Slave Valleys, Peasant Ridges: Topography, Colour and Land Settlement on Dominica.
An island of enclaves
Dominica is an island of enclaves. Some fifty-five distinct communities line the coast of the island. Mountains and ridges jutting out into the sea separate them from each other and in several cases extensive cliffs still make direct communication between neighbouring communities well nigh impossible. Some of these communities, particularly on the West Coast, are hemmed into narrow valleys with the sea on one side, estate lands on the other, and on the remaining two sides there are precipitous valley slopes which are difficult to build on. Along the east and north coasts, the communities tend to be more spread out, often they are on ridges, while others are on land which lies between the boundaries of two large estates. Both the topography and the boundaries of the large estates determine their location.
The communities on the ridges are usually made up of longstanding peasant farmers whose families have been well-established landowners for centuries. However, the communities in the valley areas on the edge of large estates are of more recent vintage. Most of the families are the descendants of people who once lived and worked on the neighbouring estates. Their period of landholding is shorter than the old "peasant ridge villages", in many cases dating from as recently as the 1950s to the 1960s. This was when large-scale government land settlement schemes were instituted on Crown Lands behind the West Coast villages and those in the north east such as Bense, Calibishie, Woodford Hill, Wesley and Marigot. Social turbulence and political upheaval in the 1970s precipitated the division of land on the estates of Melville Hall, Castle Bruce and Geneva, Grand Bay. There is a marked difference between the social stability of the longstanding "peasant ridge villages" on one hand, and the "post plantation valley villages" on the other. To understand this we must be aware of the process by which these settlement patterns have come about.
Because of its volcanism, Dominica is the most mountainous island in the Caribbean. As a result of this rugged nature, it was the last refuge, along with St.Vincent, for the indigenous people of the region escaping the spread of European conquest of the islands. It was the last island to be colonised. Prior to this, the Caribs had occupied the large river valleys around the coast. These had provided ideal resources for indigenous people for thousands of years. These were: the abundant supply of fresh water, flat arable land with adequate space for well spread out villages, sheltered bays with sandy estuaries for beaching boats and easy access up the valleys into the rainforest which was important for a wide range of ethnobotanical resources. Evidence for this Amerindian settlement pattern is found in the archaeology of Dominica whereby some 38 village sites have been located around the coast of the island. The abundance of Carib village names that still survive in the Creole language also indicates the Carib occupation of these villages in pre-Columbian times. The change came about when the British took over the island and their division of the land was calculated for maximum profits on the return of the expenses of conquest.
The Division of Land
The Treaty of Paris, agreed by Britain and France in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years War, ceded to Britain the formerly French island of Grenada as well as the ‘Neutral Islands’ of Dominica, St. Vincent and Tobago. Dominica and St.Vincent were considered to be the last Carib islands, and had been described as ‘neutral’ by virtue of the terms of the Treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle of 1748. But, even while that treaty was being signed, the islands had already been significantly settled by Europeans of various nationalities. In Dominica these were mostly French smallholders who were willing to take their chances among the Caribs. They also had to risk the loss of property rights amidst the fluctuating claims and counter claims being made by the home governments of the emergent powers of France and Britain on the islands of the Lesser Antilles. The British conquest of Dominica introduced methods of landholding rooted in British law, which established a ‘legal’ framework of property rights on Dominica as existed in eighteenth-century Britain.
At that time land settlement on Dominica had been clearly divided by the central range of mountains. The French ‘petit blanc’ settlers cultivating small farms of tobacco, cassava and provisions for sale to the plantations on Martinique and Guadeloupe, were spread out along the sheltered Leeward Coast. The Caribs had retreated to the east, along the Windward Coast. I have defined the position of the French settlements just prior to British occupation in 1763, by documenting the lands leased by the British to the French and referring these lists to the lots on the British map of land sales (PRO: CO:76/9).
When Britain took over the island, one of the main tasks that occupied attention was the redistribution, sale and setting aside of land. A team of commissioners and surveyors was raised to organise the division of Dominica into lots and administer the sale of these lands in the name of the Crown. They were directed to sell the land by public auction to British subjects; an individual could not buy more than 100 acres if the land had been cleared or 300 acres if the land was forested. The initial task that occupied them was the surveying, sale, distribution and allocation of land on the island. The Chief Surveyor was John Byres and the map which he and his team produced laid the guidelines, coastal demarcation and boundaries of all properties on the island until the aerial photographs of 1956 and the first accurate British DOS map was published two hundred years later in 1964 (Byres: 1776, DOS: 1964). The sale of Dominica raised a total of £313,666 19s 2¼d. It all went to the British Crown. The system and pattern of landholding, which it instituted in the 18th century, has determined the social patterns of Dominica to the present.
