After emancipation the new villagers needed to earn money with which to provide themselves with at least those essentials which had been provided for them by their masters when they were slaves.  Clothing, cooking utensils, and certain items of food such as salt-fish, salt-beef, and pickled meat, now had to be bought for cash and since there was a limited market for farm produce grown on small holdings cash had to be obtained by selling one’s labour to the planters.  The security of having one’s own house, and at least the produce of one’s own garden, gave the ex-slaves a favourable position from which to bargain with the planters, and the strikes of 1842 show that there was a lively appreciation of the new situation.  This was short-lived and when the planters prevailed upon the home government to allow the wholesale importation of indentured labourers, first from Maderia and China, and then more significant! from India, the Negro was effectively robbed of his hitherto disconcerting bargaining power (Barton Premium 1850).  He continued to work on the estates for part of the time, particularly during the cane-cutting seasons when a reasonable amount of money could be earned in a relatively short time by the concentration of considerable physical effort.  Attempts to grow cash crops such as cotton, coffee and arrowroot met with little success in the villages, and farming activities came to be little more than glorified kitchen gardening for home consumption.

    In 1863 the Eastern half of Plantation Belle Vue or Lot No. 22, was surveyed and partitioned into forty-four shares.  The present-day oral tradition is that the proprietors of St. Paul’s section bought this land, comprising some 250 acres, in order to bring the size of their holdings into line with that of Troy section, and it is true that the surnames of the majority of the original proprietors of Belle Vue correspond with those of the original proprietors of St. Paul’s section. [8]   However a number of new surnames appear on the Belle Vue list and there is no means of telling who these people were or where they came from.  They may have been the children of St. Paul’s women by men from other parts of the country, or they may have been new settlers.  Today Belle Vue has its own village council but it holds joint meetings with August Town and the same individual is chairman of both councils.  It is very much a part of the social unit of August Town and should be really considered as a sub-unit of the same order as Troy and St. Paul’s being closer to St. Paul’s and in some respects an extension of it.  It is separated from St. Paul’s section by a narrow private estate owned by an East Indian family, and on the other side of Belle Vue there are two private estates separating it from an East Indian village.  It is on this Belle Vue boundary of the village that there has been a slight inter-mixture of the Negro and East Indian groups.  A few Indian families actually live on Belle Vue land, and the adjoining estate is owned by an East Indian family which has kinship ties with many August Town Negro families through the intermarriage of a male member of the family with a woman from August Town.  Thus the physical boundary of the two villages August Town and the East Indian village is a stretch of private land owned by families with kinship ties in both villages.

    The opening up of the gold and diamond mining enterprises in the interior of the colony from around 1880 onwards, resulted in village men going off on extended trips as a regular feature, and the tapping of balata from the wild forest trees also became a well established male occupation requiring lengthy absences from the village. [9]   Today the older men in any village love to tell stories of their days in the interior, of the rivers and forests and mountains, of their feats and their exploits, and of the ‘buck Indians’.  This is their world of fantasy and the women roundly mock them and call them liars behind their backs.  More recently, work in the Bauxite mining towns of Kwakwani and McKenzie has provided an avenue of employment for August Town men and resulted in their spending long periods of time away from home.

Perseverance

Perseverance was settled as a village rather later than August Town.  According to local informants the land belonged to a Dutchman named Brummell prior to 1838, and it was later owned by the well-known Hogg family of England, and also by a private corporation.  It was certainly an abandoned estate when it was taken over by the ancestors of the present inhabitants, and there may have been| squatters living there prior to its legal acquisition which is placed around 1882.  Various accounts of the origin of the settlers are given, and one informant claims that ‘you had people from Africa anal from Dutch Guiana.  All them African people them die out’.  Other informants claim that some of the people came from the nearby estates of Devonshire Castle and Better Success.  Kirke, writing in 1898, says:–

    Better Success was an old, abandoned estate, where lived a number of Africans in a state of primitive barbarism.  The front dams of the estate had been broken down by the sea, and the tide swept in and out, under and around the houses of the inhabitants, which were built on greenheart piles; the road was washed away, and the only means of approach was in bateaux.  I once went to this place to open an inquest over a man, who was supposed to have been murdered.  I was astonished to see such numbers of fine stalwart people.  Their food was principally fish and rice; the former caught in great numbers out of the sea, the latter grown by coolies on a neighbouring settlement.

    As the tide was up, the people were wading through the water in all directions, most of them without clothes; only the older women seemed to think it was necessary to cover their nakedness in any way, although a few of the men sported a ragged pair of trousers or an old shirt.  There are several settlements of these Africans in various parts of the colony.  They are a fine, hardy race, hard working and prosperous, very different from the ordinary Creole black man.  They are the descendants of thirteen thousand Congoes, Mandingoes and other tribes, who were taken out of captured slavers and landed in the country, where they readily found employment.  The language these people talk is very peculiar, and perfectly unintelligible to a stranger (Kirke 1898: 143–4).

