SECTION I

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

RITISH GUIANA lies on the north-eastern shoulder of South America, but its lines of communication run north and east, over the sea to the West Indian islands, to Britain and to the United States of America.  Approximately 94 per cent of its ethnically diverse population lives on a narrow coastal strip separated from its continental neighbours by tracts of tropical forest and wide rivers.  Whatever new links may be forged with Brazil, Venezuela, Dutch and French Guiana now that air transport is rapidly becoming a practical proposition, it is certain that at the present time British Guiana’s main interests are bound up with those of the British West Indian islands, with which it shares a common language and culture.  Despite its vast hinterland, and the possibility of the discovery of valuable mineral deposits and so on, it is at present ‘under-developed’ and the majority of its 436,431 inhabitants share the low standards of living and poverty which are so characteristic of the circum-Caribbean territories.  But these factors are complicated by the existence of an intricate system of social distinctions based upon race and status.  The process of welding six ‘nations’, East Indian, Negro, Portuguese, Amerindian, Chinese and European, into a unit where ethnic identity is not the basis of distribution of social rewards is not an easy one, and although British Guiana has gone a long way towards developing a sense of common purpose in its diverse population, it would be both unrealistic and inaccurate to ignore the marked cleavages which exist at the present time; cleavages which are based both upon ethnic and cultural foundations, and are inherent in the present structure and functioning of Guianese society.

The West Indian area has been relatively neglected by social anthropologists but it is becoming increasingly clear that it constitutes an extremely fertile field for the investigation of problems of socia1 organization which lie close to some of the most crucial issues of the subject.  This is nowhere more true than in the case of the study of the family, and whereas the West Indian lower-class family system has often been regarded as a pathological phenomenon resulting from the relative disorganization of West Indian society, it is our contention that this family system provides us with a special and extremely illuminating case of the operation of certain principles which have a general significance for social theory.

    This book deals primarily with certain aspects of the social structure of three village communities in the coastal area of British Guiana, but in attempting to arrive at an adequate understanding of these relatively small sections of the population we are obliged to consider features of the total society of British Guiana, so interdependent and functionally related are the local communities and the total society of which they are a part.  This is a fact which is often overlooked by social anthropologists when they turn their attention from small-scale, pre-literate, and relatively homogeneous societies to those more nearly resembling our own, or when they begin to carry out studies in Europe or North America using the techniques of anthropological field-study.  Malinowski’s insistence upon regarding every element of culture as relevant to the anthropologist’s view of society, coupled with Radcliffe-Brown’s postulate that a society must be regarded as an integrated whole, the function of each part being to contribute to the integration of the whole, have often been interpreted to mean that the field-worker must be able to encompass every aspect of a whole society by means of first-hand observation.  So long as anthropologists confined their attention to small-scale homogeneous societies where the variations in the pattern of social life were small over the whole population, this was more or less feasible, though one often wonders just how much selectivity and generalization covering a range of social variation is made in even the best documented study.  In larger and more extensively structured societies it is clearly impossible to cover every aspect of social life in the total society, and an almost natural tendency is to try to isolate a sub-unit, usually a geographical unit, of a large society, and attempt to study it as though it were itself a total social system.  A convincing case can be made out for the selection of such a sub-unit in terms of working convenience when one is doing an intimate first-hand study of a people’s way of life, but when it comes to the analysis stage of the work it may be quite unjustifiable to treat such a sub-unit as if it constituted a total system in itself.  Some writers have even spoken of a local community, or geographically defined sub-unit, as being the microcosm representing the macroscopic whole of which it is a part (Warner 1952: 33).  This position has been rightly criticized by Braithwaite (1953: 39), and our own experience has been that it is more realistic to forego the attempt to find a consistency between all the social institutions within the village as though it were itself a closed system with a well-defined boundary.  We are now convinced that certain features of the social structure are only explicable if seen as part of a wider social system which cannot be regarded as being merely ‘external’ to the village.  Consequently we shall have to deal with features of Guianese society in its widest sense, and particularly with the system of social stratification in the colony as a whole.  Much social action at the local community level contributes to the integration of structures which cross-cut that community, and the boundaries of which are not coincident with it.

