Dr Rita Pemberton
THE ECONOMIC state of Tobago during the years after enslavement got steadily worse because the island’s revenue was dependent on the declining sugar plantations. The termination of enslavement angered the planting community, whose members were not prepared to give up their modus operandi in the operations of their plantations.
But the African workers, who had their own aspirations and plans for their freedom, were not prepared to continue working under those conditions.
The era of freedom in Tobago began with workers and employers on opposite sides of the freedom fence, each strongly opposed to the other, creating deep-seated tensions.
Planter attempts to maintain the practices of enslavement triggered workers into intensified resistance mode in their efforts to free themselves from these restrictions. As a result, the post-emancipation period in Tobago was fraught with planter/worker conflicts.
These were seen as wilfully placed obstacles to the welfare of the sugar industry, which angered the planting community even more.
Even while it was embattled with the executive and struggling for its political survival, the assembly maintained a fixation with its interpretation of the conflict as something to be managed by the imposition of legal and physical restrictions to be enforced.
Planters convinced themselves that their problems stemmed from two sources. The first was that the island suffered from a shortage of labour and of credit, which gave the labouring class the upper hand in its dealings with the employers.
In addition, the Tobago worker possessed what were considered undesirable traits. They were described as being naturally lazy. Conditions on the island were so favourable to the workers that they were too well off, had gardens, could sell items and were too independent. There were no signs of poverty and no beggars in the streets. The workers in Tobago were said to be better off than their counterparts in Trinidad and other Caribbean territories.
The solution the planters favoured was to increase the numbers of workers. They therefore directed their attention to several schemes to increase the workforce.
Requests to the imperial government resulted in the allocation of two batches of liberated Africans to the island in 1851 and 1862, but these were children, who did not make the impact on the labour force that the planters sought.
The imperial government indicated that it was not prepared to fund immigration schemes to its colonies and mandated that these had to be funded by the colonial treasuries under specific regulations.
The Tobago Assembly sought to raise money to fund immigration by imposing several taxes in 1852 and 1870, the burdens of which fell on the workforce. Some members of the administration opposed these taxes, and at any rate they did not generate the amounts required for any effective action.
Faced with declining revenue, the Tobago Treasury could not afford immigration schemes, but Barbados, which possessed a large African population which d