The large ‘Byres Map’ measuring 4x6 feet and produced on three sheets, divided the island into ten parishes and subdivided each parish into numerous lots no larger than 300 acres in size. This large master-map gives the numbers of lots and the areas that were divided. These sections covered most of Dominica except for the extremely mountainous areas in the centre of the island. Even so, very little regard was given to the lay of the land and many of the lots were on the sides of precipitous slopes and deep valleys. Most were almost impossible to get to on foot, let alone establish estates and transport goods and the majority of these lots are still inaccessible today. To accompany his map of the island published 1776, Chief surveyor John Byres compiled a list of all the properties on the island. The list, complete with alphabetical index, shows the acreage of each lot with its original or present purchaser or lessee for each parish (PRO: C.O.76/9).
The frantic sales were fuelled by the high market values of sugar and coffee at that period of the eighteenth century. A new mercantile elite was emerging in Britain and, together with the old moneyed British landholding class, they were swept up in a buying spree which coincided with the climax period for West Indian sugar fortunes in the eighteenth century. The treaty had added 706 square miles to the British Empire. It was the first sale of new British lands in over a hundred years. "Since our conquest of Jamaica from the Spaniards, in the days of Oliver Cromwell, down to present times, there has been no such opportunity of improving private fortunes" rejoiced the commissioner of lands (Young, 1764:35). The earlier plantations had created what Pares calls the "golden age" of West Indian sugar. The British settlement of Dominica was a major part of the second wave of British colonisation in the Caribbean during the "silver age" (Pares, 1936).
Auctions were held in the ceded islands, but agents were bidding for land of which their absentee proprietors in Britain knew nothing. To achieve optimum sales, the lots covered most of the island. Only the most impossibly precipitous parts of the mountainous volcanic massifs in the centre of the island had been excluded from subdivision. Although it was relatively accurate in outline, the map sketched in only five or six taller peaks and gave no clue of what the rest of the island was like. The layout shows that after an initial attempt at surveying the French-held lands on the coastal zone as accurately as was then possible, the team resigned themselves to cutting the interior into squares and oblongs. This was terrain that they had never traversed, much of which was quite obviously totally unsuitable for settlement and much of what was sold was never cultivated.
The French settlers already on the island had to pay an annual rent on every acre they owned and were not allowed to sell or dispose of the leases on these lands without the permission of the Governor. The commissioners were also empowered to make grants of land of up to 30 acres to certain British subjects classed as "poor settlers". The surveyors also outlined a strip of land three chains wide along the entire coast of the island. This was known as the ‘King’s Three Chains’ or ‘King’s Fifty Paces’ because it was set aside for the government to construct any necessary building or fortifications. In the years immediately following emancipation it was on these "three chains" that hundreds of newly liberated citizens, particularly on the west coast, sought to establish their squatter shacks which has led to the crowded nature of villages such as Massacre, Mahaut and St.Joseph.
In all this activity the Caribs were virtually ignored and only a 134-acre plot was set aside for them in the centre of what is now the Carib Territory. There are a number of geological and historical reasons why the Carib Reserve is where it is today. It is the largest section of the East Coast that is not intersected by a large river valley. It forms a separate, and much older, geological entity away from the main backbone of Dominica. It is a separate massif. The final determining factor which entrenched the Caribs in that location was the conquest and formal colonisation of Dominica by the British and the sale of lands after 1763. In fact most of their rugged corner was not even desirable to those Englishmen who had bought portions of it.