    The question then arises as to what we shall consider to be the boundaries of our ‘wider’ or ‘total’ system, and for the purpose of the problems we shall explore in this book we shall refer to the ‘total Guianese society’.  That is, we shall treat the society of the colony of British Guiana as if it were a total social system for the purposes of our analysis, though it is clear that if one were investigating certain other problems, particularly of an economic or political nature, then British Guiana would have to be treated as a sub-system of a wider system, or systems, such as the British Commonwealth or the West Indies.  Social systems are of such a nature that they are rarely completely self-contained, but whereas we may be justified in treating the whole of British Guiana as an autonomous unit for the purpose of the present analysis, we are not justified in treating the village in a similar fashion because there are direct interdependencies between those features of social structure within the village which form the subject of our inquiry, and certain social structures within the unit we call ‘Guianese society’.

    All writers dealing with the Negro family in the New World have remarked upon the important place held by women in the family system, and have been impressed by the apparent weakness of the conjugal tie on the one hand, and the strength of kinship ties and particularly the mother-child bond on the other.  Such observations apply particularly to the lower-class Negro family, and whilst it is clear that many variations have been relatively neglected there is ample evidence to show that these generalizations are broadly true.  When it comes to the question of why this should be so there is disagreement between scholars.  Our task is a two-fold one.  First to report accurately upon the situation as it exists in the population we have chosen to study and towards this end it is felt that the distribution figures which we present are an indispensable part of the report, and secondly to interpret the facts of field observation in the light of general sociological theory.

    For the sake of brevity the title of this book has had to forego strict accuracy.  To be able to generalize to the whole of the rural Negro group we should either have to study every Negro family in the rural areas, or take an adequate random sample of them.  Neither procedure is practicable for a single field-worker.  In fact field-work was carried out in three villages which have been given the fictitious (but typically Guianese) names of August Town, Perseverance and Better Hope.  Field-tours were for the following periods of time.

August Town—West Coast Berbice—July 1951 to June 1952 inclusive

Perseverance—Essequibo—October 1952 to December 1952 inclusive.

Better Hope—West Coast Demerara—January 1952 to April 1953 inclusive.

The three villages were chosen on the basis of their general suitability as field-centres; the fact that their racial composition was predominantly Negro; that their populations were of such a size as to permit a thorough study of family structure in terms of fieldwork methods and resources; that they appeared to have different degrees of economic prosperity; and that they are varying distances from the urban centre of Georgetown.  They were not chosen according to any rigorous sampling technique and therefore, strictly speaking, the conclusions drawn from the study cannot be generalized to other villages, though on the other hand, there is nothing to suggest that these three villages differ significantly from other Negro villages in the coastal area.

    August Town, Perseverance, and Better Hope lie in the three counties of Berbice, Essequibo and Demerara respectively, and they are situated on the densely populated coastal strip which carries some 94 per cent of the total population of the country.  The villages and plantations lie along the main, and almost the only, road in the colony like beads on a string and the cultivated area stretches inland for distances varying from about two to fifteen miles.  The following summary gives a brief indication of the general characteristics of our three villages, the information being based on material collected in the field.  Reference to the maps on page 24 and page 27 will give an idea of their general layout.

The field-work techniques adopted by social anthropologists are sufficiently well established to make a lengthy discourse on this topic unnecessary and the adequacy or otherwise of the data collected may be judged from the evidence presented in the chapters that follow. [1]   After a six-weeks period of familiarization with the rural areas of the coastlands, August Town was chosen as the first field-centre; a house, of the same type as the majority of houses in the village, was rented, and the field-work commenced.  A certain amount of suspicion was encountered during the first few weeks, since no Englishman had ever lived in the village before, but this was easily overcome and good relations were quickly established.  Participation in the life of the community was possible to a far greater extent than it would be in a more ‘primitive’ community, and since the local dialect is basically and recognizably English, there was no language difficulty.  Surveys of various kinds were carried out, and a good deal of quantitative data were obtained without any difficulties arising in the way of refusals to co-operate in interviews and so on.

    Field-tours in the other two villages were much shorter, but were carried out under exactly the same conditions.  During the last field-tour in Better Hope, some time was spent in collecting information on other villages in the area, and on studying factors of significance in a wider context than that of the village.