    This account of Better Success (which is now a privately owned estate), corresponds very closely to the kind of picture outsiders have of Perseverance, although there is no tradition of Perseverance villagers being descended from Africans brought in after emancipation.  Prior to 1950 Perseverance had practically no effective drainage or sea defence and the villagers were renowned for their semi-aquatic life, their supposed health and vigour, and for their independence.  There appears to have been a minimum of effective organization for maintaining the village works, but there was certainly some organization, and the pattern of land holding, etc., was substantially the same as that in August Town.  Perseverance villagers worked on the sugar estates, and when the last estate on the Essequibo Coast closed down in 1925 this was regarded as something in the nature of a major catastrophe.  Men now had to go further afield to find work as they do at the present time.

Better Hope

Like August Town, what we have called Better Hope is really composed of two separate settlements, and also like August Town they were purchased soon after emancipation by groups of ex-slaves.  There is still a traditional distinction made between Better Hope proper and the contiguous section known as Eldorado, and the official title of the village as a whole is Better Hope and Eldorado.  The history of this village does not differ materially from that of August Town and we shall not dwell upon it at length.  The main difference is that being close to Georgetown it has been much more affected by urban influences, and it came into the centralized local government system much earlier than did August Town.

    This historical sketch has been kept as brief as possible.  The intention has been to give a clear background to the present-day village structure and to highlight those antecedent developments which seemed most relevant.  The resultant impression is of groups of people forcibly transported to the estates of British Guiana from Africa and various other colonies of the New World, where they were fitted into a complex social system, occupying a given place within the total structure.  They developed enough cohesion in their sub-group to be able to establish village communities of their own after emancipation, and these were characterized by their ethnic identity, their peculiar culture or customs, their peculiar dialect and by their special place in the social system of the colony as a whole.  The further introduction of new ethnic groups in the nineteenth century modified the position of the Negro groups still further, but by the tail-end of the century the structural situation was essentially the same as it is today.  We have no reason to believe that the ‘culture’ of the Negro villages has changed substantially over the last hundred years or so despite the continued ‘culture contact’ situation, and it will be part of our thesis that the peculiar ‘culture’ of the Negro villages is correlated with their structural position in the Guianese social system.

 

ECOLOGY AND ECONOMY

It is crucial to make clear the fact that the village is not a bounded economic unit, except in so far as we decide to treat it as one for the purposes of description.  Farming activities and animal husbandry are balanced against participation in the labour market of the colony as a whole, for villagers sell their labour for wages outside the village as well as cultivating the soil within it.  This has important consequences for apart from the fact that it results in men spending considerable periods of time away from their families, it also ties in with the fact that the purchasing power of money is a more important asset than are non-consumable items of property such as land, which might in other circumstances form the basic means of production for household groups.

    Although British Guiana has an estimated area of 83,000 square miles, approximately 94 per cent of its population of 436,431 live on 3,000 square miles of coastland.  Approximately 85 per cent of the total area of the colony is forest land and 10.5 per cent is open savannah sparsely populated by Amerindians and a few cattle ranchers, gold miners, etc.  The relative inaccessibility of the interior lands and the great fertility of the coastal ribbon have been factors of some importance in the trend of development of the colony, but such ecological factors merely coincided with the primary interest in plantation cultivation in the most intensive period of settlement to produce the characteristic pattern of population distribution that we find today.  There has been no expanding frontier development despite the often expressed desire to open up the interior of the country.

    Water control is necessarily the major ecological problem of a country whose population is concentrated on a narrow coastal belt lying for the most part below the level of the high tides, and experiencing very heavy rainfall.

    The general principles upon which the drainage and irrigation system of a village is built are fairly simple.  A wall is thrown up along the seashore and another wall is built at the back of the estate to keep out accumulated rain-water which would otherwise drain through to the sea.  This water can be conserved for irrigation purposes.  In an area where there is a sufficient degree of organization, these two walls, the sea-wall and the back-dam, will be extended either way to link up with those of adjoining estates.  Down each side of the estate, side-line dams and trenches are built, the trenches being skilfully graded so that the accumulated water can be drained down through a sluice gate to the sea, this gate being closed against the sea at high tide (see Plate VIb).  Fig. I presents a schematic diagram showing the general layout of any typical coastal estate (villages are of course estates, and this diagram refers to village estates), and shows the main essentials of a drainage system.  This basic layout is capable of a great many modifications of course, and some of the sugar plantations are much more complicated pieces of engineering.  However in the three villages with which we are dealing the system is fundamentally the same as shown in the diagram.

    The proper maintenance of such a system requires a great deal of effort and an overall plan of administration.  Someone has to be employed to open the sluice gates and to close them again at the appropriate times; the trenches must be kept clear of silt and weeds; and the dams must be rebuilt as they begin to wear as the result of heavy rainfall or the constant passage of animals, carts, etc.  Since there is no stone easily available, village dams are usually built up from packed mud which wears very quickly, especially since the tops of the dams serve as roads and pathways.  A few villages metal the top surface of their dams with brick (burnt earth) but even this does not prolong the life of the dam very much.

