(From left to right) My maternal great-Aunt Doris, my great-grandfather, who was from Madras, now Chennai, India, my great-Uncle Edward and my great-Aunt Jesse in a photograph taken in Belize, then British Honduras, on March 25, 1927, of the Roberts family
One word echoes from the elders of my East Indian-descendant relatives in Belize describing our family's past:
"Slaves".
In 1833, after three centuries and 3 million Africans shipped to the Americas, Britain abolished slavery in its empire, freeing 800,000 Africans, reported The Guardian (July 12, 2015). A so-called apprenticeship scheme forced the Africans to continue working from 1834 to 1838 at very low wages and the same working conditions, according to Indian Migration and Indentured Labour, BBC.
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After apprenticeship, many Africans refused to work for the British, creating an acute shortage of labour. Lucrative sugar plantations needed workers.
Who could the British exploit now for cheap labour?
There was a scramble, not just by the British, but by all the European colonialists. Private groups and governments undertook a series of experiments of migration without contract as well as with indentured labour as the colonialists tried to ascertain a winning formula.
The indentured labour system was most successful, ending in India in 1917.
As an indentured worker, the labourer agreed to work for a plantation owner for a set period, typically five years, in return for accommodation, food, medical attention and free passage home at the end of the contract, reported 'A new system of slavery?' The British West Indies and the origin of Indian indenture (December 3, 2020), The National Archives (United Kingdom).
Sources of Indentured Workers
The sources of workers were wide-reaching.
There were indentured labourers from Sierra Leone and St. Helena island (8,000 West and Central Africans to Jamaica, 1841-1865), according to Monica Schuler, The End of the Slave Trade and Indentured Immigration (1981);
China (120,000 to Cuba and, between 1853 and 1884, 18,000 to British colonies, especially Guyana), according to Kamala Kempadoo, 'Bound Coolies' and Other Indentured Workers in the Caribbean: Implications for debates about human trafficking and modern slavery, Anti-Trafficking Review (2017);
Java island in Indonesia by the Dutch (32,965 to Suriname, 1890-1914), according to Geschiedenis van Suriname: van stam tot staat (History of Suriname): from tribe to state) (1993);
Britain, Malta, France, Germany and Portugal's Madeira and the Azores from which there were small numbers, according to 'Bound Coolies',
And from within the Caribbean where there was rivalry among West Indian colonies for indentured workers within them. From Barbados, in 1853, more than 2,000 indentured labourers traveled from there to St. Croix and Antigua, fleeing limited labour mobility, low wages and reliance on imported foodstuffs. They were unique in that their contracts mirrored those of Asian and African immigrants, according to Experiments in Indenture: Barbados and the Segmentation of Migrant Labour in the Caribbean 1863-1865 (2005), Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (New West Indian Guide).
Also, there were discussions about the possibility of African American migrants to the Caribbean.
"Paralleling its failed attempts to recruit agricultural labourers from Barbados, the St. Croix government also lobbied in Washington to obtain black migrant labour from America and in London for access to indentured immigration from British India," according to Experiments in Indenture Barbados, citing Employment of Laborers of African Extraction in the island of St. Croix: Correspondence between the State Department of the United States and the Chargé d'affaires of' Denmark, Washington, 1862, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.
"American debates during the Civil War (1861-1865) over 'contrabands', or the former slaves of the Confederate South, reanimated discussions in British Guiana on the possibility of settlements by African American immigrants. However, like the privately sponsored efforts which followed (British) emancipation, immigration schemes initially aimed at black Americans were rapidly redirected to focus on West Indian migrants," according to Experiments in Indenture Barbados.
East Indians
Scottish merchant and politician John Gladstone, who lived in the port of Liverpool, was one of the initiators of schemes for the exporting of indentured labour from British-controlled India to the Caribbean, according to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, University College London.
