5
More than Statistics: Experience, Memory, Legacy in Migration Studies
©Verene A. Shepherd
Presented to the Regional Seminar on
Migration and Human Trafficking in the Caribbesan
Organised by FES Jamaica & FES Dominican Republic
Alhambra Inn, Kingston, November 27, 2008
The birth of the Atlantic World as an integrated and expanding capitalist economy based upon the infrastructural development of chattel enslavement has increasingly engaged the attention of scholars, many of whom are now involved in the dedicated academic field of Atlantic Studies. An integral aspect of Atlantic Studies is the theme of migration, especially that of the intra-regional relocation of indigenous peoples and the forced African ‘migration’ through the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans. The centrality of slavery to the Atlantic World is evidenced by the fact that it was slavery that transformed the Atlantic into a complex trading area, turning it into the centre of the international economy especially during the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery also transformed the Caribbean into a plantation complex in the South Atlantic System that subsequently contributed to industrial development in the North Atlantic. Not only were over 15 million Africans transported to the Americas, but white immigration from Europe was a vital feature of the Caribbean colonial system, which required settlers, managers, artisans and a governing elite. When slavery was abolished in Haiti in 1794 and in the rest of the Caribbean between 1834 and 1886, Caribbean landholders mined many areas, mostly Asia, for additional plantation labourers in order to perpetuate the mentalities and practices of the slave relations of production. After 1930, the voluntary migration to and settlement in the Caribbean of entrepreneurs and professionals from many parts of the world, a large percentage Asian and Middle Eastern, further cemented the region’s historical role as a recipient of people of diverse nationalities.
These historical processes have resulted in Caribbean populations that are inevitably multi-ethnic, the result of waves of forced and voluntary migration since the 15th century. But migration is not only confined to the historical past. The current pre-occupation with the spate of refugee migration, in particular the migration of Cubans and Haitians to the USA and the Caribbean, the continuing global debates over immigrant communities, trans-national identities, new and stringent immigration rules and the relationship of so-called resident and non-resident aliens to border security are all indications that migration does not only lie at the centre of modernity, but continues to characterize the post-modern age. So while we continue to revisit the historical waves of forced and voluntary migration that have resulted in multi-ethnic Caribbean populations, the politics of migration, the mythologies of citizenship and mobility, trans-national, globalised and diasporic identities will also, inevitably, feature in our deliberations. So will discussions of regionalism (including the CSME and the contentious matter of intra-regional mobility), the modern deportee phenomenon, modern-day slavery and human trafficking.
The themes that we will discuss over the next two days along with all the other themes that now characterize the field of migration studies testify to the reality that we have moved the discussion from migration statistics to the human face of migration; and from paper solutions to the formulation of concrete policy initiatives and plans of action. Nowhere is this more evident than in the research on deportees and human trafficking. In this era of globalization, international movement of capital, trans-nationalism and enhanced technology, human trafficking is a global problem affecting every continent and most countries in the world, although it would seem that the sources of those trafficked are the countries of the South and the East, where populations have always been mobile in search of improved economic opportunities. Statistical data collection has been a critical part of understanding and dealing with this global phenomenon; but researchers like Thomas-Hope, Kempadoo, J. Joseph, Gallardo, Hesse and others have gone beyond statistics to understand the experiences of those affected by this forced movement of people.
These developments in the research agenda of migration scholars are timely. For too long, the study of migration has been dominated by a sort of numbers game. In the case of the indigenous peoples, it was how many existed at the time of European colonization, how many died and how many survived – history as higher mathematics to quote from an article by David Henige. In the case of Africans, for decades, researchers’ attention centred on the futile attempt to count how many African people were affected by the Maafa or African holocaust; what percentage was male and what percentage female; and over the differential percentages of those torn from different ethnic groups. Even the most recent database on the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans is all about numbers: of people, of ships, of voyages; of mortality rate; of crew, of origin and destination ports, etc. Plantation records were equally preoccupied with quantities and numbers: of sugar, of rum, of coffee, of indigo, of income and of expenditure. Colonial records were also focused on the frequency of revolts, the numbers involved and the numbers of those punished, deported or died in the process.
