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January 11,1848: The "Foreday Morning" of
working Class Consciousness in Grenada
"Like an individual, a society can only know
itself and its future when it explores its
antecedents. We can have little notion of where
we are going if we do not consciously
appropriate our past and make it a part of
our living present and our future"
-Selwyn R. Cudjoe
International Workers'Day is the perfect moment
to call up Tuesday, January 11, 1848, the day
when hundreds of drum-beating, shell-blowing,and
tree branch-waving "labourers" took a protest
demonstration to the Town of Sauteurs. Coming
within ten years of the legal termination of
Apprenticeship- the system of "modified slavery"
which ran from 1833-1838- the march to Sauteurs
was an infinitely courageous act of industrial
politics which gave very militant voice to the
birth of the Grenadian working class.
A wage reduction was the proximate cause of the
labourers' angry march to Sauteurs but this was
most certainly not the only "matter in the
mortar". For in the years immediately following
legal emancipation the former slave workers and
their ex-masters were locked in a series of
bitter struggles all aimed at defining and,
indeed, designing "freedom" and "post slavery".
FREEDOM: THE EX-SLAVE WORKERS' VIEW
For their part, the ex-slave workers saw freedom
as meaning the coming of a new contractural
regime
between themselves and their former masters: the
old "contract", slavery, was imposed, therefore
the new one had to be negotiated and bargained
into existence. Naturally, the ex-slave workers'
notion of freedom presupposed an end to rule by
the 'pessie" whip.
But the January 1848 pay cut reminded that
Emancipation did not change the psychology of
the estate tyrants, stone-hearted men who did as
they pleased during slavery and seemed bent on
continuing in their old ways, treating the
abolition law as a London-imposed inconvenience.
The ex-slave workers, who were never reconciled
to the slave regime, were not going to the
accept the old ways in what they saw as a 'new
time'. Their view of freedom included
first and foremost a right to purchase and own
land. Here it is well worth saying that the
value of land was both economic and
psycho-cultural ; indeed, land ownership was a
key means of securing some economic
independence, and it was also "a place" to sow
an autonomous individuality. And this still is
the case.
Grenada's planter-merchant elite went to some
lengths to frustrate the ex-slaves' hankering
for their own piece of "grung": they feared that
the birth of a black peasantry would spell the
demise of the plantation economy, and against
this backdrop the importation of poor whites-
the so-called "Red Legs" from Barbados- might
have
been much more than someone's attempt to ease
population pressures in Bim.
Many of these poor whites would have been
members of various "police forces" maintained by
Bajan estate owners to keep slaves in line. In
Grenada, they could be a called up in case of
any "trouble". Besides, a white peasantry could
be a social shock absorber between the masses of
poor blacks and the "baykays" at the top of the
social and economic pyramid. Colonialism is at
the high point of minority rule. To stay on top
the colonial minority must always find ways of
dividing its subject population, exploiting
existing disputes, or manufacturing such
disputes where none existed.
FREEDOM WAS NOT ABOUT LOSING OLD PRIVILEGES
Finally, for the ex-slave workers (the majority
of whom were compelled to remain in old massa's
employ),
freedom meant adding to the customary rights won
during the days of slavery. These included the
right
to land to plant a kitchen garden ( rent free);
the right to collect firewood, burn charcoal,
fish and hunt wild game, and the right to "mind
a beast" (livestock) on estate land.
The PLANTER-MERCHANT VIEW OF FREEDOM
The planter-merchant elite had a completely
different definition of the meaning of freedom.
Fundamentally, they thought freedom meant
supplanting slave labour with wage labour on the
basis of semi-servile relations of production.
The planters prosecuted their definition of
freedom by improving their means of coercion:
They created a Police Force in 1837; they wrote
up a heap of vagrancy laws that criminalized
"idling"; they introduced a Masters and
Servants Act; and they denied citizenship and
the right to vote to the newly emancipated.
The undemocratic denial of citizenship and the
right to vote continued until 1951, when
universal adult
franchise was introduced, wholly one hundred and
113 years following emancipation.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1848
The January 11 protest was an occasion for
hundreds of St Patrick's ex-slaves to articulate
their many post slavery woes as well as state
their views concerning what constituted a free
society. The march protested a pay cut, saying
that it was not right and saying also that in
the 'new time' such impositions were
unacceptable. The labourers broke into the
Sauteurs courthouse and mashed up a meeting of
Stipendiary
Magistrates; these magistrates were seen as
being in the hip pockets f the planters.