Gladstone owned many sugar plantations in British Guiana and Jamaica. The Demerara Rebellion of August 1823, a pivotal event in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, began on his estate, Success, in the Demerara province of British Guiana, reported The Guardian (August 19, 2023). Word spread and 13,000 Africans rose up from 60 plantations for better working conditions. A few white planters were injured in the revolt. British soldiers killed 200 enslaved Africans, some of whom were tortured to death and decapitated, their heads speared on to poles as a warning to others.
In the end, Gladstone's scheme of East Indian indentured labourers totaled half a million in the Caribbean, by far the largest group, according to Caribbean Community (CARICOM).
'A new system of slavery?'
"I see the British public have been deceived with the idea that the Coolies (See article on use of "coolie" below.) are doing 'well'; such is not the fact; the poor friendless creatures are miserably treated, at least I can speak confidently of plantation Bell Vue," according to a report published in the newspaper British Emancipator (January 9, 1839). Two Indian indentured contractors, Jummun and Pulton, were found dead outside the estate.
On a different plantation, a governor had ordered an inquiry into the British Guianese estate of John Gladstone, an initiator of Indian indentured labour, into a report that "coolies of Vreed-em-Hoop" had been flogged and that two had escaped and were found dead.
The findings in a report, dated May 2, 1839, Hill Coolies: A Brief Exposure of the Deplorable Condition of the Hill Coolies in British Guiana and Mauritius, and of the Nefarious Means by Which They Were Induced to Resort to These Colonies, by John Scobie, quoted witness Elizabeth Caesar:
"The Coolies were locked up in the sick-house, and next morning they were flogged with a cat-o'-nine tails. The manager was in the house, and they flogged the people under his house. They were tied to the post of the gallery of the manager's house. I cannot tell how many licks; he gave them enough. I saw blood. When they were flogged at the manager's house, they rubbed salt pickle on their backs."
Elsewhere, a magistrate, Justice Coleman, was appointed to investigate the alleged ill treatment of labourers and the mysterious death of a 10-year-old. Three men, eventually, were convicted of brutal assaults on the "coolies" and either fined or imprisoned as penalty. In Justice Coleman's report, an eyewitness stated that the 'sick-house' was 'heart-rendering', according to 'A new system of slavery?'
"The house itself was wretchedly filthy. The persons and the clothes of the patients were filthy also. The poor sufferers had no mats nor mattresses to lie on. A dirty blanket was laid under them, and their clothes wrapped together formed a kind of pillow."
Working a sugarcane field
Indentured servants from India supplanted the slave workforce in all Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member states, except Barbados and Haiti, reported CARICOM. Haiti, born out of slave revolt, had become an independent nation in 1820.
The descendants of East Indian indentured labourers represent the majority of the population of Guyana and a significant proportion of the population of Trinidad and Tobago as well as Surinam, according to CARICOM.
Portuguese Indentured Labourers
Europeans -- particularly Portuguese from the Madeira Islands -- and Chinese also became a part of the indentured system, reported CARICOM. Regarding Madeira, the British government had signed a treaty with Portugal covering contract immigration from Madeira to Trinidad to resolve labour shortages.
For Madeirans, the push factors were socio-economic and political, including famine, according to Jo-Anne S. Ferreira, Madeiran Portuguese Migration to Guyana, St. Vincent, Antigua and Trinidad: A Comparative Overview, Portuguese Study Review (2006/7), University of West Indies, St. Augustine, in Trinidad and Tobago.
"By and large, Portuguese were welcomed wherever they went in the West Indies, mostly because they provided cheap labour, and also because their presence was supposed to act as a buffer between the Africans and the Europeans, at least from a socio-economic perspective," Ferreira quotes from History of Modern Trinidad, 1783-1962 (1981).
Indentured labourers also worked in Dutch, French and Danish colonies.
Needless to say, Portuguese, Indians, Chinese and other groups had migrated to the Caribbean and elsewhere before, after and outside of the indentured system.