HISTORY 0F THE THREE VILLAGES

As social anthropologists we are interested in the study of social structures as they exist over a limited time-span, usually broad enough to enable us to discern regularities in cyclical processes as well as to allow us to observe and record regular customary modes of social action. [2]   The three villages with which we are concerned came into being at a known point in time, and in a known manner, and we are able to give some idea of the relative stability in the form of local organization, economic activities, and so on, and this is of theoretical importance to our study as well as serving as a descriptive background to what has been recorded during the period of field-work.

    Slavery and sugar cultivation made their appearance together in the British West Indies when, in 1616, the first plantation of sugar cane on British territory was made in Bermuda and in the same year one Negro and one Indian slave were landed from one of the Spanish islands (Masefield 1950: 22).  The history of colonization is the story of the demand for labour, and the building up of a diverse population through the importation of indentured Europeans, mostly criminals and deportees, but above all of Negro slaves from Africa.

    British Guiana was originally discovered by Columbus on his third voyage, but attempts at colonization came much later.  By 1580 a few Dutch settlers had landed on the Guiana coast, but Raleigh’s expeditions of 1594 to 1597 were still mainly treasure-seeking enterprises and serious colonization was left to later Dutch traders and settlers who moved inland up the great rivers.  Although the territories which comprise present-day British Guiana were under Dutch control for a great deal of the time between their discovery and their final acquisition by Great Britain in 1815, this did not mean that British planters and traders were entirely absent from the colony.  Apart from repeated forays against the Dutch by French and English expeditions in the latter half of the seventeenth century, English settlements were established on a permanent basis during the eighteenth century under Dutch rule.  In 1796 a military detachment from Barbados under the command of General Whyte occupied the whole of Guiana, but by the Peace of Amiens the colonies of Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice were given back to the Dutch, only to be reoccupied in 1803 by an English fleet and officially ceded to Britain by the treaties of Paris and London in 1814.

    Pinckard reports that at the end of the eighteenth century there was a large number of English traders in Georgetown as well as the English planters in other parts of the colony, but the towns of Georgetown and New Amsterdam were little more than administrative centres and the sites of the courts, for the real reason for the existence of the colony was the plantations and it was around them, and their production, that everything else revolved (Pinckard 1806).

    By the time that the abolition of slavery movement was under way the structure of West Indian society had emerged in a clearly recognizable form, and the broad outlines of that structure can still be discerned today.  Plantation cultivation dominated by a white oligarchical plantocracy, and depending on the slave trade to furnish the necessary manual labour for production, resulted in the development of a rigid pyramidal structure with the lowest stratum in a clearly-defined legal position as slaves.  Originally race and skin colour were relatively unimportant criteria of status, for all labourers regardless of whether they were African slaves or European indentured labourers occupied much the same position.  The overriding consideration was to supply labour, and sentiments of racial superiority and inferiority seem to have increased in importance as race came to be a more crucial index of differentiation, with the rapid growth in the number of enslaved Negroes and the diminution in the number of white labourers.  The formation of a mixed-blood middle-class, through the process of miscegenation, has been well documented (see Williams, E. 1942, 1944 and Henriques 1953).  By the end of the eighteenth century, this group had assumed a position of great importance, and its existence gives the whole system its main distinguishing characteristics.  The abolition of the slave trade and the eventual emancipation of the slaves established a more just relationship between the various strata without altering the fundamental structure of the hierarchical system in which they were arranged.  Even in Haiti where a successful revolution resulted in the virtual expulsion of the French, the main outlines of the colour/class hierarchy eventually reasserted themselves and the light coloured Creoles replaced the French as the apex of the pyramid (see Leyburn 1941).

    Of the social life of the slaves on the Guiana plantations we know very little.  Certainly slaves were granted some privileges, and there was scope for them to develop a limited degree of internal organization and retain some of their own customs.  An investigation carried out in Demerara in 1808 revealed that ‘it had been customary for years for the negroes of every nation in a district to choose head-men or “Kings”, under whom were several subaltern officers of the same nation.  The duties of the “kings” were to take care of the sick and purchase rice, sugar, etc., for them, to conduct the burials, and see that the corpse was properly enclosed in a cloth, and that the customary rites and dances mere duly observed’ (Rodway cited by Cameron 1934, Bk. I: 108-9).  It was also mentioned that the slaves contributed money for funeral expenses, and of course this is very similar to the prevailing West African pattern, both in the past and in the present.  However, amongst the slaves an extended system of reciprocity such as this would be tied to the local community such as the estate, and further broken down on the basis of tribal affiliation, rather than on a strictly kinship basis.  Even under the most adverse conditions, such an extended network of reciprocal relations would be necessary in order to carry out the minimum of rites in the event of death, and the present-day burial societies perform the same functions. [3]

    The ability to attend markets and to sell produce, as well as such articles as fish, crabs, pigs, poultry, fishing nets, baskets, pottery and prepared foods such as black pudding, souse, [4] and cassava bread, must have been important in enabling some slaves to acquire enough money to purchase manumission, and this contributed to the growth of a free group of Negro and Coloured persons, who often owned slaves of their own.