The labourers' protest combined maroonage - in
the form of a withdrawal of labour- with a
"taking of the road"
to declare "war". Such war declarations were
conveyed in songs (banter songs), whose primary
aim was to "publish" an injury and to excoriate,
tease, taunt and shame the injurer into
submission.
The banter song, also called "cariso", was the
antecedent to the protest calypso, a moralising
editorial in song. Banter songs were often
composed and sung by women. Indeed, one hundred
years after the
Sauteurs protest, banter songs could still be
heard in Grenada: Miss Elvie and Miss Rawlings
were singing
them at the junction where the Paradise Cocoa
Road meets the "Government" Road. The Carnival
day songs
of the Short Knee and the Jab Jab are still very
much in the banter (careso) tradition.
The composers of banter songs were crucial to
the success of protest action and ,indeed, were
incorporated
into the leadership of such actions. Banter
singers were often a part of the community's
ritual leadership.
These facts helped to lay down the the rhythm
track of political behaviour in Grenada, which
tends to be
excessively personalist and loudly adversarial.
These same facts have also cut the leader
template: the leader is supposed to be "good
talker" and master of
terms of abuse and insults. Unfortunately, our
leaders, including labour leaders-have elevated
these "survival
tactics" of our unlettered ancestors into a
permanent law of political conduct .
RESPONSE TO JANUARY 11
The planters' response to the Sauteurs protest
was predictable: they called in the military to
beat up on the ringleaders and one day later the
Governor headed up to Sauteurs to tell the
workers that the needed
to accept the pay cut. The Governor was
accompanied by a Roman Catholic priest, whose
job was doubtless that of reminding the workers
of what St Paul said in Colossians
3:22 "
Slaves, obey your earthy masters in everything";
and do it not only when their eye is on you to
win their
favour, but with sincerity of heart and
reverence for the Lord
In the name of the Lord, the host was asked to
cooperate with the parasite. Some labourers
heeded the Governor and the priest ,
others stubbornly refused to go back to work.
MORE PLANTER RESPONSES
And there were other planter reactions to the
Sauteurs protest. In the wake of the Sauteurs
march there emerged from among the planters more
strident appeals for fresh and reliable
(tractable) labourers. Eventually, the colonial
state yielded to the planters and Indentured
Indians were brought in, the first batch came on
May 1,1857 with the arrival of a "jahaj" called
the Maidstone. More Indians would come in the
ensuing years.
Today is Labour Day and ,too, it is Indian
Arrival Day. More than three thousand indentured
Indians were brought to Grenada; names like
Bhola, Beharry, Japal, Ramdhanny,
Ramdin,Baldeo, Nyack, Laljee, Lawlite and
Gidharrie bear witness.
The story of Indian indentureship in the
Caribbean has two Grenadian in prominent role.
Grenadian HKM Sisnett was the man who was used
by the British to whitewash the murders of
Indian protesters on the
Rose Hall estate in Guyana in 1913.
Grenadian Joseph "Lall"* Mc Laren ( mostly
likely Kayak) was an overseer on an Indian
estate in South Trinidad in the 1880s, when he
created a new church by combining elements of
Hinduism and Christianity. Maclaren took his
church to British Guiana (Guyana) when he moved
there in the early of the twentieth century. In
Guyana, the Church will become the Jordanite
Church, named after Lall McLaren's ablest
disciple, Nathaniel Jordan. *Lall, Hindi for red
(red man)
CONCLUSION
The January 11,1848 protest remains a
significant landmark in Grenadian history : it
marks the birth of Grenadian working class and
the coming of "industrial politics" as a means
of effecting social change. In other words,
trade unionism one hundred years before
the birth of the trade union movement in
Grenada. Talking about which, the trade union
has long ceased to be a credible agent of social
change.
Today, the workers and their leaders may wish to
act on three eminently sensible challenges
thrown out by
Lawrence Nurse in a seminal paper entitled "Organised
Labour in the Commonwealth Caribbean".
The challenges are the following. First, that
the union movement end it old style adversarial
relationship with employers and capital. What
Nurse is saying amountsto this: heckling the
labour minister on Labour day is passe
Nures's second challenge calls on the trade
union to "rethink its philosophy about its role
in society based
on a careful examination of current realities
and an appraisal of how best it can contribute
to changing them".
Finally, Nurse says the union movement must
improve its competence for dealing with national
issue". He continues:
"This requires establishing and strengthening
its local
competence for serious analysis of the major
issues facing
the region"
It is time for renewal. It is time to go forward
by taking organised labour back to a place where
it will be a part
of our living present and future.
©
May 1, 2006.
C. Taylor |
