"The Greatest Attributes of Freedom": Water, Kinship, and the Village Movement in Colonial Guyana

Abstract:Within twelve years of de jure emancipation, Afro-Guyanese residents purchased twenty-four abandoned estates through collectives of up to 168 individuals. During the period, the majority of colonial Guyana's population resided on a narrow coastal strip that enslaved Africans had reclaimed from the sea by moving at least 100 million tons of soil. Maintenance of this land demanded centralized infrastructure that the colonial government denied to Afro-Guyanese collectives, thereby exposing them to the sea's eroding force. Nevertheless, emancipated people knew how to manage water, having laboured as water engineers for cotton, coffee and sugar plantations. In spite of the risks, they still decided to purchase large tracts of land for the possibilities it could engender.Early historical scholarship on this significant development in Afro-Guyanese land purchase, also known as the "village movement", assessed its apparent "failures". Such judgements were delivered without attending to the possibility that the movement was not pursuing agriculture, oriented exclusively around export commodity production. The attempt here is to approximate what Afro-Guyanese collectives tried to achieve on their own terms. The village movement produced new geographies by and for Afro-Guyanese residents who seized the opportunity to live together according to their own means of structuring value. These collectives wagered their ecological knowledge, and particularly their experience with water, to recast plantation land into plots for alternative futures.