The British planter class, aided and abetted by the British Government, viewed African slaves as their personal property, without legal rights, and viewed the formal abolition of slavery as a needless imposition. And the slaves were ‘freed’, not for any humanitarian reason, but because slavery had become uneconomic and would have been increasingly so in the long term. Indeed, almost as if to dispose of the ‘humanitarian theory’, the United Kingdom Government in its Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833, would state that “a reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the services of such Slaves for the Loss which they will incur by being deprived of their Right to such Services”. It was a dismissal of any thought that they could and should be considered as human beings. While the slaves were not given any payment, either by way of gratuity or pension for their years of forced labour, the slave ‘owners’ however, received 20 million pounds sterling as compensation. To this day, the descendants of those who were forcibly removed from Africa, brutalised and exploited, have never received reparations or even considered for such.
The non-compensating of slaves was designed to force them to remain in the employ of the estates, and when this was resisted, both because work on the estates reminded them of their earlier forced labour, and the wage offered was small the plantation owners adopted tactics that, by any standards, were wicked and cruel. The planter class charged exorbitant rents for accommodation and for the lands which the former slaves tilled on their own. They destroyed their crops. The former slave masters determined that the abolition of slavery should profit them three ways. The compensation given them by an accommodating British Government; the fact that they no longer had to house, clothe, feed and even provide limited medical care to the slaves, and the offering of wages that were clearly less than what it would have cost them to maintain slaves. The Governor of Trinidad and the law enforcement agencies, including Special Magistrates, co-ordinated efforts in an attempt to frustrate the former African slaves from leaving the land and moving to the towns. A law was introduced requiring former slaves, who relocated to the towns to either obtain employment within 24 hours, and provide the authorities with proof of this, or risk being taken before a Magistrate where he/she could be deemed idle and disorderly and sent to prison. In 1842, eight years after the abolition of slavery and some four years after the end of the Apprenticeship system, first class field workers in Trinidad were paid a daily wage of 50 cents; in St. Vincent, this would range from 16 to 24 cents a day; in St. Lucia, from 16 to 48 cents a day; in Barbados, 29 cents; 40 to 48 cents in British Guiana [now Guyana], and in Grenada 21 cents a day.
Because of the relatively wide differences in wages between those obtaining in the islands of the English speaking Eastern Caribbean and Trinidad and Tobago and Guiana, scores of people migrated to BG and Trinidad to seek employment. They would soon abandon jobs on the estates. Plantation owners in Trinidad and Guiana pressured the UK Government to introduce indentured immigrants from India to work on estates, and meet their estates’ needs so that sugar cane could be planted, reaped and sent to the factories. Guiana was the first to introduce indentureship in a short lived and later reintroduced scheme, with the first two batches of just under 400 indentured Indians arriving there in May of 1838 on the Hesperus and Whitby. The importing of indentured labour from India was meant to crush the reluctance of former slaves to work on estates. The choice of Indian labour made for ‘good’ economics, particularly when you examine the brutally cynical arguments put forward by the then Governor of Guiana, Sir Henry Light, in a despatch to Lord Russell, the Secretary of State for the Colonies seeking to justify Indian indentureship. Russell in his reply to Light, dated February 15, 1840, would refer to Light’s arguments. One of them, quoted by Russell, was that “the wages of a day labourer are, in Guiana, 1s. 6d. [36 cents] per day, and in Hindostan not more than 2d. [four cents].” Indian indentureds, although subjected initially to harsh and oppressive treatment, had the advantage of being able to retain their religion, their customs, their languages, work under “contract of service” for five years with the option of either returning home, renewing their contracts or, receiving a parcel of land in lieu of repatriation.
Although, slaves had no such “contracts of service”, yet many, following on abolition, were able to rise above the many injustices meted out to them. According to a Resolution moved on July 25, 1842, in the British House of Commons, the fruits of a Committee headed by J. S. Parkington, [later to become Secretary of State] “many of the former slaves have been enabled to purchase land….and….the land they thus hold as owners or occupiers not only yields them an ample supply of food, but in many cases a considerable overplus in money…” But the determination of the plantation owners to have the former slaves back on the land, despite the importation of indentured labour, had assumed even greater emphasis, with the realisation that African slaves had daily production levels 33 1/3 per cent higher than that of the Indian indentureds! Educational opportunities for the children of former slaves was, initially, severely limited, and the “Negro Education Grant” was effected by the UK Government in 1835. It represented the lordly sum of 25,000 pounds sterling a year, and was not for Trinidad alone, This was solely for primary or elementary education, and it was not until 1859 that the Government of Trinidad would establish the Queen’s Collegiate School, later to be renamed The Queen’s Royal College. For the record, the Queen’s Collegiate School was built mainly for the children of the white planter class and white officials, and only a handful of blacks were actually admitted.