When British land purchasers began to take physical possession of their newly acquired properties, the unforeseen discrepancies between the topography and Byres’ survey immediately became patently obvious to many of them. As a result, the land-use pattern of the new colony quickly fell into four categories:
The "petit blanc" French settlers who were being edged out by the consolidation of British proprietors on the west coast, moved east to take up lands abandoned or available for sale by disillusioned British purchasers. They were joined by a constant trickle of smallholders from northern Martinique and southern Guadeloupe during the latter half of the eighteenth century. These "petit blanc" settlers, particularly in the areas of Bagatelle/Petite Savanne, Delices/La Plaine, Petite Soufriere to Good Hope and at Atkinson and Vieille Case/Penville in the extreme north, found the land already occupied by small groups of Caribs. Pennville, Delices and Bagatelle still have areas called "Carib" or "Pointe Carib" where Caribs had lived in historic times. The first British map of the island (Jeffreys, 1768) has a pictorial representation of Carib huts in the Pennville area. In some cases the Caribs had "sold" their land to those Frenchmen who had arrived prior to British conquest (Borome, 1972; Pares, 1936:196). Informants in some of these villages indicated to me parts of their district where Caribs are known to have lived in the past and there is a tradition in all of these villages that their French ancestors mixed with the Caribs who they found living there.
The demographic map that emerged along the East Coast during this period, therefore, is one clearly defined on racial lines demarcated by landscape. The large valley plantations contained hundreds of black slaves who vastly outnumbered the small core of white managers and overseers. Because of their concern about this racial imbalance, the land commissioners had stipulated that plantations must maintain one white man, or two white women, on every hundred acres of cleared land under threat of being fined. But it was a regulation never effectively policed despite the governor’s defence of it on the grounds that, "the want of [white] people in our West India islands, arises in a great measure from the paucity of women" (Young, 1764:26).
In contrast, the rugged intervening holdings were populated by a largely white French yeomanry and their increasingly mulatto offspring. The settlements which emerged along the East Coast between the plantations of Stowe in the south, and Hatton Garden in the Northeast, during the period 1763 to 1800, are: Bagatelle, Petite Savanne, Delices, Laronde, Petite Soufriere, Saint Sauveur, Good Hope and Atkinson. Today, these villages, along with Vieille Case and Pennville in the extreme north, are still recognised and referred to as the "light skinned villages" of Dominica. Their inhabitants will tend to make primary reference to their French ancestry, although at the same time recognising their Carib and African antecedents as well.
For a long time these villages attempted to maintain racial exclusivity by marrying only with other "light skinned" people from the other communities along the coast. In Petite Savanne, I was told of the village matriarch who lived in the early part of this century and who made it her business to dissuade young members of the community from marrying, or bringing into the community, black partners. My informants on cassava production at Atkinson told me that their own marriage had occurred in this way when the husband visited his wife’s family at Saint Sauveur to deliver a canoe. Up and down the coast I found that, among the older couples particularly, relationships had been made through contacts in other "light skinned" villages. The family names in these villages as well as in the Carib Reserve are further proof of this trend: Darroux, Moise, Valmond, Frederick, Durand, Royer, Le Blanc, Laronde, Sorhaindo and Auguiste are the main surnames in all of these communities and people can trace relations along the coast through them.
These relationships leapfroged over the black villages, such as Castle Bruce or Wesley, which developed in the post-emancipation period on the edge of plantation boundaries. This pattern had an economic rationale as well as that of ethnicity, because the "light skinned" villages were also, by virtue of their history, the centres of longstanding peasant proprietorship. Therefore the "light skinned" one-upmanship favoured by the Eurocentric society was matched with the economic security of land, which the black plantation workers, who were mostly tenants and squatters in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, did not possess. Landholding for the black peasantry developed much later, but even during slavery they had begun to establish themselves as a proto-peasantry upon marginal land on the edge of the plantation which they were allowed to cultivate on certain days a week. As this black peasantry strengthened, their infiltration into the Carib/French Creole zone became more marked and began to take on its increasingly mixed late twentieth-century form.
Another feature which is dominant in the older peasant zones among the "light skinned" villages, is the communal possession of land by entire families; a system known locally as "family land". Family landholding is the second largest form of land tenure on Dominica. The main land tenures according to the 1995 agricultural census (Department of Agriculture 1995:41) were freehold ownership with 34,000 acres (65.1 percent) and family land with 5,700 (10.9 percent) of the total land under farms. What the census lists as "communal land" is in fact the Carib Reserve, which has 2,900 acres under farms or 5.6 percent of the island’s total. With the total Reserve area estimated at 3,700 acres, this shows how intensively cultivated this land has become. When one adds the Creole family lands to the Carib family lands encompassed by the Reserve, the total amount of family land accounted for on the island as a whole is 8,600 or 16.5 percent.