    It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of the peculiar nature of the country and its effect of imposing a pattern of corporate group life almost as a condition of existence, but on the other hand it must be remembered that there was never any iron necessity for this.  Some villages in British Guiana have let their drainage and irrigation works deteriorate to a point where they live a semi-aquatic existence and just don’t bother about the repeated flooding of their lands.  For many years the inhabitants of Perseverance did practically no farming on their village lands, and the fact that they had to wade waist deep in water to get to the public road was of little consequence to them.  Such villages often specialized in fishing, particularly for shrimps, and the possibility of finding employment on the sugar estates has always meant that the Negro villager is not wholly dependent on farming as a means of livelihood.  Of course only a limited number of villages at any one time could be completely unproductive or the production of food crops would fall below a necessary minimum, but farming has been, and is, very much a secondary occupation to the Negro.  On the slave plantations small plots of land were given to the slaves for the purpose of growing food and the fact that slaves often sold their surplus produce in the markets did not make them farmers.  After emancipation the new villages were established and operated by a remarkable feat of cooperation, but this co-operation has always been difficult to maintain, not least of all because men have found it difficult to meet the demands it made upon their labour when they wished to sell that labour for wages outside the village.  By the time a village has come under the aegis of the local government system, real co-operation has been replaced by a system of cash payments which are obligatory under the law of the colony as a whole.  Ever since the villages were first established the tendency has been in this direction, and the initial feats of co-operative endeavour never crystallized into a strong continuing system.  The present-day local government system has been described by Simey (1946), Hinden (1950) and Laing (1949), but these writers tend to ignore the fact that in practice the villages are heavily dependent on agencies of the central government both for supervision and administrative assistance and often for financial aid (see Smith 1955 and Report of the British Guiana Constitutional Commission 1954 (Cmd. 9274) H.M.S.O., London).

    If we try to look at the economic system of the village as a whole we find that there is really no sense in which the village functions as a sub-system of the total economy of the colony.  There is instead a series of lines where the economy of the whole society cuts across the village as a unit.  For example, villagers participate in the economic life of the sugar estates, but these estates are external organizations so far as the village is concerned.  Similarly farmers produce rice which is sold to external agencies, and they may even engage tractors to do part of the cultivation, but the tractors are also external to the village.  Whilst we must bear in mind this intrusion of external economic factors, for the purpose of simple analysis such as we require at the moment we may look at the village as though it were a distinct unit and try to see how the economy fits on to its political, territorial and social organization.

Farming

Farming is the first sector of the economy with which we shall deal, and there is a fairly close correspondence between the organization of economic activities and village structure.  Successful farming depends upon adequate drainage and irrigation and this is most directly organized at a village level, even though a large measure of administrative control rests with officials of the central government.  It is not organized by individual farmers or by households.  In all three villages the farm lands are divided into large blocks on which different kinds of crops are grown.  Thus we speak of the ‘provision area’, the ‘rice lands’ and the ‘cattle-grazing area’ (see Map 2).  Each village is made up of lands which are the freehold property of the villagers, but in the case of August Town there are certain lands used for rice cultivation and cattle grazing which are leased from the Crown on a long lease at very low rental.  They do not all come under the direct control of the village council although they are really an extension of the village lands, but there is a basic similarity in their mode of control.  In the first place these lands must be drained through the village drainage system and the local authority takes full responsibility for this.  Secondly the lands are leased from government in exactly the same way that the village lands were purchased after emancipation.  That is, two men take out a lease on behalf of a number of villagers and then the land is allocated in strips between the participating shareholders who all contribute towards the rental, the cost of building low dams or ‘empoldering’, and the cost of buying any wire fencing that may be necessary.  One block of Crown land is actually leased by the council and allocated to farmers in this way.  Rice is always cultivated in large blocks divided into individual holdings, and is kept distinct from the ‘provision’ area, which is similarly divided into strips.  The reasons for this are obvious, since rice fields require to be flooded at certain stages of the plant’s growth.

    In the provision area, which is freehold land in all three villages, the land is divided into individual strips known as ‘beds’ (see Map 2) and they run laterally across the village from the side-line trenches to the middle drainage trenches.  Originally each bed was an individual holding but through sub-division a single bed may be divided into as many as four separately owned sections.  In August Town the majority of beds are about 800 x 30 feet in Troy section, and 450 x 57 feet in St. Paul’s section, averaging a little over half an acre per bed in both sections.  The greater part of Belle Vue section is now used for rice cultivation and when it was repartitioned in 1952, it was divided into varying sized lots, but very few were over one acre, and the majority were less.  Perseverance was also repartitioned in 1951, and individuals who had consolidated a few holdings may have beds of three or more acres, but again the majority of beds are in the region of one acre, and even where there are large beds, it is most likely that they are being cultivated by several different persons (Smith 1955: 76).

