Current Conclusions
So, we have come to the end of these reflections on the 150-year-old story of nonalcoholic carbonated beverages, popularly called
“sweet drink,” in Guyana.
This series highlighted a popular product in Guyana’s food and beverage culture. It answers this question: If
“sweet drink” could talk, what textured story would it tell? So far, it has been a multidimensional story about an innovation in British Guiana during the early post-emancipation years and the consequences of its adoption by society.
It is a story about the Guyanese experience over the past 150 years. It is a story closely connected with working people, and it is closely intertwined with moments of profound change in the making of contemporary Guyanese society. One such was the dramatic growth in the size and diversity of the population, which took place between 1838 and 1899, the end of the 19th century.
This is also a story of a product about which most Guyanese, at home and abroad, have shared memories. These are products that “flavor” the sense of being Guyanese. The sweet-drink story increases our understanding of the forces at work in Guianese society during the early post-emancipation years (1838–1899). The consequences of those years continue to influence all relationships in the complicated and complex multiethnic Cooperative Republic of Guyana.
I am grateful to the growing number of Guyanese scholars and intellectuals who have been conducting research and writing about this pivotal period in the making of modern Guyana. That body of work is delineating the nature and scope of the forces that were dominant at that moment in the Guyanese experience. It is supporting the textured understanding of the interplay among the ideology of racial superiority, the sugar industry, demographic change, industrialization, food and nutrition, urbanization, culture and aesthetics, among other things, during this pivotal period in the development of the modern Guyanese nation.
This influential body of work guided the thrust of the series. It directed where to look for sweet drink’s textured story. Some of these works are listed in the references at the end of this installment.
What follows are the highlights of 150 years of sweet drinks in Guyana. Population change, and its place in shaping a set of related beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that impact human relations in contemporary Guyanese life, is privileged in this take on sweet drink’s textured story.
The 1838–1899 Churn
On August 2, 1838, British Guiana continued to be a colony dominated by finance capitalism, with sugar as the core of the economy. In 1870, the year we associate with the birth of Guyana’s sweet drink industry, only 32 years had passed since the country was a slave society. The society was in churn. The old order retained power. Sugar was the maximum leader. An observer in 1853 (15 years after emancipation) opined that the economy was controlled by “some fifty or sixty gentlemen in Great Britain.” He noted:
“If the capitalists connected with Guiana, were merely to issue orders to suspend the workings of their estates on and after the first of January next, and which they might possibly do without any great loss or inconvenience to themselves, in twelve months more the country would be a wilderness and the people remaining in it reduced to starvation and famine.”
Between 1838 and 1899, British Guiana’s sugar industry faced intense international competition from sugar produced more cheaply through slave labor in Cuba and Brazil. Slavery ended in 1886 in Cuba and in 1888 in Brazil. This sustained tension within the industry led to anxiety among the plantocracy, the colony’s ruling class. There was an increase in sugar estate closures and personal bankruptcies. Many estate managers experienced declines in their lifestyles. The aforementioned observer of British Guiana in 1853 wrote: “He [estate manager] breakfasts, and as the clock strikes twelve, recollects the day when he always drank a sangaree at that hour, but bad times and reduced salaries compel him to quench with lemonade his ever-burning thirst …”
In response to the international competition, sugar producers in British Guiana invested in technology and refined their approaches to produce a product that was popular internationally because of its crystals. Demerara crystals were a sought-after muscovado sugar in Europe and North America. Its production required “continuous labor,” an abusive system.
When enslaved Africans were emancipated on August 1, 1838, the colony’s total population of approximately 136,000 included approximately 97,000 formerly enslaved Africans. Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice were reputed for high death rates among enslaved Africans. In 1817, the enslaved African population was 101, 712. In1832, it was 88,623. More than 13,000 Africans died, the result of over work, pestilential conditions, and inadequate nutrition. In addition, the birth rate among African people in the colony was low. The arrival of 53,788 African indentured laborers, Africans “liberated” from the illegal Cuban and Brazilian slave trade, and West Indian immigrants between 1834 and 1892 halted the decimation of African people during the early post-emancipation years. (Table 1 shows the number of Africans and West Indians who migrated to British Guiana during this period.)
As anticipated, after emancipation, approximately 70 percent of the formerly enslaved Africans left the sugar plantation to establish independent villages. The government responded by funding immigration schemes to bring in labor from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the West Indies, starting with Portugal in 1834. By 1899, India had become the major source for new labor. Table 2 shows the growth of the Indian immigrant population between 1838 (the arrival of the first Indian immigrants) and 1916 (the end of the state-funded Indian immigration program).
These demographic developments had social, cultural, and political consequences. During this period, the colony’s sugar interests required that steps be taken to protect the industry from the potential political power of the newly emancipated African and other subordinated people. In 1842 and 1846, formerly enslaved Africans organized two strikes with varying degrees of effectiveness. These threats to the status quo triggered the use of the state’s coercive power, including oppressive taxation, seizure of the power of village councils, amplification of the anti-African propaganda developed during the slavery era, and the expansion of custodial facilities (Mazaruni [1843] and Onderneeming [1879]). The use of state power to coerce and to punish political opponents has persisted in Guyanese politics.
A consequence of the plantocracy’s assault on the recently freed Africans was their increased migration to the colony’s urban centers, Georgetown in Demerara, and New Amsterdam in Berbice. (Table 3 presents the population growth in Georgetown and New Amsterdam during this period.) This led to a new era in African mobilization for self-determination and economic independence.