Family landholding developed in response to a number of economic, social and ecological factors. It exists mainly in those old peasant communities hemmed in by the sea on one side, the mountains on the other and with large estates to the north and south. These physical constraints limited the means by which succeeding generations could expand their areas of landholding during the colonial period, even if it had been economically feasible for them to do so. Large estates resisted selling off portions of land until the late twentieth century, and even if they had been prepared to sell, smallholder incomes from marketable cash crops were too low to achieve this. Any large capital investment into land procurement by the peasantry only began with the advent of the banana industry.
Family land ensured food security for all family members who, for the most part, were entirely dependent on subsistence agriculture. It also gave security of tenure to family members who emigrated from the island or sought work elsewhere, departing confidant in the knowledge that their rights to land remained on their return. Those who stayed worked their plots communally. This was due both to the absence of capital with which to employ labour, or of a pool of manpower from which to obtain it. The maintenance of undivided parcels of land for use by members of the whole extended family was therefore of particular advantage in those closely knit communities where everyone was dependent on each other’s labour and opportunities for the physical expansion of independent landholding was restricted. According to most accounts I came across in the villages, this land had been left by a long-dead patriarch "pour mes enfants, et ses enfants, pour tout les generations".
Lowenthal sees one of the main worths of such inheritance as being social or psychic, according descendants a feeling of rightful place in the family lineage. "‘Family Land’ in the West Indies today", he says, "as in medieval England, seldom sustains a livelihood; it is a locus of communal comfort whose fruits all kinsfolk are entitled to harvest, a potential refuge for any descendant" (Lowenthal,1996:32).
Throughout the British Caribbean during the latter half of the 19th century the emancipated black labour force had been demanding significant changes to their circumstances. "A race has been freed, but a society has not been formed", a colonial official informed Britain in 1848. The islands were still dominated by labour-intensive plantation agriculture, and social and economic structures had changed little since the years of complete emancipation in 1838. The most violent reaction to the demands of smallholders occurred at Morant Bay in Jamaica in 1865 (Heuman 1994).
As early as 1836, two years before full emancipation of all slaves had been granted, Lord Glenelg, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, explained his policy to the West Indies governors. If stable economies were to prosper, he said, they would have to make it "the immediate and apparent interest of the Negro population to employ their labour in raising them". This could be done by "impeding" their acquisition of land and forcing them into estate labour for their survival. Crown Land sales were to be carefully priced ‘out of reach of persons without capital’ and always sold to the highest bidder above a set minimum. The ‘object is not to force the cultivation of the present staples by depriving the Negroes of every other resource for their subsistence, but merely to condense and keep together the population in such a manner that will always contain a due proportion of labourers’ (GOD 30:1836). This policy promoted limited access to land even where it was plentiful, as it was in Dominica and Demerara for instance (Moore 1987).
In Dominica, Crown Land was to be priced high enough to keep most people as landless labourers, but not too high to discourage the most industrious workers from saving out of their wages in the hope of purchase (PP: 1846:34). But even for the ‘industrious’, only private lands held by those either willing to sell or forced to do so by economic circumstances, were generally available to the newly emancipated. Most large estates lay overgrown and abandoned to bush while several were heavily encumbered. Absentee landlords held others as collateral for interests elsewhere.
As late as 1945, an acre of Crown Land only cost ten shillings. But the regulations ensured that a purchaser was not permitted to buy less than forty acres, thereby effectively cutting the prospective smallholder out of the market. The low wages in Dominica during the latter half of the nineteenth century made the purchasing of such land by estate labourers virtually impossible. Landless black labourers were caught in a vicious circle. This was a colony where ironically, in the 1850s, the very fecundity of the soil was used as an argument for keeping labourer’s wages low: "Six pence a day for field labourers is adequate remuneration in a colony where ground provisions are so easily cultivated and to be obtained at a very reasonable rate, an advantage not possessed by the labouring population of most of the other West India islands’" (GOD: 23:1856).
In 1882 the Acting President John Spencer Churchill declared that ‘peasant proprietorship is, no doubt, rather to be deprecated than encouraged in the case of the Negroes, who are apt in that state, to lapse into barbarous idleness’ (Dominica Blue Book: 1882:76). Political upheaval and economic decline on the island at the end of the century eventually goaded the Colonial Office into taking action to ameliorate such policy. In the 1850s there had been disturbances due to the armed eviction of squatters along the West Coast. Land taxes, first imposed in 1886 and increased in 1888, were other ways the colony sought to stem the possibilities for independent landholding and force a dependence on plantation wages among the black labour force. This action precipitated protest by villagers of La Plaine on the southeast coast in 1893, which erupted into a violent confrontation between the smallholders and Marines of the Royal Navy backed up by the local colonial police force. Property was seized and four villagers were shot dead by the police (PRO: CO 152/186).