    On these small plots of land a variety of crops is grown, the majority being for home consumption or for sale within the village.  Cassava, yams, sweet potato, plantains, eddoes, tannia, squash, pumpkin, corn, ockro, boulangers, peas, beans, calalloo (spinach), and fruits and nuts are often grown mixed up together, without any attempt to separate the various plants.  This is not always the case and there may be definite grouping of the plants, but the term ‘mixed provisions’ is commonly used to designate the crop growing on a particular bed, and it is to be taken as a literal description.  Before a provision bed can be planted it has to be cleared of bush and this is done by the ‘slash and burn’ method.  The undergrowth is hacked down by cutlass and burnt before the bed is forked over ready for planting.  After the initial clearing of a bed it is worked for about five to seven years before being allowed to return to bush for fallowing for upwards of five years.  During the period when the bed is being worked, crops are planted almost continuously, and reaped as they ripen or as they are required.  Cassava in particular can be planted at any time of the year, and it can be left in the ground without deteriorating until it is required.  There is therefore no well demarcated cycle of planting and harvesting seasons so far as ground provisions are concerned, and the harvest festivals celebrated in the churches are based upon the English church calendar, being delayed just a little to coincide with the rice harvest in late September or October.

    The bulk of the produce of provision farms is consumed by the producer or sold within the village, but some is bought by itinerant dealers who are mostly Negro women from other villages, or East Indians.  The quantities sold are usually quite small and the transactions will rarely exceed a few dollars at the most (One dollar [B.W.I.] = four shillings and two pence, or fifty-five cents [U.S.]).  Selling within the village is done by women or children who go around from house to house, or by women at the one market of the week held in August Town.  From Perseverance a few farmers take provisions to markets at Charity or Anna Regina (each 7 miles away),and there is also a government depot at Charity which buys produce for transport to Georgetown by schooner.  The farmers in Better Hope sell their produce either to middlemen (‘hucksters’) who transport it to Georgetown and the sugar estates, or they sell it themselves in the local markets.  The general rule amongst rural Negro cultivators is that you sell wherever you can, whenever you need money sufficiently badly to take the trouble to seek a market This is not true for all farmers, and in Perseverance and Better Hope the proximity of markets with a constant demand leads some farmers to produce regularly for it.

    Apart from provision farms there is a certain amount of produce grown in kitchen gardens on the house lots, particularly in Better Hope where animals are more satisfactorily controlled and less constant attention to fences is required.  Again the bulk of kitchen garden produce is used for domestic consumption, and the methods of cultivation are exactly the same as in the case of provision farms except that manure from the animal pens may be used.  Very few villagers grow provisions on land outside the village as there is no shortage of this type of land within the village boundaries.  In fact it is much more likely that a few beds of provision land will be rented to outsiders, including East Indians from neighbouring settlements.

    In the early days of village settlement some attempt seems to have been made to grow cash crops such as cotton and coffee, but these attempts were never very successful.  Markets were not particularly good, and the village cultivator could not hope to compete with the plantations.  Sugar has never been widely grown as a peasant crop in British Guiana and the few cane farmers there are in the colony are all concentrated on the East Coast of Demerara near to a few large plantations which buy their crop.  Out of a total colony sugar production of 217,306 tons in 1951, only 1,070 tons were produced from canes supplied by small farms (Colonial Reports–British Guiana 1951, London: H.M.S.O. 1953: 50).  It is rice which has developed as the basic cash crop for the small farmer, but in the Negro villages the cultivation of rice is still very much a supplementary activity for the great majority of farmers, yielding only part of their total cash requirements.  East Indian and Chinese immigrants established rice cultivation on a commercial basis and the Negro villages seem to have taken it up when the milling and marketing facilities had been developed to a point which made it worth their while.  Originally they grew only a small amount for subsistence purposes and only began to sell surpluses as the demand increased.  At the time of the study there were some 540 acres of Crown lands under rice in August Town, and in addition to this, rice was grown on about 120 acres of freehold land in Belle Vue section.  Some August Town farmers were also planting rice on rented lands lying outside the village boundaries.  Perseverance had 213 acres of village land under rice in 1952, and Perseverance farmers were cultivating some 140 acres of rice on various rented and leased lands outside the village.  Exact acreages were not collected for Better Hope but it was clear that far fewer villagers planted rice than in the other two villages, and much more of the village land was rented out to non-villagers, and particularly to East Indians.

    The methods of cultivation employed by the Negro farmer tend to be extremely rudimentary and the real progress in establishing a flourishing rice industry based on a high degree of mechanization is being made by the East Indians rather than the Negroes.  The only mechanical farm equipment owned and operated by any member of the three Negro communities studied was that owned by a Coloured (mixed Negro and European) man in August Town, and where mechanical equipment was used at all on Negro farms it was hired from outside the village.

