The Hosay Riots

 One of the more turbulent periods in Trinidad’s history was towards the end of the 19th century. This was a time when crown colony rule was challenged on many levels. The ‘Cannes Brulee Riots’  pitted the police against some of the island’s best stickfighters and white French creoles spearheaded a reform movement that brought them into confrontation with the colonial administration. But it was the Hosay Riots of 1880 that blood was shed to the extent that it was described as a massacre.

From 1845 to 1917, tens of thousands of Indians were shipped to this island to work in the cane. Amongst the multitude of faces of the bedraggled that stumbled ashore at the lighthouse jetty after the period of quarantine at Nelson island, there were those of a different timber.

Sharp-featured, bearded, harder, moving to the beat of a different reality, the Shiite minority was even a minority within the minority of Muslims who arrived in Trinidad. They brought with them a unique festival, a commemoration that marked a death.

The protector of immigrants, the official who oversaw the activities, work and welfare of the Indians, remarked that smoking ganja “helped to put the people into a state of exaltation on the day of the festival and with the drinking of rum it all degenerated into a mob as excited and wildly noisy and quarrelsome rowdies.”

Plantation servitude, endless hours of back-breaking work, the terrible homesickness, loneliness, frustration, disappointment and a multitude of other unrecorded factors were the cause for terrible emotions. Some of the Indians released them in the ferocious drumming, chanting, dancing, light and colour extravaganza that is the mourning ritual of Hosay. Whatever the reason, Hosay by 1880 had acquired a sort of symbolic value in the eyes of the Indians. Their cultural and national life and their self esteem were concentrated in the celebration of Hosay, a Mohurrun festival. Fr. Anthony de Verteuil, former principal of St. Mary’s College and renowned historian, wrote in his book ‘Years of revolt’:

“Every year the Hosay festival was celebrated on the 10th day of Mohurrun, the first month in the Islamic calendar, in order to coincide with the anniversary date on which imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Mohammed, was slaughtered at Kerbala, Iraq, some 1,370 years ago.”

Hosay was brought to Trinidad by the Shiahs, a sect within Islam representing perhaps 5% of the world Muslim population. Hosay itself was taken into India by the Islamic mogul conquerors more than 800 years ago. The faith of the Islamic invaders was adopted by many Hindus and adapted, for many of the converted did not completely give up their traditional and customary forms of religious expression. In this manner, the austere forms of this observance originating in Muslim Persia, became in India and as a result of transportation to Trinidad and occasion for colourful processions and the production of ‘Tadjahs’, drumming, elaborate rites and ceremonies. Great tadjahs were constructed on the estates, replicas of the tombs of the martyrs, and both Hindus and Muslims assisted financially. The building of the tadjah was passed down as an inherited craft from generation to generation., The creation was sometimes a result of a promise to God, or was a devotion to avoid misfortune.

The processions, the wild drummings, the spinning red and blue ‘moons’, the seizing of the day was alarming to all aspects of creole society both black and white.  Memories of the Indian mutiny of just over 15 years before, when tens of thousands of English were massacred in India by both Muslims and Hindus, was fresh in the minds of the administrators. The other classes saw it as an opportunity to point out just how alien the Indians were. Against the reality that in 1881 there were 48,820 Indians in Trinidad, 31.8% of the population, and bearing in mind that almost all the Indians were adults and most of them male and concentrated in particular areas, the alarm felt and expressed was not entirely without reason. Clashes had been taking place for several years between the Hosay of adjoining estates, beginning at St. Joseph and eventually all over the cane belt. The reaction to this by the Sunni sect, the majority of Muslims was the penning of a letter to the Governor Sir Stanford Freeling, condemning the Hosay and distancing themselves from it and the appeal for its discontinuance.

The result was that the celebration was to be controlled, in fact regulated, and the processions were not to be allowed to enter the towns. During this period of the 1880s, there was increasingly for the first time labour unrest on the cane estates arising from various conditions, the most onerous being the nature of task work, but also actual living conditions. Tensions were rife because of the lack of women. Also by this time there were in fact a large percentage of Indians who had either served out their indentureship or had grown up here and were so acclimatised that they had left behind the subservient character of the freshly arrived indentured.