Post-slavery migration studies were, initially, hardly different, being equally preoccupied with quantitative analysis: how many indentured workers were imported? How many repatriated? What was the male/female ratio among immigrants? What percentage of Caribbean populations consist of ethnic minorities? How many left the Caribbean for Panama, the US, UK? How many fought in the world wars, and on and on – counting, counting. In the post-war era, attention has turned to the scale of human trafficking; the scale of remittances, the politics of population censuses and even to how many high profile Barbadian men have married Jamaican women.
Let me hasten to explain that statistical data are important. They provide important quantitative data that enable qualitative analysis. For example, an idea of the numbers of Africans trafficked during slavery assist our understanding of the scale of the crime against humanity, the magnitude of the impact on Africa’s population and economic development and enable us to argue the case for reparation. Quantitative data on Asian immigration, post-independence outmigration to places like Britain and Canada and on human trafficking assist us in understanding the roots of our multi-ethnic populations, the formation of the Caribbean Diaspora and the formulation of strategies to curb the modern illegal practice of forced relocation of Caribbean citizens, respectively. The following tables illustrate:
Table 1: Origin of Africans Transported to Jamaica, 1678-1713
Table 2: Number of Indians Imported to the Caribbean, 1838-1917
Table 3: Percentage of Females on Emigrant Ships to British Guiana, 1867-68
Table 4: The Indian Population in Jamaica: Male/Female, 1871-1921
Table 5: Migrants Interdicted at Sea, 1982-1991 (Thomas-Hope)
Table 6: West Indian Emigrating to the UK, 1948-61 (Women in Caribbean History)
EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY:
But the history of migration is more than statistics; and happily many scholars of migration studies have transformed the field to take on board the social experiences of migrants. They have searched for their personal stories, tapped their memories and captured their experiences at home and abroad. This direction has been manifested in the study of slavery, 19th and 20th century indentured labour migration, inter- and post-war population movements and modern-day migration, the latter evidenced by the number of works that explore, through the techniques of oral history, the migrant experience in the UK and the USA. This use of oral history to capture the migrant experience led Mary Chamberlain to discover Beulah, who left Barbados to join her mother Estella and her new family in the UK in the 1960s and who relates her sister’s experience with racism in South London: “when we had the Brixton riots, it was like a turning point in her life. She said to me,” Do you know what? I was in Asda [supermarket] yesterday and I could feel everybody looking at me, as if to say, “you black bitch”! And I said to her, God, now you know what it’s all about…”. (MC, Caribbean Migration, 158).
The study of slavery and the trade in Africans are also being increasingly studied through an excavation of the voices, experience and memory of those who were its victims. In this regard, the narratives of Equiano, Coguano, Montejo and Mary Prince; the speeches of Toussaint L’Overture, the baptism class responses of the christianised enslaved Africans; the sermon of Ebenezer and the letters of Jenny Lane have become valuable sources through which to understand the lived experiences and the memories of forced migrants. So has Anne C. Bailey’s work on Voices of the transatlantic trade in Africans, a work centred on oral history in Ghana. Punishment lists and Court Records have given us names; valuable cultural resources that shape our understanding of agency and retentions.
