AND PRESBYTERIANS, JAMADAR?

Freedmen and women were discriminated against in their access to marriages as the story of the Catholic priest de Rydder and the schism which racked the Catholic Church here, indicates.

By the end of slavery for former slaves, procreation was disassociated from marriage — as is the case in every former plantation slave society of the Americas. Rather marriage was linked to status.

Indeed while, unlike Anglicans, Catholics baptised their slaves, this was often done in mass ceremonies. They were allowed no other sacrament.

Now this is not a discrimination operated by Christians against non-Christians. It is discrimination within Christianity which follows the principal social cleavage between slave and free. Jamadar doesn’t see this nor does Sue Couyant.

The Planters’ population policy

And yet one of the reasons for the shortage of labour on Trini plantations was the Planters’ population policy.

While in the USA and in nearby Barbados slaves were able to reproduce themselves, providing a large native born slave population, this was not so in Trinidad.

Rather in every year of Trini slavery the number of slave deaths was more than the number of slave births.

Labour depended on a replacement population. Within Trini slavery the death rate was higher among field slaves than among domestic slaves while the number of field deaths increased as crop season went on, reaching its peak just before the end of crop time.

To collapse Catholic slaves into one religious classification is misleading. Slaves, Christian or not, were powerless.

In broad terms it is not even certain that Catholic plantation owners had much power. The important Sugar Lobby depended on contacts with British Members of Parliament. It was overseas owners who had these.

Free Trade and Brazilian Sugar

Comes this in Sue Couyant’s letter to a Sunday newspaper: “It is conveniently forgotten that indentured labour saved Trinidad from economic collapse in the last third of the 19th century.” But the greatest crisis of Trini — and other English speaking Caribbean sugar — had nothing to do with labour. It had to do with the Sugar Duties Act of 1846, which ended the high tariffs for slave produced sugar which had kept Brazilian and Cuban sugar from Britain, as well as the coming on stream of European beet sugar. It is these which threatened sugar production then, and it is the same free trade and Brazilian sugar which practically ended it today.

Morton would write in his diary: “Great Britain, by a strange twist of economic conscience, after spending 20 million pounds sterling to free the slaves, decided in the interests of free trade to abolish the deferential duties penalising slave grown sugar.”

Between 1843 and 1846 the average price of British West Indian sugar was between 34 shillings and 36 shillings per hundredweight exclusive of duty. By 1848 the price was 24 shillings and three pence. But in 1840 it had been more than twice that. Since many planters borrowed against the next crop the result was disaster. Most planters had raised capital through mortgaging their property. The fall in price meant that mortgages couldn’t be repaid.

A false explanation

Sue Couyant then, “conveniently” forgets the cause of the sugar crisis which by the way did not happen in the “last third of the 19th century” but in the “second.” For Sue Couyant the reason for the crisis is placed on the high cost of free ex-slave labour. Now this is typical ethno history. An event is given a false explanation in order to suit the “needs” of a specific ethnic group even when, as in this instance, the projection of the false explanation into today would legitimise severe cuts in Indo sugar labour salaries in order to compete with Brazilian sugar. Sugar was saved not by the Indos but by the reintroduction of the tariff in the face of planter ruin.

But listen to this: “In a decade when destitute immigrants were a common sight, the Indian beggars were in a worse plight...they lay unattended and sick on the roads and pavements. The only token that others had ever existed were their skeletons, stumbled across in the canefields and the woods...some Indians, less stricken than these by the environment, also left the planters to whom they had been contracted and looked for work on estates where they believed conditions would be more congenial for them.” Donald Wood, Trinidad in transition, the years after slavery. Now this is hardly salvation of the Trini economy. Indeed Donald Wood suggests that many Indians were unsuited for plantation work. They were sickly, unaccustomed to agricultural work and easily offended. In other words the same conditions which led to the high death rate of African slaves, even when modified, led to the illness and death of Indian labour.

It is in what had become a human disaster that Anglicans first, then Catholics opened up orphanages for Indian children orphaned or abandoned.

In the case of Indians, a series of harsh regulations and what was in fact a pass, eventually tied them to the plantation during their period of indentureship. Even so, KO Laurence reports that there were continuing complaints of drunkenness and absenteeism.

Plantation relationships

Now this is not what we are hearing from the new Indo revisionist historians nor more that we are hearing of slavery. Rather a race-stereotype is constructed of the lazy African and the hardworking Indian who saves the economy of the country from Afro-engineered disaster. But Indian beggars and vagrants existed in my time. They were there clustered at the old Railway Station or along Frederick Street and one hanged himself in the square opposite.

British owned plantations

Catholics feature highly in charges of discrimination against Hindus and Muslims. I look at the historical facts and I find something quite different. Indian indentured labour was only available to plantations in large lots of 25 or 50. The result of this was that smaller plantations did not get Indian labour. Although there were some large plantations owned by Catholics, most were small or medium plantations generally in cocoa. Indian labour went above all, to British and often absentee-owned plantations. Cocoa plantations, with one exception, continued to be worked by African labour. It is these which were the crucible of Catholic Creole culture.

Racially divided Presbyterians

Indian conversion was overwhelmingly Presbyterian. When I was growing up there was Greyfriars Scots Presbyterian Church on Frederick Street and almost all white. As late as the 1970s, Greyfriars was attempting to recruit a minister from Scotland. According to the British Guardian, they were willing to offer him everything from a handsome salary to a swimming pool. And so in spite of the fact that a local Chinese the Revd Chen was acting.

On upper Charlotte Street, there was the Portuguese Presbyterian Church. In Long Circular Road not far from today’s Long Circular Mall, was the Chinese Presbyterian Church. Revd Worrell ministered to the Afro Presbyterian Church in Sangre Grande (he was Afro) and there was the Canadian Mission to the Indians, the CMI Presbyterian Churches.

Strange that neither Jamadar — himself Presbyterian according to Sat — or Sue Couyant mention this even though until the 1970s there was a fair amount of dissatisfaction among Indian Presbyterians over the division between the Canadian Mission and other Presbyterians.

While it is true that every Christian Church in the island from Catholics to early Adventists practised some form of colonial/race discrimination, none divided up their churches as did Presbyterians.

Dark idolatory and Mohammedan illusion

It was John Morton, of Scots descent but now Canadian, who, recuperating from a throat infection in Port-of-Spain, decides to teach Indians “a holier faith” and to save them from “their dark idolatory and Mohammedan illusion.” Morton would write, “the characters of these deotas and of their incarnations is felt to be a vulnerable point. Brahma was a liar. Vishnu an adulterer. Siva a drunkard, Krishna shameless and even Ramchandra, one of the best, violent and murderous...” Morton would add, “where the gods are unholy and unclean, there can be no sense of sin.” I can hardly blame Sat for being annoyed at that.

Morton would first arrange with American Baptists to close their mission to freed American slaves living around Iere. He would get the agreement of Baptists, Methodists and Moravians not to convert in Indian areas in return for his not converting in African areas. Anglicans refused and it is doubtful that Catholics were approached. However Morton’s friendship with the planters, de facto made it difficult for either Anglicans or Catholics to enter and convert in the principal Indian areas. The result of this was a racially divided Christianity. Only Catholics had all the ethnic groups in the country in large enough numbers, within their communion. So much for St Paul.

It is to Morton and not to Hindus, that we owe the first transmission of the myth of an Indo Germanic Aryan race. It is to this we will turn next week.