    Despite the possibility of planting and reaping two crops every year owing to the double wet and dry seasons, very few Negro farmers take the trouble to try for a double crop.  The ploughing of the rice fields begins as soon as the weather is dry enough after Christmas, and some August Town farmers began to plough before the end of January in 1952.  February and March are the main ploughing months, and unless tractor-driven ploughs are hired the work is done by light ox-drawn ploughs of a very simple design, the plough share being bought in one of the Georgetown hardware stores.

    Towards the end of March, as the rainy season approaches, the padi is sown by ‘shieing’ or hand broadcasting.  August Town farmers scatter about seventy pounds of seed to the acre, which is twenty pounds more than is strictly necessary, but since they generally use seed kept from the previous crop rather than high grade selected seed-padi the excess probably compensates for a low germination rate.  Once the seed has been scattered, it is left to germinate when the rains come and no further attention is paid to it until harvest time. [10]   Of course water control is very important during the period when the rice is growing, but this is a matter for the sluice-watchman to decide in collaboration with the village overseer.  By building temporary dams, or ‘stop-offs’, it is possible to keep the rice fields flooded whilst ensuring adequate drainage for the other farm areas and the dwelling area, but of course it is impossible to regulate the amount of rainfall, and a lack of rain at the crucial period of growth can be disastrous.  The more laborious method of transplanting prepared seedlings is not very popular amongst Negro cultivators though it is more common in Perseverance than in the other two villages.

    As the padi begins to ripen around the beginning of September the main job of harvesting gradually gets under way, and this is the one activity in the village which mobilizes the labour of men, women, and, to a limited extent, children, all at one time.  However, there is practically no cooperative activity involved.  Each farmer is concerned with his own crop, but the available resources of labour and equipment manage to get distributed in such a way that every one is able to harvest his or her crop.  There is very little development of a system of reciprocal kinship obligations, and although ties of kinship or friendship may be invoked as the basis for reciprocal help, the main mechanism operates through the medium of monetary exchange.  Reaping requires the greatest number of hands, and the bulk of this work is carried out by women who are paid according to the area they cut.  We shall have more to say about this in the next chapter.  In Perseverance this system of monetary payment is not quite so highly developed, but a farmer who has planted more rice than can be reaped by the members of his own household group will certainly have to pay for labour, either in cash or by returning an equal amount of labour under what is known as the ‘day for day’ system.  In August Town, cash payment for rice cutting is the rule even between members of the same household group.

    Mechanical reaping is very little practiced in either village and even in areas where mechanical equipment is available, it is not always possible to use it owing to the fact that the heavy-grained stalks tend to fall down flat in front of the mechanical cutters Threshing is either carried out by bulls which tread the grain from the straw, or in the case of Perseverance, by beating the heads of the sheaves on a table with a slotted top, the grain falling on to sheets spread beneath (see Plate IVb).  The threshed padi is packed in 140 lb.  bags which are transported by donkey or bullock carts to the dwelling area or to the railway line to await shipment to the mills A part of the crop will probably be retained for domestic consumption and for seed for the following year, though some farmers lodge the padi they require for domestic consumption with a miller, and during the course of the year they can withdraw it in the form of milled rice on payment of a milling fee.  This amounts to about $2.00 per bag of padi, which yields about half a bag of clean rice.  In Perseverance there is one small mill catering for domestic needs and padi can be milled there by the bucketful as it is required.  Alternatively women may pound the padi in a mortar and winnow it on a special winnowing tray, but this method is rarely used today in any of the villages.

    Padi which is surplus to domestic requirements is sold either to one of the government rice mills, or to a private miller through a village agent.  In either case the net return per bag of padi was approximately $4.75 in August Town in 1951, and a normal yield for an August Town farmer would be about fifteen bags of padi to the acre.  The cost of cultivating one acre would be in the region of $50.00 so that the farmer would make a profit of about $21.25 on each acre if he paid for the land to be ploughed and the crop to be reaped.  This figure takes no account of rent, rates, or depreciation on capital equipment such as carts, sickles and so on.  Whilst the profit is fairly high if looked at from the point of view of return on capital invested, the income derived from this source is certainly not high when it is remarked that one of the biggest August Town rice farmers planted only twenty-two acres of rice in 1952.  Not all the padi reaped is sold of course, for a certain amount is retained for home consumption, and this cuts down cash income considerably where the acreage planted is small.  One general consideration to be borne in mind is the risk of failure in planting rice at all, for unfavourable weather conditions, or faulty drainage and irrigation, can quite easily render the crop a total loss.

Animal Husbandry

In any coastal village in British Guiana livestock is very much in evidence, and cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, donkeys, fowls, turkeys, ducks, cats and dogs wander about the village under varying degrees of control.  In many of the Negro villages there is a perpetual battle raging over the allegations of damage to crops by uncontrolled animals, and actions for damage are frequently heard in the courts.  This is not merely the result of bad management, but is also tied in with the fact that there is very little systematic feeding of livestock, and pasturage is generally inadequate.