    Slave rebellions were as common in Guiana as elsewhere in the West Indies, and at various times groups of rebels and runaway slaves managed to establish settlements where they led an independent, if somewhat precarious existence.  Pinckard reports that there were about eight runaway settlements in Demerara towards the end of the eighteenth century and they caused a good deal of trouble by their raids on the plantations.  He describes the settlements as follows:

Having fixed upon the spot most convenient for their purpose, a circular piece of ground was cleared of its wood, and, in the centre of this, they built huts, and formed the encampment, planting round about the buildings, oranges, bananas, plantains, yams, eddoes, and other kinds of provisions; thus, in addition to the trees of the forest, procuring themselves further concealment by the plantations which gave them food.  The eddoes were found in great plenty, and had seemed to constitute their principal diet.  Round the exterior of the circular spot was cut a deep and wide ditch, which, being filled with water, and stuck, at the sides and bottom, with sharp pointed stakes, served as a formidable barrier of defence.  The path across this ditch was placed two or three feet below the surface, and wholly concealed from the eve by the water being always thick and muddy (Pinckard 1806, Vol II: 246-7).

Shortly after Pinckard arrived in the colony all the bands except one were wiped out by a force of slaves and Amerindians, and by 1800 all the settlements had been destroyed.  The members of the punitive expeditions got 300 guilders for every right hand they brought in, and from one foray they brought in seventy-six hands and a number of prisoners, all of whom were tortured and then killed.  This put paid to the Bush Negro settlements, and no permanent groups survived as they did in Surinam (see Herskovits, M.J. & S.F. 1934) and Jamaica (see Henriques 1953: 15 and Edwards 1796).

    The estates at this time were concentrating on the production of cotton and coffee rather than sugar, and out of 116 estates along the coast from Georgetown to the Abary, only Plantation Kitty was growing sugar, all the rest being planted in cotton (Pinckard 1806, Vol. III: 403). [5]   Berbice produced coffee, and in August Town I was told by the older inhabitants that they had heard from their parents and grandparents that the estates on the West Coast did not grow sugar in ‘slavery days’ but cultivated cotton and coffee.  However the plantation system was the same, and whether it was sugar, cotton or coffee that was grown at any particular time depended to a great extent upon the availability of markets, and price levels in Europe.

    Between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the final emancipation of the slaves in 1838, there must have been a considerable influx of planters with their slaves from the over-crowded islands of the Caribbean, and Farley has referred to British Guiana at this time as an expanding economic frontier region (Farley 1954).  However, our main concern is with the establishment and development of the free Negro villages after 1838, and prior to that date there were only three tiny hamlets, probably inhabited by freed persons, in the whole colony, and the enormous development of the new village communities after 1838 was undertaken by ex-slaves who had all spent some time on the Guianese plantations.  It is worth mentioning that even after emancipation the immigration of Africans continued, and between 1841 and 1865, 13,264 Africans entered British Guiana.  No doubt many of them came from other West Indian islands, but some came from North America, and some came direct from Africa (see Cruikshank 1919).  In 1891 the number of African-born Negroes in the colony was 3,443 whilst by 1911 the number had fallen to 706.