East Indian indentured labourers were sent not only to the Caribbean: another half a million went to other British colonies, such as Mauritius, Uganda and South Africa, according to Indian Migration and Indentured Labour, BBC, a study guide for the first three years of secondary school in England and Wales.
In these African colonies, Indians worked on plantations, in mines and building the British railway system, the latter of which killed 2,500 Indian indentured servants and injured 6,500.
In Belize
In Belize, East Indians constituted 1.5 percent of the population of 397,483, according to the 2022 Population and Housing Census as compared to 3 percent in the 2000 Census. Because Belize is ethnically diverse, respondents are allowed to indicate membership in up to two ethnic groups, which may help to account for the low percentage. Over the years, East Indians have intermarried with other cultures.
Living in Portugal, I did not fill out the census. However, if I had, I may not have checked East Indian even though my mother's father's father came from Madras, now Chennai. There are more than two ethnic groups in my family as is true for many Belizeans. I would tick what I considered most politically significant at the time.
In the 2022 census, just over half (51.7 percent) saw themselves as belonging, at least in part, to the Mestizo/Hispanic/ Latino ethnic group. The second largest group was the Creole (25.2 percent). The Maya (8 percent) and the Garifuna (4 percent) are two indigenous groups in Belize. Other unnamed groups constituted 5.6 percent. In the 2010 census, Mennonite; Caucasian/White and Asian (Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese) were named, specifically.
Some of the many faces of Belize
Belize National Library Service and Information System states:
"The earliest evidence of the influx of East Indians in Belize was in 1858 when the British Parliament arranged for the transport of some one thousand mutineers with their wives and families after the suppression of the Indian mutiny. The East Indians that came again in the 1880s were from Jamaica (ex-indentured workers), brought mainly to work on the sugar estates of ex-Confederates who settled in the Toledo District after fleeing the Civil War in the U.S.A.
"About the same time, some East Indians who had previously been employed in Guatemala planting coffee also settled in Toledo. By the turn of the 20th century, East Indians also had settled in Calcutta and San Antonio in Corozal District in northern Belize, cultivating a variety of fruits and vegetables for sale."
I do not recognize any of these scenarios. Perhaps, my family was not part of an influx. They lived in Belize City in Yarborough, with many other East Indian families.
I have been led to believe that there was a sense of familial shame in having a legacy of slavery. As a descendant of African slaves on both my mother and father's side, I harbor a range of emotions about the institution. Shame is not one of them. Yet, it is telling that I, at least, have inherited the word -- slaves -- from my East Indian-descendant relatives but not one word or story from my African-descendant family.
"Horrible dark chapter of Caribbean history"
Indentured servitude ended in 1917 with the agitation of Indian nationalists and British abolitionists. It was declared illegal.
"Many people may think of this system as the replacement for slavery, but if we consider slavery to be when someone loses all their agency and someone else controls that agency, then indentureship shouldn't be remembered as the replacement for slavery but a horrible dark chapter of Caribbean history," according to Ankit Chowdhury, Breaking the Silence: Un-covering the Voices of Indian Indentured Labourers in Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana, Journal of People's History and Culture ( June 1, 2023), M.A. in Dependency and Slavery Studies, Rheinische Freidrich-Wilhelms Universitat Bonn.
I am simply trying to put together pieces of history. Like Kamala Kempadoo in 'Bound Coolies'':
"The questions I seek to engage here are not about which labour system -- indentureship or slavery -- was the most monstrous, for both were violent, coercive and inhumane. I am also not interested in contributing to scholarship that argues for a hierarchisation of oppression."
The word, "slaves", still rings in my ears.
For indentured labourers, "living conditions were very poor. Despite the Abolition Act, there were few differences between slavery and indentured labour," according to BBC's Indian Migration and Indentured Labour.