    There is no systematic breeding of cattle for particular purposes, but the agricultural department has made some attempt to raise the standard of the stock by introducing Zebu and Holstein bulls which are made available to the villager for crossing with his creole cattle.  The creole cattle are generally small, the bulls weighing about 800 pounds and the cows about 500 pounds when fully grown, and they quite definitely give the appearance of being under-fed.  No attempt is made to develop dairy cattle as opposed to beef cattle, and all cows are milked, and all eventually killed for beef.  In August Town there is a large expanse of grazing land beyond the rice area which is leased from government and used as a communal pasture by those cattle owners participating in the joint lease.  The pasture is some four to five miles from the dwelling area and it generally falls to young boys to drive the cattle to and from the pasture when it is necessary.  After the rice harvest the cattle are put to graze in the rice fields which means that there is a certain amount of natural manuring.  Perseverance has no satisfactory grazing area at all that it can call its own, but there is a neighbouring estate owned by an East Indian where cattle can be grazed upon payment of an agistment fee of 60¢ per head per month.  A few farmers lease Crown lands for grazing but this pasture is about five miles from the village.  Fewer villagers keep cattle in Better Hope and they use the village foreshore or a small grazing area between the dwelling and cultivation areas.

    Milk yields are low and the general procedure is to milk the cows after they have been corralled away from the calves overnight.  The calf is allowed to feed for a few moments until the milk is flowing, and then the cow is milked before being turned out with the calves for the rest of the day.  Eight pints of milk per day is considered to be a fairly high yield and many cattle owners milk out considerably less, so that there is no real attempt at specialized milk production.  Most bulls are castrated during the animal’s first year and are then used for draught purposes.  The number of cattle kept by farmers is generally small and in Perseverance no villager had more than six animals, with the exception of one East Indian store-keeper who had about thirty-five head, and one Negro carpenter who kept about forty head on leased lands outside the village.  In August Town the figures would be very little different, except that there would be a greater number of persons owning about ten animals, as there are more adequate grazing facilities.  There is one butcher in August Town who slaughters one animal per week, and this is not always obtained from a village cattle-owner.  The meat is sold in the village, but the choicest cuts go to the Government Compound at Fort Nelson, and the rest is distributed amongst those of the 1,700 villagers who can afford to buy it.  Perseverance has no butcher and any fresh meat that is bought comes from a village seven miles away, but fresh meat is not a regular part of the diet of the majority of Perseverance villagers.  In Better Hope there is a fairly large abattoir and the number of animals slaughtered per week varies.  However meat is distributed more uniformly through the population than in the other two villages owing to the greater quantities available and to the higher purchasing power of the majority of families, as well as being sold on other parts of the coast.

    Cattle, or indeed livestock of any kind, are not counted as a symbol of wealth or status, but in the system of internal differentiation in the village there is a tendency for the wealthier persons, who are generally non-Negroes, to own the largest number of animals, but this is a result of their pattern of economic activities rather than a sign of their superior status.

    Pig rearing is more highly developed in Better Hope than in the other two villages, and pigs are usually kept in pens in the vicinity of the house and fed with prepared pig feed.  Wherever the making of coconut oil has become established as a small scale industry, pig rearing on a slightly larger scale becomes feasible since the pigs can be fed on the by-products of the oil extraction process.  At the time of the study there were very few oil manufacturers, who could maintain their production because of the government plan to increase the production of copra by offering the growers high prices and imposing limits on the sale of locally made crude oil.  Consequently many manufacturers who had been rearing pigs as a side-line were forced to slaughter their pigs when they could no longer compete with the government in purchasing copra.  The price of prepared pig feed is generally too high for August Town or Perseverance farmers and the number of pigs they keep is usually determined by the degree to which they are able to allow their pigs to ‘graze’ or scavenge about the village.  Even when this is done the animals’ diet must be supplemented by home-made mash composed of boiled wild grasses and household surpluses, such as there are.  Most pigs are hybrid, being ‘creole’ stock crossed with Berkshire or Tamworth breeds.  They are generally killed for home consumption on special occasions such as at Christmas time, but in August Town and Perseverance one or two are killed for sale from time to time.  Better Hope rearers can always find a market for pigs in the town and some are slaughtered for local consumption.

    Sheep and goats are kept almost exclusively for sale outside the village, and particularly to buyers from the East Indian communities.  Goats are not milked.  There are quite considerable numbers of goats and sheep in both August Town and Perseverance, and they tend to be kept in reasonably large numbers by a few persons rather than each household having one or two.  They are put out to graze on a small pasture or in the ‘wood bush’ near to the village, and it is not at all unusual to see sheep spending a considerable amount of time in swampy ground with water up to their bellies.  It is usually the older men, who are less spatially mobile, who keep sheep and goats, whilst pigs are frequently reared by women.  Both sheep and goats cause a considerable amount of damage to growing crops, particularly to kitchen gardens in the dwelling areas where they wander freely in most villages.

