THE FREE BLACKS AND
PEOPLE OF COLOUR
January 1, 2000
Pages 12 and 13
Miscegenation has been a central feature of Caribbean society from those
early days of the Spanish conquest when the ‘mestizo’ class was created from
Spanish – American sexual contacts.
With
slavery a new group began to emerge: people of mixed European and African
ancestry, the result of sexual contacts between the settlers and the
slaves. These were the ‘gens de
couleur’, the people of colour, many of whom became eventually manumitted and
legally free. Particularly in the
French colonies in the Caribbean, where the Creoles had settled for good, the
people of colour, as a class, increased rapidly.
Another
group were those people who were not of mixed racial origin, but had in one way
or another acquired manumission. These
were the ‘affranchis’, the free blacks.
These
two groups were the intermediate groups between whites and slaves in the
Caribbean slave society. A difficult,
ambivalent position, since they did not belong to any one master but had to
show subordinance to all whites.
Typically,
a European man would make an attractive ‘fille de couleur’ his mistress;
normally he would free both her and her children. If he was upper class and reasonably well off, his children by
his coloured mistress might receive a privileged upbringing and live in the
great house of the estate.
The
Cedula of Population of 1783 offered important incentives to free blacks and
coloureds. They received free grants of
land: 16 acres for each man, woman and child and half of that for each slave
brought. This was about half the land
that a white settler would be granted, but still an attractive offer. Article 5 of the Cedula also promised that
all settlers the rights of citizenship after five years of residence, including
the rights to hold public office if qualified.
It made no distinction between whites and coloureds, a remarkable
situation that was peculiar to Trinidad.
Leading
families such as Philippe, Cazabon, Saturnin, Beaubrun, Patience, Boudin, de la
Grenade, Vincent, Louison, Latraille and Martel, to name a few, came to
Trinidad from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Ste. Domingue, Grenada and St.
Lucia. These free coloureds spoke excellent
French, were often cultivated and educated people, established estates of
cocoa, cotton and sugar, owned slaves, practised professions in a few cases,
and held officers’ commissions in the island militia. They contributed in no small way to the development of Trinidad
with the establishment of an educated black middle class unique in the western
world.
The
British conquest of Trinidad in 1797 did not lead to an immediate deterioration
in the position of the free coloureds and blacks. The first British military governors Picton, Hislop and Munro
neglected to enforce the humiliating anti-coloured rules that existed elsewhere
in the Caribbean. But under the first
civil British administration, that of sir Ralph Woodford, serious racial
prejudice was institutionalised.
Fortunately
for the free blacks and people of colour, a leader emerged: Jean-Baptiste
Philippe, whose family was one of the leading coloured planters of
Trinidad. Educated as a lawyer,
Philippe petitioned to the Colonial Office and the Secretary of State for their
rights. To back up the petition,
Jean-Baptiste wrote the famous book ‘Free Mulatto’. Philippe succeeded, and in March 1829, an Order in Council was
issued from London giving full legal equality and civil rights to Trinidad’s
people of colour and free blacks.
After Emancipation in 1834, planters in Trinidad were anxious to get labourers from virtually any part of the globe.
Africans
who had been captured by foreign slavers were, at this time, often freed by British
naval ships in West African waters.
These ‘liberated’ Africans, who were never legally slaves, were sent to
either St. Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic, or Sierra Leone in
West Africa. Conditions were not good
in either place, so an organised emigration to the West Indies began just after
1838.
Trinidad
received between 1841 and 1861 a total of 3,383 persons from Sierra Leone and
3,198 from St. Helena. Tobago also
received a few. They were indentured to
the estates for a year, but unlike the Indians, they did not receive a free
return passage.
Despite
their lack of numbers, their contribution to Trinidad’s culture was
profound. They reinforced African
cultural legacies that might otherwise have died out. ‘Shango’ was probably introduced by Yoruba immigrants in the
1840s and 1850s. In Belmont, the Rada
community, descendants of Dahomey immigrants, maintained its ancestral rites
well into the 1950s.
The
people of the African diaspora cleared the forest, created by its blood and
sweat the bases for the first economies, established the island’s dominant
cultural forms and provided its earliest eminent sons and daughters. Families like the Lazars, J. J. Thomas,
Maxwell Phillip, Vincent Brown, the Nurse family and many others contributed in
making Trinidad and Tobago unique in terms of professionalism, scholarship and
sport.