    The slaves had been participating in a money economy for a considerable time, particularly through their markets in the towns, and during their apprenticeship period from 1834 to 1838 they were able to devote a part of their time to working for wages, the planters being forced to pay them for any work they did in excess of a statutory seven and a half hours per day.  After 1838 the now emancipated workers were free to choose their employers, and free to demand higher wages, and they thus began to accumulate a certain amount of capital.  The planters were concerned lest the Negroes decided not to work at all, and it is reported that they even cut down many fruit trees to ensure that there was not a ready food supply to be had for the picking (see Rodway 1891-4, Vol. III: 106).  For the same reason they were loath to lease lands on which the Negroes could build their own houses and plant gardens, and they attempted to keep them in the estate-owned quarters from which they could be evicted if they refused to work.  Despite these attempts, the prevailing conditions resulted in many planters having to cease operations, and those who did not actually close down found it expedient to sell part of their surplus lands in order to offset their losses (see Barton Premium 1805: 60, 69, 70-71, 133).  The Negroes banded themselves together in groups and pooling their resources, purchased whole estates or sections of estates.  The present-day villages of Victoria and Buxton on the East Coast of Demerara were the first two estates to be purchased, and by 1842 they were quite large villages (Cameron 1934, Bk. II: 8).  A Commission of Investigation appointed to determine the amount of land held by the freedmen, reported that out of a rural population of 79,000, some 15,906 were already settled in villages, and 3,322 wooden cottages had been erected.  Cameron asserts that the farmlands of some of the new villages were worked communally with a paid manager and a clerk to keep accounts, and that in Buxton the impracticability of this system led to the villagers requesting government to partition their lands (Cameron 1934, Bk. II: 12).  The question of the ‘communal’ working of farmlands seems to be an open one, and though the main works of the village, including drainage and irrigation were certainly run in this manner, it is probable that each family planted its own gardens, and that the difficulties arose over the individual allotments of shares of land.  Partitioning Ordinances were certainly passed in 1851 and 1852 which provided for the division of lands between shareholders in those villages requesting government assistance in this matter.

    An interesting comment is made by Rodway on a subject that we shall find to be of great interest later on (Rodway 1891-4, Vol. III: 103).  A certain number of the freed Negroes had gone into the retail trades, for obviously there had to be agencies of distribution for essential commodities such as imported foodstuffs, cloth and hardware now that this function was no longer carried out by the management of the estates.  Rodway suggests that the later ousting of the Negroes from this activity was due to the fact that the town merchants refused to sell to Negroes in an attempt to drive them back into the fields, but favoured the new Portuguese immigrants who had proved less satisfactory as field hands.  Even at a common-sense level this gives a new slant to the usually propounded theory that the Portuguese were just naturally better business men and so monopolized the retail trades.

    The whole picture of the establishment of the free Negro villages is an exceedingly complex one and its detailed documentation in the wider context of the social, economic and political movements of the time remains as a task for the historian.  It seems certain that the rapid development of freehold villages was partly due to the economic factors associated with the trade position of the West Indies which made land available, and which probably contributed in large measure to the growth of the emancipation movement itself (see Williams, E. 1942).  Another major factor was the ecological necessity for individuals to associate themselves into reasonably large units in order to cope with the problems of drainage and irrigation.  With this brief background we are now in a position to examine more closely the development of the three villages with which we are primarily concerned.

August Town

In the pre-1838 era a planter named Mr. James Blair owned four cotton estates in the vicinity of what is now August Town.  They were known as Nos. 16, 17, 18 and 19, and after emancipation, groups of slaves from No. 19 on the one hand and Nos. 17 and 18 on the other, bought two sections of August Town lands.  This is a traditional account, and the same tradition also asserts that all of Mr. Blair’s slaves were related even then, and this accounts for the close relationship between the people of August Town and certain other Negro villages further down the coast, for their ancestors came from Blair’s estate too.  The Congregational Church which stood at Rodborough, the present site of the Congregational Manse, was dismantled and the materials were divided into three sections which were used to build three new churches in three villages of which August Town was one.  This helps to bolster the tradition of a common origin for the three villages and for the Negro communities of the lower part of the coast of Western Berbice.  Whether the details of this story are historically accurate or not is of little concern to us, for its main purpose seems to be to validate the relationships which exist between the communities today.  Certainly the main outlines seem likely to be correct for Pinckard mentions having visited Mr. Blair’s estate at the end of the eighteenth century (Pinckard 1806, Vol. II: 351, 358-67).

