Indentured immigration and its aftermath

April 18 will mark the 109th anniversary of the last ship – the SS Ganges – bringing indentured Indians to the then British Guiana. By then, a total of 341,500 indentured labourers had arrived, consisting of 239,756 Indians; 42,512 West Indians; 30,585 Portuguese/Madeirans; 13,355 Africans; 14,189 Chinese; and 1282 “others”. Today we discuss the economic impact these indentured labourers on the incipient “Creole” society formed after the abolition of African slavery in 1838.
The historical development of the colony, driven by the British colonial apparatus, created ethnic economic specialisations that have had far-reaching consequences. Within a decade of the abolition of slavery, the large swathe of Africans who had left the plantation to found the Village Movement were channelled into becoming an urbanised workforce of lower civil service clerks, messengers, transport workers, dock workers, shop assistants, artisans, masons, etc.
Many of them also went into the hinterlands to prospect for gold and supported a new industry. Those who remained on the sugar plantations constituted the majority of factory workers who were then separated from the mostly Indian field workers. When the bauxite industry was developed following WWI, the workers recruited were primarily Africans. Most of the small numbers of Portuguese and Chinese also gravitated to the urban centres directly after serving their indenture contracts, with some remaining as shopkeepers in the newly formed villages. The majority of Indians, even after indentureship, remained on the plantations or formed rural settlements near the plantations – focusing primarily on rice (which became an industry), vegetable cultivation and cattle rearing while forming a reserve labour force for sugar.
The rural African migration to the “more civilised” Georgetown precipitated severe class contradictions as they depressed wages – producing an African underclass that grew sharply as economic opportunities stagnated. The early success of the Portuguese migrants in business, which squeezed out many Coloured/African entrepreneurs, led to several African–Portuguese riots, notably in 1848, 1856 and 1888. The Portuguese were adjudged to have been granted special privileges and were unfairly moving ahead.
On the sugar plantations, the flood of new immigrants from India, the West Indies and Africa depressed plantation wages. Contrary to what some present-day ideologues are preaching, there was no significant economic competition between Indians and Africans in the 19th century. That started when Indians started moving into the urban-centred occupations after the end of indentureship in 1917. The Indians, building on their successes in rural rice, cattle rearing and petty retailing, started selling milk in Georgetown, followed by small businesses by the 1920s. They also entered the independent professions of medicine and law and the Civil Service by the 1930s. These were very highly prized, status-conferring occupations in colonial society that made the Coloured/African elite feel threatened. They pointed out that the Government had financed part of the cost of bringing indentured immigrants to Guyana from the national treasury, into which the Africans had paid taxes. This was akin to rubbing salt into an open wound, because of the now taken-for-granted belief that Indians had driven them off the plantations. In fact, however, the majority of Africans had decamped the sugar plantations by 1848, after the failure of their 1846–47 strike for higher wages at a time when there were more Portuguese, West Indian Africans and Africans from Africa as indentureds than Indians.
Africans also feared that the Indians, with their immigrant drive for economic advancement coupled with their greater numbers by the end of indentureship, would become so economically dominant that even if they were to occupy only their proportionate share of the valued economic platforms, Africans would be overwhelmed. This fear increased as the Indians slowly began to follow the path earlier trod by the rural African to the urban centres. Unlike as with the earlier African migrants, because of their distinctiveness, the Indians stood out for continued comparison. The fear was mixed with the scorn of cultural superiority since they had acquired all the cultural capital – speech, religion, dress, occupation, residence, etc – and their earlier resentment against the Portuguese was turned against the Indian with a vengeance.
This resentment in the African/Coloured population of Indians was exploited by Forbes Burnham when he launched the PNC in 1957 in coalition with the League of Coloured People political vehicle. It exploded on Black Friday, February 16, 1962, when Martin Carter claimed “a city of clerks turned a city of men” as Indian businesses were torched. The horizontal ethnic disparities, however, were exacerbated by the post-1964 PNC’s policies but are finally being addressed today in our oil-fuelled economy.