It was as a result of this climactic confrontation that the Colonial Office, exasperated by decades of unrest on the island, appointed a one-man Commission of Enquiry to assess the grievances. The Commissioner, Sir Robert Hamilton, a former governor of Tasmania, was sent out in late 1893. His orders were to make a ‘diligent and full enquiry into the state of affairs existing in Our Island of Dominica’. To investigate why the colony was: ‘more backward and less developed than any other of the islands’ and why its people were ‘less prosperous and contented than Her Majesty’s other West Indian subjects’ (Hamilton Report: 1894:iii). Hamilton’s report made recommendations for promoting small farmers and encouraging peasant industry, but much of his proposals were never carried out.
Fifty years later yet another commission of enquiry had to deal with the same issues. The West Indian Commission under Lord Moyne, which visited Dominica in 1938, and reported in 1945, went over much of the same ground. "Of all of the British West Indian islands," it stated, "Dominica presents the most striking contrast between the great poverty of a large proportion of the population, particularly in Roseau, the capital, and the beauty and fertility of the island". The report called for the distribution of land for more peasant holdings improved housing and better communications, particularly a road across the island.
The results of these proposals were seen in the land settlement schemes of the 1950s and 1960s whereby former estate workers became landholders in their own right for the first time. In the hilly Crown Lands behind the crowded coastal "plantation villages" and beyond the 18th century plantation boundaries, new smallholdings were established. Backed by the rise of the banana industry from 1954 a new generation of small farmers began securing an economic base which would enable them to build better houses, educate their children and build a level of security to match the older established peasantries. In the urban areas, the governments’ purchase and redistribution for housing of such estates as Goodwill (1950s), Canefield (1960s), Bath and Elmshall (1970s), all near Roseau, provided for improved low and middle income housing. The take over and redistribution of Geneva, Castle Bruce and Melville Hall in the 1970s was in response to, in most cases, violent demands from the populace for village expansion. All this caused a rapid transformation of land settlement.
Dominica as a whole has the largest percentage of landowners per head of population than any other island in the Caribbean and this has traditionally enabled the island to withstand periods of economic and political stress which would not be possible among a relatively landless wage-earning society. An example is the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Within the island however, instability has been marked in the crowded "plantation villages" as opposed to the stable "old peasant villages". Crime figures show a striking difference between the two. Community co-operation is also more evident in the "old peasant villages" and self-help projects for the good of the entire community receive more active participation there as well. In politics the "old peasant villages" have been active in the electoral process years before the establishment of Universal Adult Suffrage in 1951 by virtue of the fact that as landowners, they owned and earned enough to qualify to vote in the former restricted system of general elections. Certain interesting cultural indicators are also evident: the most African of folklore dances, the Bélé, is more prevalent in the "plantation villages" while the dances of European origin such as Quadrilles, Polka, Flirtations and Lancers were stronger in the "old peasant villages".
The marked boundaries of ethnicity and ownership which were evident even up to the latter half of the 20th century are now being blurred by more interaction caused by increased road communication, economic transformation and movement from the countryside to urban areas particularly around Roseau. But there are key lessons to be learnt about the manner in which landholding gives security and stability to communities. It also shows that the more longstanding the period of land ownership, the more stable the community becomes. It will still take a few generations for the effects of the social and economic template of land settlement that was set in the 18th century to be completely overturned.
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---- 1777. References to the plan of the Island of Dominica, as surveyed from the year 1765 to 1773. London: S. Hooper, 30pp. (PRO C.O. 76/9)
Department of Agriculture, Dominica 1995. 1995 Dominica Agricultural Census Final Results, Ministry of Agriculture and Statistics Office, Roseau, Dominica.
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Moore, Brian L. 1987. Race, Power and Social Segmentation in Colonial Society: Guyana after Slavery 1838 - 1891. Gordon and Breach, New York.
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Young, Sir William, 1st Bart. 1764. Considerations which may tend to promote our new West India Colonies. New Bond Street, London.
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URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/dominica/conference/papers/Honychurch.html
© Lennox Honychurch, 2001. HTML prepared using 1st Page 2000, revised February 12th, 2001.