    The main event in the historical tradition is the founding of the village itself shortly after emancipation.  The first section of August Town known as St. Paul’s section was purchased by a group of forty-nine persons.  A copy of the Transport (conveyance) passed at that time shows that they were represented by one man who appeared before His Honour Samuel Firebrace, one of the Judges of the Supreme Court of Civil Justice of British Guiana, on the 12th day of October, 1840 (Sch, B, 1916/No. 768–Deeds Registry–New Amsterdam, British Guiana).  In 1841 a magistrate made a tour of the rural areas, and in his report to the Governor he remarked upon an estate called No. 21 (the numerical designation of St. Paul’s section) and on the neat cottages built by the ‘labourers’.  He thought it seemed to be quite a village already.

The cultivation of provisions is being commenced at the back of the estate.  This property is owned by forty-nine people and cost 2,000 dollars.  The majority of these people I was informed by one of their body, Jacob Wilson, work upon a sugar estate called number 17, and come home only at night (1841 C.O. III/82–Governor Light to Russell, 26 Jan. 1841–Encl.).

The second section of the village to be purchased was named Troy, and this was bought in 1841 by a group of ex-slaves from Nos. 17 and 18 sections of Blair’s estate.  Although these two units, Troy and St. Paul’s were, and are, contiguous, they formed two separate units for many years.  A bitter feud is supposed to have developed between the two sections over the disputed position of the boundary lines between them at the very back of the cultivation area.  The drainage trenches separating the two sections take a sharp turn into St. Paul’s land at one point, before turning back into the previous direction of division, and if they are still taken as the dividing line beyond this point it means that St. Paul’s loses a small area of land.  The St. Paul’s people contended that the boundary should be a continuation of the straight compass line, and they reputedly took the matter to court and got a decision in their favour.  However, this resulted in a prolonged series of fights, reciprocal burning of crops, impounding of animals, and working of destructive magic.  Most important of all, a ban on intermarriage between the two sections was maintained until somewhere around the 1870’s when the marriage of a Troy woman to a St. Paul’s man marked the beginning of frequent intermarriage.  It is interesting that this traditional account places the first intermarriage at a point corresponding to the farthest extension of known kinship reckoning, and this division of the village into two sections with a tradition of mutual hostility is particularly interesting since something of the kind is found in most Negro villages throughout the country. [6]

    When the two sections were purchased and settled each had its own internal organization and its own elected headmen.  The fact that most of British Guiana’s coastlands lie below the level of the sea at high tide means that an elaborate system of drainage and irrigation works has to be maintained if the land is not to be perpetually under water, and if farming is to be at all possible (see below).  This means that the system of social organization has to be of such a nature that the tasks involved can be properly executed.  It was not, and is not, possible for each proprietor to drain his or her own pieces of land individually, and the history of village political organization is dominated by the recurrent theme of problems of drainage and irrigation.  We do not know a great deal about the very early working of the system in August Town, except that the headmen were elected to supervise the proper execution of the necessary works.  Some villages seem to have run into difficulties quite early, for one of the demands of the central government was that every village and estate should be responsible for that section of the public road running through it, and as early as 1845 we find Queen’s Town, Essequibo, petitioning government to enact an ordinance making it compulsory for every villager to contribute to the upkeep of the road and its bridges.  Plaisance, Demerara followed in 1849, and monetary contributions in lieu of labour contributions were introduced.  The central government gradually came to exercise a greater degree of supervision over the internal organization of the villages, and the history of the various ordinances affecting the villages has been well documented by Cameron (1934, I am much indebted to this writer for his account of the history of the Guianese villages), and in less detail by Hinden (1950: 53–70).  It appears that there was always a certain amount of difficulty involved in enforcing the obligations of villagers to contribute to the maintenance of the village works and the early appeals to government were primarily for a system of effective legal sanctions to bolster the authority of the village headmen or overseers.  Most of the early legislation was concerned with providing these sanctions, but one also hears stories today of the way in which villages sometimes worked out their own control system.  Thus in August Town it is said that anyone defaulting on their obligations to work was arraigned before a ‘court’ of the whole body of the proprietors, and if the negligence of the offender was established then he could be beaten by the headmen.  For August Town we are fortunate enough to possess a copy of an agreement which was signed by all the shareholders as early as 1865.  This document is in the possession of one of the villagers, and although it was originally dated 1865, it was recopied at later dates in exactly the same form, and it is quite possible that this particular document is a copy of an even earlier one.  Judging by the style and punctuation it appears to have been drawn up by the villagers themselves, perhaps with the help of a minister or local official, and it sets out very clearly the rights, and obligations of every shareholder.  Due recognition is given to the values prohibiting ‘African’ dancing and Obeah, and these must have been fairly common at the time to merit mention in a document such as this. [7]   It is abundantly clear that a democratic form of local self-government had been established as a natural response to the situation confronting the settlement.  That this form of local control eventually became less efficient was not due to the natural inabilities or political ineptness of the villagers, but rather to the change in the pattern of activities of the shareholders, and the same factors are responsible for the ‘inefficient’ running of the village today under a local government system with a large measure of outside control.  The following is an exact copy of the document, apart from the fact that the place-names have been changed.  Where a cross appears in the middle of the signature, this indicates that the person was completely illiterate.