As a result of continuous hybridization, a ‘creole’ variety of poultry has been developed which is hardy and fairly small, but strains of such varieties as Rhode Island Reds, Plymouth Rock and Leghorn can be distinguished.  Almost every household keeps a few fowls which scratch around the yard and are fed a little padi when there is enough to spare.  There is generally a brisk trade in eggs, and some women go around buying from different households to meet orders from outside the village.  The consumption of eggs within the domestic group is almost solely confined to ceremonial occasions when cakes are made.  The fowls themselves are consumed on similar occasions and the rest are sold to buyers from outside the village.  Again a pattern of trade with East Indians has grown up in August Town, and regular visits are paid to the village by Indian buyers.

    A few donkeys are kept as draught animals, and there are one or two horses in August Town and Better Hope which are used either for riding long distances to the backlands or for racing at holiday seasons.

 

Methods of earning cash wages

Apart from the money accruing from the sale of padi, earned wages account for the bulk of the cash intake of the village.  These wages come from a variety of sources, but work on the sugar estates is one source common to all three villages, and it has always been the typical kind of employment open to residents of the rural areas.  Such work is largely seasonal, and is generally paid on a task basis, which means that there is a minimum of ‘time-keeping’ or regular working hours.  It is during the cane-cutting seasons that the Negro labour force is recruited most fully, when extra hands are needed to supplement the main supply of resident East Indian labour.  On many estates, special ranges of bachelor quarters are provided to accommodate seasonal labourers.  From August Town a number of men travel across the Berbice river to an estate near Canje Creek where they stay during the cutting season, occasionally travelling back to the village whenever they feel like it.  The fact that they go to work on an estate so far away when there is a cutting estate within daily walking distance of the village is extremely interesting.  The reason given for the preference for the more distant estate is that they like the manager there, but this seems to be a rationalization of a more fundamental predisposition to spatial mobility on the part of men.  Not all August Town cane-cutters go to this estate but certainly a majority do.

    In Perseverance the situation is rather different for there have been no sugar estates on the Essequibo Coast since 1925 and therefore men have to travel to Demerara to find work.  The whole of the Essequibo Coast is regarded as a depressed area, and there is certainly very little scope for funding employment there, with the result that there is both a marked seasonal migration and a certain amount of permanent migration to other parts of the colony, and particularly to Georgetown.  Out of a total adult male population (over 18 years) of approximately 151 in Perseverance, it is estimated that about ninety to one hundred men regularly spend the cane-cutting season working on estates in Demerara.  There is the same tendency for all the men to go to one estate that is found in August Town, and in the case of Perseverance the main group goes to Plantation Diamond, on the east bank of the Demerara River.  The rest go either to Plantation Uitvlugt or Plantation Leonora, two neighbouring estates on the west coast of Demerara.  In Perseverance, the pattern of regular seasonal migration is firmly fixed, and for the majority of Perseverance men this tends to be the only type of labour which takes them away from home.  By and large, the regularity of the migrations tends to give a certain stability to the economic activities of the men which is not found to the same extent in August Town.

    The wages paid to sugar workers are not high as the averages for the whole industry show.  In 1951 the average weekly earnings of adult male, non-resident piece workers was $9.72 (£2 0s. 6d.).  Since the majority of men from Perseverance and August Town who engage in this type of employment are temporarily living away from home it means that they have to meet their own expenses for food and washing, at least, before they can calculate how much they will send home to their families.  Many cane-cutters make much more money than the average wages might indicate, for the Negro prides himself on being a strong and able worker, and when he does turn out to work on the estates he usually does a good job.  Despite this fact it is abundantly clear that the wages earned by a good worker during the two cutting seasons would be quite inadequate to keep himself and his family for the whole year.  There is practically no attempt to spread the earnings over a long period of time, and the money is usually spent as fast as it is earned, and in some cases even before it is earned.  After the rice harvest is in, one actually hears men saying that they are going off to the sugar estates to earn their ‘Christmas money’.  This means that they are going to accumulate enough ready cash to celebrate the Christmas holiday in an appropriately festive manner.

    In addition to this seasonal work cutting the sugar cane, there are opportunities for other types of work on the estates.  A few August Town men work as labourers on the maintenance of the sugar estates’ drainage and irrigation works, and for this type of job a system of indirect employment is generally used.  One man acts as a contractor to the estate manager, and he employs a group of men to work for him, usually paying them on a piece-rate basis.  Most of the work involves digging ditches and making up dams and is paid by the rod.  (One rod = 12ft 4in.)  Women are also employed on some of the lighter tasks such as weeding, and this affords an opportunity ,or young women to earn money in their own right.  Perseverance men usually leave the estates when the cane-cutting season is over, for it is hardly worth their while to stay on waiting for a few days’ piecework now and again.  Better Hope supplies a certain number of factory workers to the adjoining estates and some villagers are highly skilled technicians.  Sugar boilers are amongst the élite of the sugar industry and their skill commands high wages both in British Guiana and in the other West Indian islands, where they often go to work for six months or so at a time.  These technicians enjoy prestige within the village community, often ranking almost as high as the school-teachers.  Neither Perseverance nor August Town has a comparable degree of differentiation of this kind, and Better Hope is the only one of the three villages to have a sizeable group of regularly employed skilled artisans.