Researchers on Asian migration have tapped letters that allow us to understand life in the villages, inter-ethnic relations, gender-relations, culture and the search for right, respect and acceptance by Creole host societies. Then there are the Ships’ Logs and the Court Testimonies, which give us unparalleled access to the experiences of Indians via the immigrant ships, now regarded as having been spaces for exploitation and sexploitation. It was this search for the voices of immigrant women that led me to write the book, Maharani’s Misery, centred on the experiences of a young Indian woman, who boarded the ship Allanshaw destined for colonial Guyana in July 1885. By this year, the colonial Caribbean region had already had a long history of importing contract labourers from India for commodity production on its many, primarily sugar, plantations. Most of the documentary evidence used in the book comes from the over 400 pages of correspondence generated by the investigation into the journey of the Allanshaw. Briefly, during the early morning hours of July 24, 1885, Maharani, along with 660 other contract labourers, embarked at Calcutta on this James Nourse owned sailing ship bound for colonial Guyana. Maharani did not complete her passage to the Southern Caribbean; she was among the 17 who died before the ship reached colonial Guyana. While the cause of death of 16 of these was ascertained and recorded unproblematically, Maharani’s death was the subject of intense controversy, uncertainty and speculation. The Surgeon-Superintendent of the ship vacillated between "shock to the nervous system", "shock from shame" and "peritonitis" as the cause of death; a few fellow female emigrants attributed her death to “criminal assault” based on what Maharani allegedly told them before she died; and Dr Robert Grieve, Acting Medical Officer to the Immigration Department and later Surgeon-General, and a member of the Commission of Enquiry ordered by the Governor of colonial Guyana, agreed that rape was the cause of her death. His fellow commissioners disagreed with him, arguing that the evidence presented was contradictory and inconclusive.
And those fingered a perpetrators went free. Many questions emerged as I tried to make sense of this case with its conflicting documentary evidence. Even if I did not answer all questions posed satisfactorily, the very existence of the testimonies has changed the face of migration studies and put a human face to the misery of it all.
The stories from Panama and Colón; from Brixton and London: from Havana; from Flatbush and from Harlem continue this trend. So do the accounts of the experiences of those who have become caught up in the web of drug trafficking and human trafficking. We now know much more than we did before about the attitude and practices of the illegal employers; about the treatment meted out to those who fall prey to these schemes – especially women and children; the abuse suffered by those caught up in the ‘restavek’ tradition in Haiti; the implications of trafficking for sexual purposes on the rates of HIV-AIDS.
LEGACIES:
I now turn to legacies. As we attempt to transform the field of migration studies from paper to policy; as we try to find solutions to the current problems of human trafficking, the deportation to the Caribbean of its citizens who became criminals in the North, threats to border security, discriminatory immigration policies, illegal migration to an settlement in Caribbbean and non-Caribbean countries, threats to Caribbean regional integration and obstacles to the full implementation of the CSME, let us be conscious that many of our difficulties in finding solutions are linked to our failure to understand the historical roots of current problems and our lack of commitment to eliminating from our midst the lingering legacies of slavery, colonialism and indentured labour migration. These legacies are manifested in current attitudes towards migrants, demonstrated by visa restrictions, difficulties in accessing visas and travel permits, international border discrimination, racism against African and Indian-descended people inside and outside of the region, ethnic comparison and ranking, and the refusal of those who relocated people from their homelands to the Americas to plant cane, coffee and banana etc and make rum, to talk reparation. Perhaps if the politicians and policy-makers of the region made better use of regional historians as a matter of course and not only during Black history month, National Heroes Week, Emancipation Day and Indian Arrival day, some of the errors they make in policy-formation would be minimized if not eliminated. For example, our regional governments must take on board history in addressing what many refer to as the Haitian problem. We should recall the role of Haiti in regional emancipation and instead of counting refugees, adopt humanitarian policies.
We should all work together to eliminate the social legacies of historic migration. We should adopt a policy of appreciating cultural difference and stop playing the ranking game in our mulit-ethnic spaces. Ethnic ‘ranking” is not simply a euphemism for the static social stratification model of sociologist M.G. Smith in which the racial, cultural and class categories are conflated into a simple social hierarchy.[1] Within the Jamaican context ‘ranking’ represents the linguistic, oral and literary aspects of social culture that is the ritualized and politicized codes and consciousness of difference. Stuart Hall is correct to assert that the persistence of such colonial creations as ranking contradicts the cultural desire of postmodern mentalities for the celebration of difference in an egalitarian fashion rather than hierarchically.[2]