Seventeen percent of Indians died aboard ships on the journey from India to the Caribbean, and more died on plantations. The death rate of indentured servants in Jamaica in 1870 is thought to have been as high as 12 percent, reported Indian Migration and Indentured Labour, BBC.I
Still, unlike slaves they received pay, but often less than promised, and they were contracted to work for a set period of time, not a lifetime.
"Most went willingly, possibly because they were not fully aware of the conditions they would face. Others were forcibly taken to other colonies.
"The people who signed contracts (girmits) typically agreed to five years as an indentured labourer -- although many could not read or write and signed with a thumbprint. This meant that they could not read the conditions they agreed to. Many people ended up working much longer than five years and had to remain in the colony that had been taken to because they could not afford the journey back home. Some people were kidnapped and forced to travel abroad and work as labourers."
Crossing the Kala Pani, the forbidden Atlantic
The archives in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), Port-of-Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, and London furnish factors that pushed the hopeful emigrants away from their villages such as "starvation, chronic debt, domestic violence, caste oppression", according to Judith Misrahi Barak, Indentureship, Caste and the Crossing of the Kala Pani (2017), Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences.
"British government generally relied on private contractors as recruiting agents (arkatis) to source Indian labourers for the colonies. These agents would travel to different parts of India, often to rural areas, and convince individuals to migrate to those colonies by making promises of high wages, good living conditions and opportunities for advancement. The process was often marred by coercion and deception," according to Breaking the Silence (June 1), Journal of People's History and Culture:
Recruitment happened through conversation on many occasions. Pilgrimage shrines had become hotspots for indenture recruitment, according to Arkatis, Recruiters, Intermediaries: The People and Practices in Indentured Labour Recruitment in Nineteenth Century India (May 28), doctoral thesis, Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London.
The recruits would eventually reach Calcutta, Madras, the port of arrival of 109,880 between 1858 and 1906, or another city by train from remote places, reported Breaking the Silence.
They had to communicate through interpreters and translators, reported Indentureship, Caste and the Crossing of the Kala Pani.
Kala Pani means black waters and refers to the forbidden waters between India and the Americas.
The candidates also had to submit to selection tests to ascertain whether they were fit to work in the sugar colonies, though the tests and their rigor are not specified. Their emigration passes stated their name, gender, approximate age, marks of identification, village of origin, next of kin, ship of embarkation and the vessel's day of departure.
Whether they knew they were departing for Mauritius, Fiji or the Caribbean is not certain, according to Indentureship, Caste and the Crossing of the Kala Pani. Some believed that they would be relocating to other parts of India, according to BBC's Indian Migration and Indentured Labour. Indeed, some who escaped plantations in the Caribbean attempted to walk back to Calcutta.
Escaping Famine
Famine and poverty were a common part of life for many Indians under British rule. Indians had to pay high taxes to the British, while the jobs available to most Indians did not pay enough to cover these taxes and basic food and shelter, according to BBC's Indian Migration and Indentured Labour.
The famine of 1770 in the Bengal region killed an estimated 10 million people as a result of a huge crop shortage. Throughout the 1800s, several other severe famines hit India.
The opportunity to work as an indentured labourer became an opportunity to escape famine and poverty.
People of All Castes
Also, caste could be escaped on the journey, according to Indentureship, Caste and the Crossing of the Kala Pani.
The passage took at least three months, long enough for people of all castes, upper and lower, to mingle "from Brahmins to shudras to untouchables. This intermingling was so pervasive that one of the scholars doing extensive work on indentureship and the crossing of the Kala Pani, Brinsley Samaroo, has coined the phrases 'Brahmin by birth,' or 'Brahmin by boat, according to Indentureship, Caste and the Crossing of the Kala Pani:
"Men and women from the villages of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, looking around in the receiving depot and seeing no one who could attest to their true origins, gave themselves new names which indicated the upward direction which they now wished to pursue. They were now Singh (lion), Sher (tiger), raj Kumari (princess), Maha raj (Great King) or Maha Bir (Great Warrior)."
There were now many new Brahmins by boat rather than by birth."
