The passing of Rooplall Monar (1945-2024) brings us almost to the end of the line of those who wrote about Indians on the sugar plantations as a “lived experience”. Monar was born in one of the 101 logies of Lusignan, on the East Coast of Demerara, and, in 1953, moved to the new housing scheme in neighbouring Annandale. This housing scheme was established during the early 1950s, when the sugar planters decided to move all workers out of the logies that had originally adjoined sugar factories.
Monar’s poems, short stories and novels first deal with life in the logies (Backdam People; Jhanjat), and then with the housing scheme (High House and Radio). Possibly in Lusignan, as in the ninety-four logies of Uitvlugt with which I am familiar, there was a smattering of African Guyanese in addition to a “Bajan Quarter” that housed immigrants from the small islands in the early 1920s.
It was a critical period of Guyanese history, and Monar brings to life the cadences of the Creolese patois the Indians spoke three decades after Indentureship had ended. In 1947, there were 1247 logies in the 11 “grinding estates” housing some 76,000 men, women and children. The logies ranged from cottages housing two families, which were introduced after the 1930s, to holdovers from the days of slavery and early indentureship that housed up to ten families in 10X14 rooms. While living conditions had gradually been improved with, for instance, malaria having been eliminated by DDT spraying between 1945 and 1951, and wells supplying water which had previously been obtained from open, germ-laden canals, the densely-packed logies presented unique solidarities and challenges.
In 1943, Cheddi Jagan launched his political career to improve the lot of sugar workers; and serendipitously, the reformist-oriented Chairman-to-be of the largest sugar conglomerate, Bookers, Jock Campbell – who had first been exposed to life on the logies during the Great Depression of the 1930s – shared that goal. The latter confessed that Jagan’s agitation helped him immeasurably to convince his board of the need for amelioration – including housing. During the Depression, conditions had deteriorated considerably, and agitation across the Caribbean had caused a Royal Commission to be brought down in 1938 to investigate. The MPCA sugar workers trade union had been formed in 1937 by Ayube Edun, and the Commission was in Guyana taking evidence when a strike at Leonora resulted in four workers being killed. The Commission recommended several wide-ranging reforms that included housing.
In 1947, a levy was imposed on all sugar exports, and a portion was assigned to a Sugar Industry Labour Welfare Fund (SILWF), out of which house lots were prepared in neighbouring areas, dubbed “extra-nuclear housing schemes”, of which Annandale was to accommodate 558 houses. The scheme was modelled after one in Britain, and included “dispensaries” and community centres to provide recreational activities to workers and their families. Typically, a $1000 loan was supposed to construct and paint a 20X20 house with a kitchen on a 50X90 house lot.
There was yard space for a kitchen garden and “fowl” pens, but not cow pens, which were common in the logies.
Monar’s “High House and Radio” refers to the new houses being constructed on stilts to address the endemic flooding in the logies, where the early ones had mud floors or, at best, had rooms one foot off the ground. Rats and termites were endemic, and there was no privacy between families, since the walls did not reach the roof. The “radio” was the first of new status symbols, and it brought into the “high houses” playback songs from Indian movies that had arrived in the late 1930s.
In 1937, an Arya Samaj missionary arrived in Guyana, and he precipitated wide-ranging changes in traditional Hindu practices in the logies. The same year a Muslim missionary arrived.
In 1948, a strike at Enmore – where workers from Lusignan were employed – protested a change in working conditions, and five workers were shot and killed. It was mere fortuity that those particular workers were from the logies of Enmore and Enterprise/Non-Pareil, but they had been known personally by the Lusignan workers. They, however, had participated in the funeral procession to Georgetown led by Dr Jagan and other labour leaders.
It was a time of ferment and agitation in the logies. Monar’s oeuvre needs to be extended to give a fuller picture of the times that were a-changin’.
