The seeds of conflict

After that the proportion of women dropped to 25 percent mainly due to the problem of recruiting women willing to take the journey. After 1870 the percentage of women remained at about 40 percent.

Indians made up 4.8 percent of the population in 1851 or six years after they first arrived. They made up 33.2 percent of the population 60 years later.

Within 60 years Trinidad was faced with integrating immigrants on a scale rarely seen in any country with the exception of the tea plantations in Sri Lanka, and the sugar plantations of Fiji, Mauritius, Suriname, Guiana or Natal in South Africa.

In every case it was a plantation economy. In nearly every case the result has been conflict.

This immigration was compounded by the geography of settlement. Indians were clustered in the area of sugar plantations both as labour and increasingly settled in nearby Indian villages. The areas of sugar were what we now call Central, and in the South. There were only a few sugar plantations in the North, one has only to read the extensive literature on integration — thanks to immigration into Europe or the present heavy Hispanic immigration into the USA — to understand the problems of constructing a national society, that this massive immigration posed.

A fragile society

Indian immigration was not taking place in a settled society. The abolition of slavery had taken place in 1838 — only seven years before the arrival of Indian labour. In other words Trinidad was integrating former slaves into the wider society with all the problems we know of from other societies from the USA to Mauritius, at the same time that the society was integrating massive Indian immigration.

The relatively short period of Trini slavery from the 1783 Cedula de Poblacion to the 1838 abolition, a population policy based on the replacement of the slave workforce rather than its reproduction, and the large number of coloured slave owners that were direct descendants of white slave owners, made any slave society particularly fragile. Add to this the division between urban slave (relatively numerous in Trinidad) and rural slave, domestic slaves and field slaves. It is not by chance that the only organised (note the word) slave revolt is Daaga’s in 1837: only one year before abolition.

Circumventing free labour

Integration was not of Indian immigrants who, coming to the USA or Canada, were only seeking a better life. This was recruited immigration intended to circumvent the bargaining power of free labour. This, shorn of the mystification which has surrounded it, was what it was. As such conflict was imbedded in the immigration — a fact that would emerge clearly with the first attempt to address labour problems with the foundation of the Working Men’s Association.

That the Working Men’s Association was inter-classist and inter-racial, illustrates the extent of the problem.

This had been accentuated with the eventual decision to fund the voyages of Indians through the colony’s taxation and not as at first, through the money of planters. In other words, small and medium farmers who, as one of my former articles relates, were barred from accepting cheap Indian indentured labour, were forced to pay the taxes which made that labour available to large, mainly expatriate owned, plantations.

Free labour wages were brought down by an inexhaustible pool of imported tied labour. None of this has anything to do fundamentally with race. It had to do with colonial plantation labour relations. That Sue Couyant sees it as an anti-Indian affair illustrates again the extent to which social phenomena which can be logically explained, are translated into anti-Indianism Nowhere in the world does free labour permit tied labour to exist in the same society.

Police

The policing of sugar areas exacerbated conflict. On the pretext that only men of a certain height could be accepted in the police service, Indians were practically locked out. Afros policed the Indian areas. This could be seen as part of British colonial policing policy. After all Bajans were preferred for policing Port-of-Spain and members of the Royal Irish Constabulary who, unlikely to be given the top policing posts in an Ireland that was considered a restless part of the United Kingdom, were given many of the top police posts in Trinidad and Tobago. It also underlined the importance of the sugar plantation.

Tickets of leave

It also served to underline that, if Afros could be trusted to induct police Indian labour, it was because they could be trusted not to establish links of interest between Afros and Indos.

The regulation first introduced in 1852 and then contained in an ordinance of 1854, that Indians must carry tickets of leave if off the plantations during working hours and tickets of industrial residence if they had them, was framed in order to curtail Indians from absconding or changing estates. In other words, the regulations were framed in order to ensure the stability of the plantation’s workforce. These tickets of leave and tickets of industrial residence duly stamped, had to be shown on demand to police and owners of land. This measure not only marked Indians as a specific and subordinate segment of the population, it pitched Indians particularly against the Afro police who could at any time demand the certificate and in whose hands was the duty of reporting an infringement. It also gave opportunities for an Afro police abuse of power. It is certain that remarks and taunting of what was a vulnerable group added to tensions between Afros and Indos.

The method of settlement, the use of indentured labour to circumvent the bargaining powers of free labour and the use of Afros in implementing the coercive measures of planters would in any case have resulted in acute tensions between Afros and Indos. Two other factors would consolidate conflict beyond the period of indentureship: education and Aryan race.

Education

During the last years of slavery Methodists entered the smaller Caribbean islands, eg Barbados, St Vincent, Montserrat. In these islands they obtained permission from planters to missionise the slave communities. This permission, it is true, was granted at the cost of Methodist missionaries choosing the pro slavery Charles Wesley, rather than his abolitionist brother john Wesley. They therefore posed no threat to planters’ interests. Methodists then set about establishing estate schools, Sunday schools, small worshipping centres and a network of lay catechists and lay preachers. The result of this was that at abolition, there was already a literate Afro population. My own great grandfather, a Bajan born in slavery, would as a result of this, become the principal of a primary school giving the family the first step into middle class status.

Catholic policy

Nothing like this was done for Afro slaves in Trinidad. Anglicans in all the islands did little missionising during slavery. They did little here. Catholic slave owners certainly baptised their slaves, but there were no estate schools and no Catholic missions which would catechise and provide education in the way that Methodists had done in the smaller islands.

Rather the attempt to ensure parity between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church increased the ties between the Catholic Church and Catholic planters and ensured that the major Missionary Congregations, Holy Ghost priests and St Joseph of Cluny nuns, were not preoccupied with former slaves, but principally with educating the Catholic elite of which the wealthiest were likely to be white. Worse there was no model of massive lay involvement in the Catholic Church of other teachers or of local preachers as was the case of Methodists not only in the Caribbean but in Britain.

If slaves and former slaves remained central to Methodist concerns in the smaller islands, they were marginal to Catholic concerns here. Indeed, the small Methodist congregations around Tranquillity and Hanover, mainly of small island immigrants to Trinidad, would produce an extraordinarily high percentage of the Afro middle class. The names tell the story: Collymores, Cumberbatches, McDowells, Woodings, Procopes, Fields, Commas, Maynards, Mc Burnies, among others. This difference between the Catholic response to slaves and former slaves on the one hand, and the Methodist response or the other, would become crucial to understanding the evolution of conflict with the coming of Presbyterian missions to Indians.

John Morton’s model

The model used by John Morton for the missionising of Indians followed to a large extent, the model used by Methodists in the smaller islands ie a network of schools even if these were small and rudimentary, the Sunday school and a network of lay teachers and lay catechists. It would be as effective in Trinidad as in Barbados. There were two major differences: it concerned only Indians. And both Morton and Grant were convinced of an Aryan race of which Indians were a part. The very efficient method of missionising which had integrated former slaves into Vincentian or Bajan society, served to keep Indos apart in Trini society and to increase a separateness which would be the major problem in the future.