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Raymond T. Smith Copyright 2000: All Rights Reserved Go To Site Map |
I have chosen to refer to this whole phase of my Caribbean research as "village studies" even though an attempt was always made to locate these individual villages in a wider context of the colonial and emergent national society. As explained in the opening section on Caribbean Research, I finally settled on fieldwork in what was then British Guiana, and travelled there by sea to Jamaica and then on by British West Indian Airways via Trinidad, arriving on Sunday May 27th 1951. The British Guiana government officers responsible for my well-being had decided to place me in the Park Hotel, an elegant but incredibly restrained and repressed colonial retreat. The beautifully open lounge of this huge, domed wooden building was lined with "Berbice chairs" on which aging expatriates reclined, reading English newspapers, with their legs draped over the elongated chair arms. At the dinner hour a lady in evening dress played the piano while waiters padded silently about delivering large drinks. The hotel was clearly meant for white people, and behind the main building was a series of bungalows and apartments where many of the English colonial officials lived. The hotel was immediately opposite the Governor's official residence, Government House, across Main Street. When I visited Guyana in 1997 the Park Hotel was still there though the Berbice chairs had been replaced by garish upholstered arm chairs and the piano was shrouded in a canvas cover since dinner was no longer served in the main dining room. I understand that moves are afoot to reopen the restaurant to cater to the new elites of the modern state, and the foreign visitors who come mainly in search of investment opportunities. Having submitted to the Colonial Social Science Research Council a proposal to study the processes of change affecting villages inhabited by the descendants of African slaves my first problem was to decide which one of the many such villages to study. When slavery was abolished throughout the British possessions on August 1st 1838 (after a number of transitional years known as apprenticeship), large numbers of plantations were no longer economically viable and were sold off to groups of ex-slaves by planters anxious to cut their losses. These became the free villages of the new colony of British Guiana that now combined the old colonies of Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo. The villages were usually run co-operatively, with the potential to develop into a thriving experiment in socialist economic development. That was thwarted by the combined action of the surviving planters and the colonial government who actively opposed any development that would divert the ex-slaves from wage labour on the remaining plantations. Since they controlled all transport and access to markets it is not surprising that this noble experiment foundered. Among the most famous of these free villages were Buxton, named after a leader of the abolition movement, and Victoria, named after the young queen who had signed the emancipation declaration. However, these villages were large and close to the capital, Georgetown, and therefore not quite suitable to my purposes. After an extensive survey I settled upon a Village named Hopetown, suitably distant from Georgetown along 50 miles of dusty pot-holed coastal road, but also served by the excellent train that ran between Georgetown and its terminus at Rosignol, a small community across the Berbice River from New Amsterdam, the capital of Berbice county. I quickly transferred from the splendours of the Park Hotel to more austere (and cheaper) quarters in Mrs. D'Abreau's Boarding House--no less colonial in that its normal inhabitants were all Europeans, though a few West Indians took lunch there every day. From July 15th 1951 to early June 1952 I lived in the village of Hopetown on the West Coast Berbice: that field experience is described more fully in the section labelled Hopetown. After an interlude of several months at the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica, I returned to British Guiana in order to study two other "African" villages for comparative purposes. The first one I chose was the village of Dartmouth on the Essequibo Coast. In 1952 Essequibo was considered to be a depressed and backward area since sugar cultivation had effectively ceased and the opportunities for wage labour were few. Nonetheless this remained a fascinating area, not least because the road along the coast from Suddie and Adventure, the terminus of the ferry boat from Georgetown, led to the jumping-off point into the interior river complex at Charity. Close enough to Dartmouth to allow villagers to travel there for the weekly market, Charity was the most racially complex town on the coast with its mixture of Amerindians, Africans, East Indians, Chinese and Portuguese. Dartmouth itself was a poverty-stricken village that depended on intensive methods of rice cultivation and the income from village men who migrated to work on the sugar plantations of Demerara or at mining sites in the interior of the country--originally at the gold and diamond mining areas but more recently at the bauxite mines. After three months in Dartmouth I moved to Den Amstel on the West Coast Demerara, just a few miles and a short ferry trip from Georgetown, the capital. Den Amstel was a much more complex community with a predominantly African population that was only marginally involved in small-scale farming. Work on nearby plantations was readily available and over the years since its founding as an independent village its schools had produced many individuals who had gone on to careers in teaching, the police, nursing and the clergy. By the spring of 1953 I had completed the first phase of my studies in British Guiana. Elections under a new constitution providing for universal adult suffrage for the first time in Guyanese history were held on Monday April 27th 1953 and I left shortly afterwards for an extended visit to the United States on my way back to Cambridge (See Raymond T. Smith, British Guiana. Oxford University Press 1962 for a discussion of the politics of British Guiana). Most of my time in the United States in 1953 was spent at the University of Chicago--then considered to be an outpost of British anthropology because of the considerable influence of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown resulting from his stay there during the 1930s. However, I did also spend some time at Yale and Harvard before returning to England and the year spent writing up my research. Upon completion of the Ph.D. in mid-1954 I decided to return to the Caribbean and to British Guiana, in order to explore more fully the relationship of the East Indian population to the emerging national state. Before embarking on that new set of studies I had to prepare the Ph.D. dissertation for publication and it eventually appeared as The Negro Family in British Guiana. The book occasioned a good deal of comment and review at the time, and although it was reprinted once it has long been out of print. In preparing this web site I have decided to place the whole book in this section and to annotate it with various comments, as well as indicating sources for the major criticisms and comments on the work. By the time I returned to the Caribbean and prepared to take up the work on the East Indian population of British Guiana the enthusiastic push toward national unity through the vehicle of the People's Progressive Party had been halted through the stupidity of the British government, prodded and persuaded by the United States intent on stopping any movement that looked as though it might be a part of an emergent world communism. In British Guiana that led inexorably to a local politics mobilised by the appeal to racial fears and ambitions. I took up an appointment at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies in the Autumn of 1954 and immediately undertook a study of the very small East Indian population of Jamaica. Relatively few East Indians had been recruited as indentured labour for work on the plantations of Jamaica, but there were concentrations of their descendants in the parishes of St. Mary and Westmoreland. I chose to work in St. Mary and collected interesting information on the way in which the labouring populations originally bound to the coastal plantations had spread up into the hills to become small farmers. The process started with the African ex-slave population but the same process had been followed by many ex-indentured Indians. That work was written up but never published, mainly because I wanted to get off to British Guiana, which I did at the beginning of 1956.
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