Map of the Caribbean
West Indian and African Migration to British Guiana from 1834
With the passing of the Emancipation Act in 1833, the sugar planters in British Guiana (Guyana) anticipated a labour shortage even though the apprenticeship system would force the ex-slaves to continue to provide free labour. As a result they made plans to recruit labourers from the West Indies and elsewhere. (recruitment of Portuguese indentured labour was featured earlier in Guyanese Online HERE).
Because of the close proximity of the West Indian colonies, the planters felt it would be more economical to bring a paid labour force from those islands. Between 1835 and 1838, about 5,000 labourers were recruited from Barbados, St. Kitts, Antigua, Montserrat and Nevis. These islands either had no apprenticeship system or they had a fairly large free African population by 1834. The employment of West Indian full-time wage labour was carried out by the private sugar planters who competed sharply among themselves for the available migrants. Continue reading
Published: October 30, 2014 | Authors: 
REFUGEES: No room for today’s ‘tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ — By Mohamed Hamaludin
The number of free African Americans increased from around 60,000 in 1790 following the Revolutionary War to about 300,000 in 1830 and European Americans feared they would help the still enslaved to escape or revolt and believed anyhow that they were an inferior race who would be better off elsewhere. The American Colonization Society and others came up with this solution: send them to Africa.
African Americans, in general, objected strongly, with some pointing out that they had lived in the United States for generations and were “no more African than white Americans were European,” as Wikipedia puts it. “Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose and all that countenance such a proposition,” abolitionist and scholar Frederick Douglass declared. “We live here—have lived here—have a right to live here and mean to live here,”
Still, 4,571 African Americans were relocated between 1820 and 1843 to West Africa, in a collection of settlements with names such as Mississippi in Africa, Kentucky in Africa and Republic of Maryland that formed the nation of Liberia by 1857. Because of diseases, only 1,819 survived. Continue reading →
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