One worker who migrated from India to Trinidad and Tobago in the early 20th century was quoted in Breaking the Silence:
"In India, I was a low-caste woman who couldn't move around freely. Here, I can go wherever I want and do whatever I want. I've more freedom here than I ever had in India."
Only a minority made the crossing back to India at the end of their five-year contracts for financial and social reasons. By the end of the 19th century, labourers had to pay their own way back, and many could not afford it.
"Five years is a long enough period to settle down and start raising a family. Once they had become acclimatized to a society where caste did not exist, or at least not with the same implications, it was difficult to adjust to India again. And the returnees were often rejected by their communities, precisely because they had crossed Kala Pani.
"In Metiabruz, not far from Garden Reach, (in Calcutta) there was even an area where returned emigrants were stationed, waiting for the ships from the Caribbean and looking into re-indenturing themselves. Repatriation occurred until the mid-1950s, a time when India was already finding it difficult to manage the flows of post-partition migrants.
As Brinsley Samaroo (1940-2023), author of many books, including India in the Caribbean, and late Professor of History at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, in Trinidad and Tobago, noted:
"This loss of caste meant rejection and social ostracism upon returning causing many to opt for Tapuha (island) status rather than Maha Bharat (Great India) ascription. The descendants of these early migrants now constitute a substantial and fascinatingly diverse diaspora that takes its roots in the social equalization that took place on the ships, making the emigrants into Jahaji Bhai and Jahaji Bhahins (brothers and sisters of the boats)."
John Gladstone
In 1837, one year before the end of the apprenticeship scheme, John Gladstone, the representative of the West Indian Association of sugar plantation owners, wrote to the Colonial Secretary requesting a meeting as he was anxious to obtain "a supply of Hill Coolies from Bengal" to be imported as indentured laborers for a period of five years, reported 'A new system of slavery?' The British West Indies and the origin of Indian indenture (December 3, 2020), The National Archives (United Kingdom). "
"Unless a system of regular continuous labour is adopted, the cultivation of the sugarcane cannot then be carried on to a productive result," wrote the man who was a Member of Parliament (MP) in the 1820s and father of William Ewart Gladstone, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for 12 years in four non-consecutive terms. Two other sons also were MPs.
Gladstone was promptly granted a meeting and permission to recruit indentured labourers from his agent in India.
Gladstone's ship, the Hesperus, sailed from Calcutta on January 29, 1836, to Georgetown, British Guiana, according to Beyond This Day -- 29 January 1838: Indian Indentured Trade and the First Crossing (January 29, 2020), Historical Transactions, Royal Historical Society. The paper quotes from the diary of the ship's surgeon, a 23-year-old doctor from Bedfordshire, Richmond, The First Crossing, being the Diary of Theophilus Richmond, Ship's Surgeon aboard the Hesperus, 1837-8:
"Carrying 165 Indian indentured workers on board (of whom thirteen died during passage), it arrived in British Guiana on May 5th. Richmond described Indian labourers onboard as 'very handsome well formed fellows and as happy and contented as possible, having apparently but little of the Mal de Pays (homesickness) in their composition'. They were accommodated within the main deck and the fore masts, and were provided regularly with Rice, Salt Fish, Peas. Turmeric, Chilis (and) Tamarinds."
The doctor's journal also included a detailed account of the cholera that broke out on board:
"The virulence of the disease in (a labourer) may be judged from the duration of his illness: at 8 o'clock he was in good health . . . and at 1 o'clock he was a corpse, a lapse of scarcely 5 hours."
Outbreaks of cholera were common on indentured voyages and represented one of the many dangers of close-quarter voyages, according to Beyond This -- 29 January 1838: Indian Indentured Trade and the First Crossing.
In interviews conducted by the British colonial state, Indian labourers also complained of mistreatment and corporal punishment on board ships. Many stated that they had no idea of their destination.
