Dr Rita Pemberton

The social state of Tobago is best revealed by the extent to which identifiable progress can be observed in critical areas, namely education, employment, housing and living standards for the major element of the population.

These, however, did not feature on the agenda of the administration, which remained obsessed with the effort to wring profits out of a dying sugar industry. For both the rulers and the ruled, this was a period of challenge which affected social conditions during the last three decades of the 19th century.

The challenge for the planting community and their supporters in the administration was how to overcome the depression in the sugar industry. Its problems were related to falling market prices, increased competition from new producers, high production costs for poor-quality sugar, failure to modernise the industry and the lack of investor and imperial interest in Tobago.

Yet the planting community sought to deal with problems solely through local measures, specifically labour. In face of the strictures which confronted the industry, the priority of the administration centred on the impossible task of its salvation, a process perceived to centre on labour. Having failed in bids to obtain imperial aid and support for immigrant labour, emphasis was placed on the local labour force.

The African population was expected to remain the workforce on the estates and seen as the mechanism to resolve the problems they faced. The solution was to use force to make it difficult for labour to become otherwise engaged, and the policy was land deprivation, low wages and poor working conditions. These became the chains used to try to bind workers to the estate.

The challenge for the freed population was how to overcome the impediments intended to restrict them to the status of plantation labourers permanently. The freed Africans resisted, and sought to achieve their ambitions, which were to remove themselves from plantation control and gain the freedom to seek to achieve their other aims.

Their first step was to house themselves, preferably on their own property; but, given the challenges with land owning, rented property was the available option. Across the last three decades of the 19th century, housing was increasingly made up of single dwellings, and there was a marked reduction of residency in estate barracks, which were primarily used to house migrant workers.

The small, overcrowded houses were bereft of access to potable water, drainage or sanitation services and, in many cases, access roads. The standard of housing was low, but their numbers continued to increase, and by the start of the 20th century, individual houses, the pride of the owners, predominated and barracks were scarce.

For the freed Africans, education assumed importance as the means to find other employment than that on the estates. Primary schools were established by the Anglicans in all districts, while the Moravians concentrated on the Leeward and Middle districts and Methodists on the Middle and Win