With the interests of the BG Government being coincident with King Sugar’s by most administrators, it was not surprising that the demand for cheap, reliable labour intensified during the 1890s, when sugar prices declined. Labour was the largest cost factor in the production of sugar. The Journal Timehri was the forum of local intellectual life, and took a strong pro-planter line. In 1898, even as increases were made to the indentureds’ portion for repatriation while land-exchange programmes were planned, in the Timehri of that year, the article “Notes on Labour and the Necessity of Immigration for Sugar Estates” made the case for more immigrant labour.
JA Luckhoo
After the abolition of Indentureship in 1917, the planters continued their scheming for cheap labour. In the 1919 edition of Timehri, the editor James Rodway wrote an extended article on “Labour and Colonisation”, in which he expanded on the need for a new scheme for “settlers”, who would work for three years on plantations then be granted land for settlement. In the same year, JA Luckhoo, the first Indian solicitor in the colony, relaunched the British Guiana East Indian Association (BGEIA) in Georgetown, after it had become inactive subsequent to its formation in 1916 in NA. Critchlow had also launched the BGLU in 1919, and there had moreover been launched a branch of Garvey’s United Negro Improvement League (UNIA), that preached a Pan African Ideology.
Initiation of the Colonisation Scheme
This is described in Timehri Vol VI 1919 when the Chairman of the Planters Association told the R.A.C.S. publishers of Timehri of the decrease in sugar cane acreage. A meeting of the Combined Court and other social organisations was convened on 27 Jan, 1919. They agreed on a Colonisation scheme that included the “creation of a special Sub-Committee to deal with West Indian and African immigration and labour supply. Finally, it proposed the despatch of a Colonial deputation to England.”
First tractor imported by an East Indian
Luckhoo, who had been elected as the first Indian representative in the legislature in 1916, along with Dr. Hewley Wharton, the first Indian doctor in Guyana, on behalf of the BGEIA, went to India in 1929-1930 to convince the Indian authorities of the feasibility of the colonisation scheme. They tried to sell it as the formation of an “Indian Colony” in South America, but opposed by Gandhi and others, they failed. Protests by African organizations such as the Negro Progress Convention (NPC), which was formed in 1922 and supported by Critchlow’s BGL and UNIA, about Africans being swamped led to their representatives being also authorized to solicit settlers from Africa or the West Indies.
Even though the debate within Br Guiana planted the seeds of ethnic political competition and another Committee of JA Luckhoo and Attorney General Nunan (a white official) visited India in 1923-24, the Colonization Scheme eventually collapsed.
Eventually, between 1920 and 1928, 1729 Immigrants arrived from the Caribbean (mainly Barbados) compared to 607 from India. Many sugar estates formed “Bajan Quarters” comprising of raised two-family cottages rather than logies – which was part of the agreement to entice them to come to B. Guiana.
