Guyana Prize Non-Fiction awardee Estherine Adams aims to bring clarity to narratives on Guyana’s history
Historian Dr Estherine Adams, whose manuscript, “The Few Among the Many: Women’s Labour in British Guiana’s Jails”, won the Non-Fiction Award in the 2024 Guyana Prize for Literature, is continuing to research and write with the aim of bringing clarity to some of the narratives that form part of Guyana’s colonial history.
One such narrative involves Reverend Richard Elliott, who was credited as one of the founders of the Presbyterian Church. Another highlights Swedish plantation and slave owners in British Guiana.
“Reverend Elliott, who came to British Guiana with a lot of missionaries, and who was attached to one of the Presbyterian churches on West Coast Demerara was accused of raping a number of enslaved young women. There was this big inquiry into his actions. It had to be something out of the norm and really bad for the authorities to launch an inquiry into what he was doing,” Adams told the Stabroek Weekend in an interview on Tuesday.
“Several young women were brave enough to come forward and accuse him of sexual impropriety with them. Nobody in those days really cared about enslaved women. The fact that they had an inquiry into it raised all kinds of red flags. That is one of the things I am working on; how we venerate these people who committed all these atrocities.
“This is living history in which we try to eliminate some things to get to the truth about the narratives that are pushed out there. A lot of these white missionaries who came down developed this white saviour kind of complex. You only hear the good things about them.”
Adams is working along with another colleague on this study which they are tentatively calling, ‘The Not So Very Right Reverend Richard Elliott’.
Her findings on Elliott and the involvement of “a lot of Swedish people owning plantations in Guyana,” she said, occurred during the time she spent at the Gladstone Library in Wales last year on a Miranda Kaufman Black British History Scholarship.
“A lot of the time we talk about the British, the French and the Dutch but we don’t talk about the Swedes who were involved in slavery,” she noted.
At Gladstone Library, she said, “The amount of stuff I gathered … was overwhelming. I basically gathered and gathered and when I came back I started sorting.”
Adams’s manuscript, “The Few Among the Many,” which spoke of women’s labour in jails during the postemancipation period, had its genesis in research on British Guiana’s colonial penal system Adams undertook in 2015 with Professor Claire Anderson of the University of Leicester, who had obtained seed grant funding to conduct the research.
Prior to that, Anderson had researched the British penal system in the Andaman Islands and mention was made of the Mazaruni prison which piqued her interest. She subsequently met Dr Mellissa Ifill of the University of Guyana who encouraged her work.
“While I was researching that project, the data we were gathering spoke mainly about male prisoners. I kept seeing brief mentions of women,” Adams said.
The project was successful and Anderson obtained more funding for a larger project focused on mental health, neurological disorders and substance abuse in Guyana’s jails.
“Again I was a researcher on that project. Again while looking at all these prisons, I kept seeing little mention of women in Guyana’s prisons,” Adams said.
The establishment of the Fellowship Jail for women at Fellowship in the vicinity of the police station in Den Amstel on the West Coast Demerara, prior to the establishment of the New Amsterdam Women’s Prison, caught her attention.
“Initially only men were at Fellowship. Because of overcrowding at the Georgetown Prison, which initially housed men, women and juveniles, the authorities moved
the men out of Fellowship Jail and put the women there making it the first prison for women in Guyana,” she stated.
Prior to this, except for Mazaruni Prison, she said, “Men and women were all housed in the jails at Mahaica, Suddie, Wakenaam and at Best on the West Coast where there was a temporary one.” Mahaica, New Amsterdam and Best jails were used exclusively for immigrant prisoners, she said.
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“I kept seeing a number of women in the prisons but no
one was talking about them. The attention was focused on men because they were in the majority,” she said. “This is the reason for the title, ‘The Few Among the Many: Women’s Labour in British Guiana’s Jails’. The women’s experiences in the prison had an impact on the way in which the prison system evolved over time. I felt somebody had to talk about these women. Going through archival documents, encountering women by names and seeing what they were going through, resonated with me and it was a good opportunity for me to focus on that.”