by
Jean de Boissiere
Being
second only to the English as slave traders, the Portuguese appeared in
Trinidad at a much earlier date than is generally supposed. In the 17th and
18th century, the small Spanish colonies that settled from time to time were
supplied with slaves by these Portuguese traders whose headquarters were in
Brazil. The north and east coasts of Trinidad had large plantations which were
also used as slaves depots.
The
first Portuguese colonisation made no roots in the islands and never got beyond
the fringe of coastline. They mostly traded in slaves and shipped whatever
produce these slaves grew while at the coastal depots to Europe in slave
trading vessels, going back across the Atlantic for another load of human
cargo. With the slowing up and eventual abolishment of the slave trade, these
Portuguese settlement disappeared from the island.
The
second colonisation—that which is the origin of the Portuguese community of
today— occurred under more credible circumstances. It was comprised of
refugees who had fled the island of Madeira in the 1850s. They were Protestant,
and the religious persecution begun by the Lisbon government at the instigation
of the Catholic church had become alarmed at the inroads made in a former
stronghold of the faith by Scottish Presbyterians.
These
new Portuguese colonists, being whitesand with a tradition of slave driving
behind them, were given work as drivers, overseers and, most significant of
all, as shop managers on the estates. At that time, the estates ran shops from
which they supplied goods to their labourers. The profits made were heavy, so
that the labourer, whose wage averaged 20 cents a day, was forever in debt to
the estate (This was the new freedom. Wage slavery had replaced the chattel
slavery of pre-emancination days).
The
practice became so abusive that the government was eventually forced to
legislate against the estate owners having shops to fleece their labourers. The
usual evasion of law took place and the Portuguese managers, overseers and even
drivers were placed in ownership of the shops, but with a staggering mortgage
at high interest which left the Portuguese in fact no more than nominal owners.
By
frugal living, thrift and sometimes barefaced robbery, these hardworking
emigrants from southern Europe were not long in throwing off the French and
other Creole planters they were saddled with and emerged in complete control of
the grocery, liquor and small shop trade of the island.
Their
success was due to their present thriftiness, their Latin love of a
"bodega" and most of all their facility for mixing freely and equally
with their clientele, the Negro and East Indian labourers.
In
three generations, the most successful amassed fortunes running into millions
of dollars. This spectacular rise of the Portuguese was made out of small
shops, which sold a cent saltfish and a penny butter. The only trade that must
have given them huge profits to explain this phenomenal accumulation of wealth
was the liquor business and possibly more than a fair share of dealing in
usury.
With
typical Latin instability, when out of their political and social sphere, these
Portuguese made the same mistake as the French. Instead of sending their
children to Madeira to learn agriculture and commerce from their peasant
relatives - after the necessary English education in the schools of Trinidad -
they sent them to the public schools of England to learn the academic culture
of the wealthy English mercantile bourgeoisie, a people whose ways of living
would have no relation to their future except in distant commercial contacts.
And they learnt much that was harmful - to be ashamed of the fat, greasy, very
human father who had slept beneath his dirty counter in order to accumulate
wealth for them instead of being proud of his successful struggle in a foreign
land.
These
well-educated Portuguese returned, some to spend their money in a mad attempt
to compensate the inferiority complex they had been given with their education
by giving large extravagant entertainments to the society of the island (mostly
composed of impecunious clerks, penniless daughters of ruined planters, openly
scalping for a husband and a meal ticket for life, and visiting foreigners with
a firm conviction that Trinidad was their oyster). Others attempted to clean up
with the then crystalising monopoly taking place at that time, but a few years
in England, while giving them a lot of high and low ideas, had been unable to
remove the terrifically individualistic, careful peasant psychology of their
fathers from their make-up, with the result that they either got severely
mauled by their partners or got nowhere at all.
The
younger generation of Portuguese who grew up and were educated (very often at
the most elementary schools) in the island showed much more business acumen and
common sense. They shifted their vital interest from the small shop, wholesale
provision and rum business, where the even more frugal Chinese were making big
inroads, to real estate in the main and own interests - in some instance. They
formed their large-scale business, this time carefully backed by their own
social groups, and made no attempts to form themselves into an atmosphere
artificial and therefore distasteful to their natural simplicity. It is largely
to these latter that the rise of the Portuguese prestige (achieved in a short
two decades) was due.
To
protect their real estate interests it became absolutely necessary that they go
into politics - nothing shows more clearly the private property bias of
politics than the predominance of real estate holders over other interest in
all existing political bodies - where they conducted themselves with a dignity
and propriety that was in direct contrast to a lot of their colleagues serving
on public bodies.
While
economic success is essential to survival, it hardly entitles people, or
peoples, to any honour except a presumed one. The more distinctive honours
belong to the world of art, science, literature, medicine and all the other
higher fields of human endeavour. In two of these fields - art and literature -
the Portuguese of Trinidad created what little there exists that is genuinely
of Trinidad and not a mimeographed copy of what strictly belongs to other time,
people and place, and what is universal in art and literature used in present
day Trinidad in anything but a universal sense. They treat these things exactly
as if they belonged to them by right of personal creation.
In
summing up, the Portuguese, working the distributive sphere of Trinidad's
economic life, have been the least ruthless in exploiting the uneducated masses
of Trinidad at one of the highly protected, most flagrantly abused games
peculiar to capitalism. They cleared the hurdle of their security in a race in
which whatever rules there were, seldom were applied. They took their security,
and stopped an exploitation that was so fascinating that most other people in
Trinidad having started it find it as hard to give up as a habit-creating drug.
And out of their security have arisen contributions to a cultural life that
will be truly of the West Indies, and most of all a warm human feeling of life
in a land that sometimes seems to be struggling in the grip of a fierce
northern battle for commerce.
4 comments:
I know that this is not an academic journal but i find it quite worrisome that some claims are being made without little to no evidence. It is also troubling that enslaved Africans are being referred to as slaves [uncritically] on a site that shares Post Colonial history and is run by Caribbean people.
This was written around 1945.
barefoot: what is your account please in terms of what the claims should be?
Great blog yoou have
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