Golconda’s living history

A wonderful chance to do just that comes with the people of Golconda, descendants and relatives of largely indentured sugar workers, telling their own stories about their lives in the Naparima plains that have been collected in the first publication of the UTT Press. The writer, Lawrence Scott, whose research on Michel Jean Cazabon for a new novel was the catalyst for the Golconda Project, comments that we have had a recent spate of autobiographical work that put areas of our history into a context but this new collection of personal histories, recorded in small groups over two months in 2007, and reproduced here is most probably a first timer. What is certain, is that it is a remarkable work and important resource.

My knowledge of Trinidad geography is not that bad as I lived in several parts of the country as a child, but my knowledge is patently not as extensive as I thought. For example, I had never heard of Golconda in Trinidad. I wonder how many of us have. Yet, Golconda and other sugar growing places like that provided this country with much of its national income for long years. The sugar crop is not incidental to us. It caused many to be enslaved, through ownership and indentureship, and later was the main source of work of very many people.

Getting the connection between our own lives and those of others often eludes us as we focus on meeting life’s demands, and what particularly interests me about this project of collective history recording is how edifying it proved to be to tell one’s stories, how it allowed for the joining up of the dots, and how that came about through the way in which the researchers conducted the project. They approached villagers to participate in this oral history project. Those who agreed committed to 8 hourly personal history-telling sessions that were preceded by reading to the group, some of whom had never been to school or got very far there, from literary works that reflected life in the sugar, also from historical, academic accounts of that life, and relevant poetry in order to stimulate them and prompt recollection and discussion. It produced unimagined results.

Kenneth Ramchand, in the Foreword, writes “Villagers of different ethnicities, moving together to explore Golconda, began to describe the historical foundations of their common humanity. They found out about how their history intersected with that of the estates of the Naparimas and the intellectual and cultural life associated with their part of the island. They found out about the Coloureds, the English, the French Creoles and the enslaved Africans. They found out about their participation in the meeting of peoples and cultures.” So, it was an education for all, including the rest of us who will see in the collected stories bits of history that can emerge only in the personal telling.

Most of us might think that nobody of African origin lived in the infamous barracks that was home to indentured Indians, yet in ‘Golconda: Our Stories Our Lives’ Bernadine Sandiford, who died in 2008, aged 85, described herself as “the only negro.” From age 15 she cut and carried cane and woke at five to go plant rice in Debe lagoon, getting there by donkey cart and train. Lystra Samaroo, still only in her forties, describes how coming from Barrackpore and Penal Rock she knew nothing about cane, and marrying into a Golconda family meant a change of culture for her. She remarks on the comparative liberalism of the Golconda women who work alongside their men for their own salaries. The stories are diverse, but everyone, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, were united by poverty. The hardship they all bore apparently brought tears to many eyes as they told their stories. It is sometimes painful to read.

The barracks disappeared in the 1960s but that chapter in our history lives on since it conditions our present. The ethnic split in our politics originates in the plains and is the basis of our political opposition. The effects of the demise of sugar and Caroni Ltd are still being played out, and in the shifting present and uncertain future we have an indelible account of sugar, the industry and our history, from the people’s perspective.