An­ge­lo Bisses­sars­ingh

When In­di­an in­den­tured labour be­gan ar­riv­ing in the British colony of Trinidad in 1845, cer­tain pro­vi­sions had to be made for ac­com­mo­dat­ing the new­com­ers. Aside from a food ra­tion for the first two years of the five-year con­tracts, med­ical at­ten­tion from a physi­cian and hous­ing were manda­to­ry.

The lat­ter was the source of much con­tention, since it con­sist­ed of the in­fa­mous bar­racks-long ranges of sin­gle rooms, bare­ly sep­a­rat­ed from each oth­er and lack­ing even the most ba­sic ameni­ties. Robert Gup­py a 19th-cen­tu­ry lawyer and a man of no­ble char­ac­ter, de­scribed the bar­rack sys­tem of hous­ing to a Roy­al Com­mis­sion in 1888:

"As first in the list of evils which af­flict the Colony, I look up­on the sys­tem of hous­ing the In­di­an im­mi­grants in bar­racks....The bar­rack is a long wood­en build­ing, 11 or 12 feet wide con­tain­ing per­haps eight or ten small rooms di­vid­ed from each oth­er by wood­en par­ti­tions not reach­ing the roof. By stand­ing on a box the oc­cu­pant of one room can look over the par­ti­tion in­to the oth­er one and can see their boys and girls if they have chil­dren. All the nois­es and talk­ing and smells pass through the open space from one end of the bar­rack to the oth­er. There are no places for cook­ing, no la­trines. The men, and women, boys and girls go to­geth­er in the canes or bush when na­ture re­quires. Com­fort, pri­va­cy and de­cen­cy are im­pos­si­ble."

This was no ex­ag­ger­a­tion, since the claus­tro­pho­bic en­vi­ron­ment of the bar­racks made life tense and dis­mal for many im­mi­grants. Sad­ly, due to these con­di­tions and the fact that nu­mer­i­cal­ly, men ex­ceed­ed women by a sig­nif­i­cant ra­tio, adul­tery and re­sult­ing wife-mur­ders were com­mon, as Gup­py al­so in­di­cat­ed: "If a man is sick, he is not al­lowed to be nursed by his wife, he must per­force go to the hos­pi­tal far away, leav­ing his wife per­haps with­out the means of sub­sis­tence to her own de­vices. With all this, can any­one won­der at the fre­quent wife-mur­ders and gen­er­al de­mor­al­i­sa­tion amongst the In­di­an im­mi­grants?"

The on­ly es­cape was for a fam­i­ly to save its pit­tance earned from toil, pur­chase a bit of land else­where and move in­to a mud hut of its own. Some bar­racks, how­ev­er, like those at Or­ange Grove, were a lit­tle bet­ter, hav­ing wash­ing fa­cil­i­ties as well as a many acres of pro­vi­sion grounds where labour­ers grew rice and veg­eta­bles for con­sump­tion and sale. When Pres­by­ter­ian mis­sion­ar­ies be­gan es­tab­lish­ing schools for the chil­dren of the im­mi­grants in the pe­ri­od 1870-1920, those who lived in the bar­racks were looked down up­on as "bong (bound) coolie chirren".

The psy­cho­log­i­cal and so­ci­o­log­i­cal im­pact of bar­rack life was im­mense. It is one of the har­row­ing ex­pe­ri­ences of the di­as­po­ra which nev­er re­al­ly dis­ap­peared, since bar­rack-dwellers were com­mon well in­to the 1980s in some of the sug­ar-belt ar­eas. Even to­day, there are still es­tate bar­racks in places like La Ro­maine which have been con­vert­ed in­to de­cent dwellings.