Bajans in the UK after 1945 (Part II) . . . The vexation of Barbadian migration

by George Alleyne

The 27, 000 Barbadians who were among Caribbean persons emigrating from the region to the United Kingdom between 1945 and the early 1970s were the original passengers on the second Middle Passage, asserts eminent historian, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles.

Hundreds of thousands of persons from all English-speaking Caribbean territories went to the UK during that period, and University of the West Indies Vice-Chancellor Beckles labelled the journey the second Middle Passage because very much like the first – when Africans were taken from the continent to labour in the Caribbean – they were moved from the region to provide labour in another land.

Recently delivering a lecture on ‘Barbadians in the UK after 1945’ Beckles said they were “brought from Africa to this island where they dwell for 200 years and now they are needed elsewhere again for cheap labour, or free labour… then you organise them and ship them back across the Atlantic to another place to do work. So it’s the second leg of the Middle Passage”.

“The first time we were needed for agriculture; now we are needed for industry.”

The original Middle Passage described the second leg of a triangular journey of ships in the slave trade between 1600 and 1900. In the first leg, vessels left Europe for the West African coast where captured Africans were bought and others kidnapped and brought to the Caribbean and other parts of the Americas in the second leg, or Middle Passage. Following the sale of these Africans as slaves, the vessels were then chartered back to Europe for the third leg.

Beckles’ assertion came while delivering the inaugural lecture in the Barbados Museum and Historical Society’s series, “‘Buhbadus to da World’: Exploring the Origins and Legacy of Barbadian Migration”.

In this series, all set in the Museum’s Walled Garden Theatre, a number of lecturers have already presented, and others are yet to deliver on some areas and circumstances of Barbadian migration to the UK, Guiana and Trinidad, Brazil, Cuba, Panama and US.

Professor Beckles, the author of some 23 books covering various aspects of Caribbean history, said that the movement of Caribbean people to Europe was partially a political ploy to appease restless blacks who were staging numerous rebellions against the plantocracy across the region because of their miserable living conditions 100 years after slavery’s abolishment.

By protecting the planter class this move ensured colonialism remained intact, but more importantly, Britain badly needed labour to restore its infrastructure and services after the Germans had bombed the country out in the just-ended war.

Professor Beckles said that experiences of a holocaust during slavery; a cholera decimation; and efforts by planters to stop them leaving miserable living conditions of the island caused restlessness in Barbadians that led to numerous revolts.

Speaking to the massive death rate, Beckles said 600,000 Africans were brought to Barbados and enslaved but at abolishment in 1834, some 200 years later, that population totalled only 83,000.

“So the black people on this island are the descendants of a holocaust. That is their first identity. They are the 20 per cent who survived.”

He said that with emancipation in 1838 this identity prompted a mass migration of survivors to Guyana. “The consciousness in the black community is largely to get out of here.”

“Migration in Barbados is associated with vexation because in the first generation after slavery, people are migrating in search of their families – the reconstitution of your family.”

He pointed out that the enslaved “were subject to diffusion. Slave owners would sell wives, children, brothers and sisters. Your families were sold across the region. There was a regional market for slave labour and therefore selling children, wives, husbands, babies across the Caribbean [was] the norm.

“Emancipation comes and the first thing you do, you go looking for your families.”

Plantation owners, however, used various strategies to hold on to those survivors because that remainder of the 83,000 is vital to the survival of the economy, the plantation, the wealth of the elite.

Records of a priest’s interview of ex-slaves in Barbados show them referring to the enslavement period as ‘the barbarity time’.

“So that in the 1930s, 100 years after emancipation, the oral history is showing that embedded in the black DNA are two memories, 1) the barbarity time through that 200 years of slavery; 2) and the cholera epidemic of 1854 that killed almost 20,000 people… almost a quarter of the Barbadian people.

“The memory of that cholera epidemic and the memory of the barbaric times are the endemic memories in the consciousness [of those Barbadians].”

Another contributing factor to restlessness of those who were prevented from leaving the island is that “the Barbadian black people [were] the most landless black people in the Caribbean” though they represented 95 per cent of the population.

He pointed out that this landlessness gave rise to the chattel house, the small homes rested on rocks making them transportable should the plantation owner order the dwellers to leave the property.

“This place is the source of the concept of chattel slavery. Barbados is the owner of chattel slavery. It started here, was perfected here. It was exported from here to other places.”

The contributing factor to post-emancipation landlessness of Barbadian blacks is that “the families who owned the estates held on so that at the end of the 19th Century, 60 years after emancipation, maybe one black person owned a small sugar plantation, out of 300”. This added to the vexation in their migration.

Following the Guyana migration, the next big movement was to Panama, and Beckles said the lyrics of a Bajan calypso at the time advised those fleeing to ‘hit the overseer on his head and come with me’. “In other words, before you get on the boat and the careenage and head off to Panama do something radical. Don’t just get on the boat. Make a statement, give the overseer on the plantation a lick on his head and then jump on the boat.”

The anger of those unable to flee manifested itself in numerous revolts on this island and similar uprisings for slightly differing reasons in other Caribbean territories 100 years after emancipation. It forced the British government to appoint a Moyne Royal Commission to probe reasons for the unrest across the region.

The Commission found that Barbadians wanted land, economic development, the ability to move and to not feel imprisoned on the island, plus an end to colonialism. The Commission advised the British government that there should be either emigration or redistribution of wealth because the black labour had a radical disposition.

While at the same time being desperate for labour to rebuild its war-devastated country, the British government readily decided on emigration. This resulted in what Beckles contends is the second Middle Passage.

“And that is how it must be seen because when we were needed on the sugar estates we were brought. Now we are needed in the factories of Britain and we’re moved again, and the question is where are you going to be moved to next?” (GA)