Gladstone received the largest of all reparations made through the Slave Compensation Act of 1837 for the loss of his slaves: more than £100,000, according to John Gladstone: Profiles and Legacy Summary, Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, University College London. The figure is equivalent to more than £12,250 million in 2023. He was reported to have owned 2,508 slaves in British Guiana and Jamaica in his 14 claims for compensation.
Initially, Gladstone (1764-1851) had made his wealth in trade with Calcutta. Later, he moved into Virginian tobacco and American grain. Building his fortune in Liverpool, Gladstone invested in not only merchanting activities but also in shipping insurance, ships and urban property (both warehouses and housing).
The indentured labour scheme met with moral outrage. A campaign, similar to the effort opposing slavery, sprang up in Britain and British India. In August 1838, a committee was appointed to inquire into the export of Indian labourers. It heard reports of abuses.
Gladstone's Response to Governor's Recommendations
H. E. F. Young, the Governor's Secretary, summed up Gladstone's response to his letter recommending dismissal of the two Belle Vue plantation managers:
"And what does Mr. Gladstone do, when put in possession of the documents, forwarded to him by the government, containing the melancholy details referred to? Why, like Mr. Colville (another plantation owner), he has not one word of commiseration to expend on the Coolies, but a great deal of indignation against Messrs. Scobie and Anstie, to whom reference no doubt is made, in the following passage -- 'The people continued cheerful and contented; but evil disposed persons have recently gone among them, and have endeavoured to create a bad and dissatisfied feeling, in which they have partially succeeded, as it is at present too generally the case in England, where similar effects are produced by the Chartists and others, among the lower classes," from a letter dated August 3, 1839.
Young's letter contains a reference to Scobie and Anstie, who had been sent to the Caribbean to investigate the indentured system by the British Emancipator newspaper (1837-1840). The paper had been founded as a mouthpiece of the Central Negro Emancipation Committee, an organization fighting for the abolition of the apprenticeship system, which was put into place after the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, according to the British Newspaper Archive.
The Governor Secretary's letter also references a quote from Gladstone referring to the "Chartists". Gladstone was referring to Chartism. a working-class reform movement that took its name from the People's Charter of 1838, calling for, among other things, the right to vote after the Reform Act of 1832 failed to extend the vote beyond those owning property. It had particular strongholds in regions dependent on single industries and subject to wild swings in economic activity, such as the Valleys in South Wales, Northern England, the East Midlands, the Staffordshire Potteries and the Black Country.
In May 1839, overseas manual labour was prohibited, and any person effecting such emigration was liable to a fine of 200 rupees or three months in jail.
The 1839 ban on indentured labour was lifted, in 1842, to Mauritius and, in 1845, to the Caribbean.
Abandoned Sugar Plantations
From 1838 to 1853, the condition of the West Indies sugar plantations was already dire, with many plantations being abandoned. In 1838, there were 308 plantations under cultivation and none abandoned compared to 1853 when there were 173 plantations and 19 abandoned that year, according to Breaking the Silence.
In that time period, there were 201 execution sales, which are sales carried out to execute a judgement under authority of a judicial officer but not by court order. Nearly 60 percent of the plantations in cultivation underwent ownership changes due to bankruptcy.
Planters' "Free Trade" with Government Help
The Sugar Duties Act of 1846 caused an outcry of "ruin" by the West Indian planters. It equalized import duties from British colonies. The legislation was passed at the same time as the repeal of the Corn Laws, which ended protection of British agriculture. Both measures were seen as a victory for free trade.
The Committee of West Indian planters and merchants invoked the principle of free trade to demand unfettered access to the African coast and other places to recruit immigrants.
The Colonial Office received a number of petitions requesting compensation for the colonists. Lord Russell, the Colonial Secretary, lowered the differential duties on sugar for the next six years.
A critical factor in the revival of West Indian sugar industry was Indian indentured labour. However, the cost was high. Russell offered an immigration loan, funded by the Treasury, which was accepted by the planters.