    For generations men from the coastal Negro communities have supplied the bulk of the labour for the mining industry, and this is still an important source of employment for many village men From about 1890 onwards, men from all three villages took part in the rapid opening up of the gold and diamond fields, but today there are relatively few men engaged on work in these smaller mining enterprises (see Cameron 1934, Bk. II: 61).  The growth of the bauxite industry after the first World War, and its rapid expansion during the second, provided a new outlet for the migrant Negro worker.  For some reason August Town men went to the bauxite workings in large numbers, and in keeping with the tendency for the men from one village to keep together during their migrations to the sugar estates, August Town became almost ‘specialized’ in bauxite. [11]   Almost 200 men and youths from August Town are employed at either Kwakwani or McKenzie City at any one time (there were 338 adult males in August Town at the time of the study, and though many of these migrate periodically to the sugar estates etc., the men at McKenzie and Kwakwani are not included in this number), and the migrations to these two mining towns appear to be taking on an aspect of greater permanence than formerly.  This is very difficult to estimate, but it does appear that more young men are taking their wives and children with them than was the case in the past. The bauxite industry is highly mechanized and the resulting differentiation of occupations into skilled and semi-skilled jobs means that a young man has the opportunity of some sort of progressive advancement, and the old uniformity of the ‘labourer’ category is broken up to some extent.  There is a positive inducement for some of the men to stay on as regular employees rather than regarding the work as just another labouring job to be held for a short time before seeking a change.  No studies were carried out at either of the bauxite towns but it would be interesting to discover how much internal social differentiation has developed within the Negro groups there.  In the case of August Town then, employment at the bauxite mines forms a very special part of the village economy, and it has gradually tended to become distinct from all the other forms of employment in the mining industries of the interior.  It forms a special part of the village economy because workers send a considerable part of their total earnings back to relatives in the village, and particularly to their mothers and to the mothers of their children. [12]   Other occupations in the interior lands are definitely regarded as temporary jobs, and they include gold and diamond mining, balata bleeding,  employment with companies extracting other minerals such as manganese, and an occasional job in connexion with the driving of cattle down from the savannahs to the coast.  Neither Perseverance nor Better Hope have a comparable number of men working in the bauxite industry, but a few men from both villages engage in the other activities at any one time, and probably most of the older men have worked in the interior of the colony at some time or other.

 

Economic specialization within the village.

Although we have stressed the lack of occupational specialization our description would be both incomplete and misleading unless we briefly outlined the actual differentiations which do occur.  It is part of our thesis that the Negro group in British Guiana constitutes a functionally differentiated subgroup of the total social system of the colony, and this differentiation runs through the economic system.  Whilst this is a primary consideration to be borne in mind in any discussion of the village as a unit we are now concerned with the actual range of specialized occupations which occur within the actual territorial unit.  The village is not solely composed of Negroes, and the presence of Chinese, Portuguese, East Indian and Coloured persons gives us a link with the total social system which serves to emphasize the fact that even the village as a unit is not coincident with the boundaries of the Negro sub-group.  There are villages in British Guiana which have almost equal proportions of Negroes and East Indians, but of course this does not destroy ethnic distinctions.

    Shops and the retailing of imported or non-village products are mainly in the hands of non-Negroes, and we shall delay their consideration until a later chapter when we are concerned with an examination of other than purely economic factors (see Chapter VIII).  We may just note here that the shops form an integral part of the village economy for they are the main channels through which money flows out of the village.  It enters in the form of earnings from the sugar states, bauxite mines, government work etc., and from receipts for farm produce sold outside the village.  In the case of Better Hope the system is not so closed, for money is often both earned and spent outside the village by its resident members.  However, shops in all three villages do supply a range of essential commodities, and there s a definite tendency to buy locally rather than going farther afield the principal items stocked by the village shops and stores are as follows:­–

GROCERY SHOPS

Rice

Salt-fish

Salt-beef

Salt-pork (pig-tails)

Smoked herring

Salt

Pepper

Curry powder

Marsala and coriander seeds

Cooking oil

Lard

Margarine (‘salt butter’)

‘Irish’ potatoes

Garlic

Onions

Flour

Yeast

Sugar

Matches

Kerosene

Patent medicines

Cigarettes

Various canned goods, coffee, tea, etc., which are only rarely purchased by the average village household.

 

STORES

 

Cloth

Thread

Needles

Shoes

Hats

Shirts

Cutlasses

Sickles (‘grass knives’)

School books, pens, etc.

Cooking utensils

Plates and other domestic ware

Glasses