Rules for the administration of St. Paul section,

August Town

Be it known to all whom these presents shall come we the undersigned proprietors of plantation No. 21 called Saint Paul’s on this tenth day of July 1865 hereby enter into mutual agreement in the presence of the undersigned witnesses.

1st.                We do hereby agree that whenever there is Estate work required to be done each and every shareholder shall at once turn out and do it, or send a fit and proper person to do the same or failing to do he or she shall pay a fine of 32 cents per day which shall be recoverable by a Magistrate.  All the public outlet and dams to be refit in good order and attended to, the Estate to well drained and put in good condition.

3rd.               A Committee to be chosen yearly from the majority of shareholders who shall vote for the election of such committee which shall consist of five men who shall advise the Headmen as to what is necessary to be done for the good of the Estate for the year ending 31^st July 1866 if their successors inherited shall neglect their duty a fine of sixty four cents shall be imposed, each and every shareholder shall with his family have equal rights to and from the waterside a back along the public roads or dams.  Any other person or persons trespassing shall be dealt with according to law.

4th.               Any person keeping a shop not interested in the village to pay a fine or sum of one dollar per month for the transporting of his or her goods through the coker trench.  Firewood to be bought from the shareholders.

5th.               Should any person not interested in the village graze Horses Asses pay a sum of three Dollars per Annum for each and every head.

6th.               We do hereby agree to have a burial ground or else the dead to be carried to a church or chapel such Burial ground to be well drained and kept in good condition No provision to be planted on the aforesaid ground.

7th.               We also agree that there shall be from the surveyors pall a ten feet trench to prevent all stock from grazing aback.

8th.               No strange person shall be allowed to cut cordwood unless being provided with a Licence from the committee.

9th.               And be it known to all shareholders that no ungodly dance shall be held in the village Mingy Mamma Mingy drumming, persons found in such act to be carried before Magistrate of the district.

10th.            Should any person be found practicing Obeah or receiving money under false presence to be dealt with according to law.

11th.            There must be a meeting held quarterly for the benefit of the public work of the Estate Roads Bridge Coker etc.  Carpenters to be elected by the Members of the Committee and exempted from diging trenches etc.  there must be fourteen days notice given to every shareholder.

12th.            We Nominate and appoint Jacob Rowley and Sancho Cameron to be our Headmen in the purpose of superintending the general business of the Estate and in case of failure or neglect in the said business a fine to be imposed of sixty four cents.  This done signed by the shareholders in the presence of the sub scribed witnesses.

Witnesses

Robert Bowling

George Houston

I hereby agree to the terms of this agreement

[Names of the proprietors of the village]

Jacob Rowley

Sancho Cameron X

Watson X Joseph

Stewart Thompson

Bass X Schrewder

Collingford X Sam

Hector X Wilson

Corydon X James

Brian X McFarley

Job X Stupid

King Gillis

James Watts

William Liverpool

Pith X Dover

Frank X Nicolson

Phebe X Archibald

Penny X Romeo

[Indistinct] Alexander Cain

[Indistinct] Bowling

Pompey Joseph

Felix X Wilson

Dianah X McDonald

Quamey X Johnson

William Author

John Whinfield

Harry Benjamin

Lucy X Acman

Rory X Maria

Samuel X McFarley

Eve X Rigby

Sandy Moria

Frances X House

Sabina Young

Amba X Blair

King X Thompson

Pondorah X Acman

Frank X Joseph Rigby

Sarah X Edwards

Hero X McDonald

Joan X McFarley

Phillis X Acman

Edward Gillis

Matair X [Indistinct!

[Unreadable]

Blenhem X [Indistinct]

George Cook

Febuary Watts