Between 1845 and 1848, 21,784 Asian immigrants arrived in the sugar islands.
In Trinidad, Governor Harris found that after rations, medical care and lodgings, planters were suffering a loss of £10 per indentured labourer during the first year of acclimatisation. Over time, losses turned to gains.
"In 1840, indentured labour migration was viewed as a means of relieving public pressures for selective reform of the sugar duties; by 1850 it was seen as the only means of redressing the damage occasioned by general tariff reform. From the 1850s indentured immigration guaranteed West Indian planters profits, a productive export economy, and economic and social stability in the British West Indian colonies."
Eventually, Gladstone sold most of his Caribbean properties and moved into sugar in the Bengal region of India.
Gladstone's Heirs
"I felt absolutely sick," John Gladstone's heir said when he learned about his great-great-great-grandfather's role in slavery, reported The Guardian (August 19, 2023).
The shroud of secrecy in slavery can extend to the descendants of slave owners as well as the descendants of slaves.
Eton-educated Charlie Gladstone is an author and entrepreneur who employs about 100 people.
The Gladstones have donated about £60,000 to fund a research post at University College London, the university that revealed the true extent of Britain’s slave-owning past and the £20 million paid to 46,000 British slave owners in compensation, according to The Guardian (August 19, 2023).
A further £100,000 will help set up a research department at the University of Guyana. The money is not coming from a single fund – each family member is making a contribution. The family also supported a research group in Liverpool where the Scottish-born sugar plantation owner moved to pursue his interests in the West Indies.
Charlie Gladstone, 59, said: “Through this apology, I want to say to other families and other institutions: ‘You can do this,’ and it’s incredibly worthwhile for the people that you do it with. It’s a game changer.”
"I can take my family and say: 'Let’s do this together, let’s try and make things better . . . 'rather than saying: 'It wasn’t us, it’s got nothing to do with us.'
The business entrepreneur is calling on the British government to formally apologise for its part in slavery and commit to reparations, reported the BBC (September 24, 2023. The United States government also has done neither.
"Coolie" is a derogatory term used in the Caribbean to describe East Indians.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary writes the word as lowercase. The dictionary characterizes it as "usually offensive". And it defines coolie as "an unskilled labourer or porter usually in or from the Far East hired for low or subsistence wages. It traces its etymology to Hindi and Urdu quli, and its first use in 1622, with the aforesaid meaning.
"The word would enter the English language in the 1830s, as the indentured labour system gained currency as a replacement for the use of slavery in the British Empire, reported National Public Radio (November 25, 2013).
Although the word "coolie" is primarily associated today with the histories of the Caribbean and South America, indentured labour was a widespread reality in mid-19th century America.
Companies like the Central Pacific Railroad Company signed labourers to five-year contracts (these labourers, among other things, were instrumental in building the transcontinental railroad and other projects in the Western United States). Due to the fact that the labourers were Asian nine out of 10 workers on the railroad were Chinese and the remainder were Irish -- and because the workers would labour for low wages and live in substandard living conditions, the word "coolie" became a derogatory code for "Asian" (both East and South) in the United States, reported National Public Radio.
Coolitude, however, is something else together. Like negritude and creolite, Coolitude is a constructed word based upon a derogatory slur, uplifting its tone to one of pride.
The term is associated with Mauritian poet and scholar Khal Torabully, born in 1956., reported The Economist (September 2, 2017). However, the Indian and Trinidadian historian Brinsley Samaroo (1940-2023) had tried on the phrase much earlier.
"He was negotiating what is now called 'Coolie-tude' before it was cool: with friends and collaborators in Fiji, Mauritius, Natal and India. He brought together a global conversation on the common experience of the Indian indentured labourers and their descendants," said Guyana-born Richard Drayton, Professor of Imperial and Global History at King's College London, in Guyana's Stabroek News (July 17, 2023).
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