Cycles of Revolt

It has been noted that Trinidad, not Tobago, possesses a cycle of violence. From the time of Governor Sir Tomas Picton, slave insurrection, official violence, torture, public execution, public display of decapitated heads, public whippings (1,500 lashes for desertion) from the army was meted out to both free and enslaved, military and civilian, even to young girls, on through to slave poisonings on the estates.

This happened in a short period from 1797-1805. Then the Port of Spain Riots of 1849 took place, when a British regiment opened fire on a mob intent on destroying the Government building, later the Red House, in protest of a law stating that the heads of debtors be shaved in the same manner as convicted felons. The law was repealed. In the 1890s, the Canboulay Riots and the Hosay Riots took place. This was followed 54 years later by the famous Water Riots, when a mele ensued the burning down of the Red House and 16 people were shot.

Just 35 years later, the country experienced a general strike in which riots swept the city and protesting workers were shot out of hand at various places around the country. In 1970, Port of Spain’s Woodford Square again saw demontrations, riots and shootings. The events of 1990 are well known. This re-occuring cycle of revolt, followed by official reaction, has now become virtually inherited, involving basically the same people for close to 200 years.

In the context of these articles, we will deal with events that led up to the Water Riots of 1903.

Crown colony rule was frustrating for the general populance right accross the board. It was reepressive to the lower classes, mostly black people, and it tended to debar upward mobility confining the children of the ex-slaves to perpetual poverty. It was humiliating to the coloured people and the white middle class, who, notwithstanding the heroic attempts at educating their children and mindboggling and convoluted endeavours to achieve and maintain European cultural moirees and a respectable lifestyle, they were still ouside the pale and likely to remain there.

The upper class French creoles were jealous of the English for their positions and power and smarting at the slights dished out by people whom they considered to be beneath their social standing. They were the grandchildren of the original aristocratic colonists who had, after all, come here first. The Indians were completely out of the equation socially and politically at this point.

In the closing years of the 19th century, opposition to colonial rule became more general and in fact more radical. What was mostly a middle class dissatisfaction evolved into movements that attracted working class support.

Joseph Chamberlain, the Secetary of State for the Colonies, the Govenor’s boss, brushed aside the reform movements and turned down appeals for any form of elected representation in the Legistlature, summing it up thus “Local government (falsely so called) is the curse of the West Indies. In many islands it means only local oligarchy of whites and half breeds - always incapable and frequently corrupt. In other cases it is the rule of the negroes, totaly unfit for representative institutions and the dupes of unscrupulous adventures.” He followed this up by ending the token majority of local unofficials in the Legislative Council nominated by the Governor.

He then moved on the Port of Spain Borough Council. An elected body set up in 1853, it had served as an important forum for local politicians, particularly the black and coloured radicals, and was the only voice through which any national view could be expressed by elected representatives. The conditions placed on the members were tough and they voted not to accept these and, in effect, voted themselves out of existence. Chamberlain ordered a Board of Commissions put in place to run the city. It was felt that this amounted to “the killing of a school to teach people to manage their own affairs.”

These were not significant issues, however, to attract mass support. The young but vigorous Trinidadian Workingman’s Association was much better able to do rally people around their causes, and so too was th Pan African Association led by a London-based lawyer called H.S. Williams. The next and sigificant link was forged by the creation of the Rate Payers’ Association, comprised mostly of professionals and businessmen. This group of taxpayers sought to act as a counter balance against arbitrary measures taken by the government, particularly in the distribution of water in the city. These groups acted, more or less, in an organised manner. The grassroots, however alienated, poor and easily manipulated, were moved by the rhetoric of Rate Payers’ Association’s principle speakers, Emmanuel Lazare, Moresse-Smith and others. Those speakers urged them to assemble in Woodford Square, outside the Red House, on the day when the new Ratepayers Ordinance was supposed to be read. The purpose was to seek to prevent this reading. The Ratepayers’ Association’s radicals made a strenuous effort to excite the assembled crowds against the Government. The outcome was a major riot during which the old Red House was completely burnt down. Much of recorded history was forever lost in this fire. Soldiers were called in, and 42 people were wounded, 16 lost their lives.