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In the anti-slavery society, when the immigration system were being put into place, views of opposition could be heard. The freed persons thought it was just going to turn into another brutal labour scheme like the slave trade. They also thought it was unfair for the Europeans to bring new labourers to compete with them especially after how much they suffered.

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“The Caribbean today is characterized by grave intolerance and mistrust at all levels.” 

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“The Caribbean today is characterized by grave intolerance and mistrust at all levels.” 

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This statement can be viewed from many perspectives; personally, I am examining it from the point of view that the Caribbean’s past historical tragedies have shaped its contemporary society. I will even go as far as saying it is partially responsible for some of the society’s greatest problems including why some Caribbean islands are still known as third world countries.

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From studying events like the Transatlantic Slave Trade or the middle passage, Caribbean Chattel Slavery and the various Immigration schemes, you could see where racism, ethnic discrimination, stratification and many others stemmed from.

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Nunn (2008) said that the slave trade had a significant negative effect on long-term economic development. Initially, slaves were captured primarily through state organized raids and warfare, but as the trade progressed, the environment of ubiquitous insecurity caused individuals to turn on others—including friends and family members—and to kidnap, trick, and sell each other into slavery (Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle 1854; P. E. H. Hair 1965; Charles Piot 1996).  It is safe to say that a culture of mistrust developed within Africa about 400 years ago because of the slave trade and it may still exist today.

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During the days of Caribbean Chattel Slavery, the Europeans wanted to deprive the enslaved persons of their identities. They did this forcefully by preventing them from traditional cultural practises, performing religious ceremonies of any kind and other social practises. These included their dancing, drumming, cooking, music, funeral and birth observances.

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According to Henriques Fernando, “There has always been historically an association of things non-European with the primitive, uncouth and backward in the minds of the coloured and Negro peoples of the West Indies.” For example, in Jamaica the Anglican Church was one of the pillars of white establishment and so being baptised into it-conferred prestige. This was a way of maintaining control over the Africans during slavery. They made them feel lesser than and that they were at the bottom of the hierarchy and in order to gain some mobility they had to give up their traditional African religions and even their names.

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After Emancipation, non-Christian marriages were still not legally recognised by colonial authorities who also did not acknowledge and marriages amongst non- Europeans. Here, an intolerance towards African marriages is seen. Europeans created a society where the only way to gain any upward social mobility in society was if you obeyed Eurocentric standards. For example, Africans were encouraged to dress and groom themselves according to Eurocentric standards and this was reinforced further in schools and churches.

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This intolerance towards African traditional practises transferred further down in history, for example, in Trinidad from 1917 to 1951 the colonial authorities had banned to practise of the Spiritual and Shouter Baptists faith. The Shouters Prohibition Ordinance was passed on 16 November in 1917 because they said that this practise contained too much noise as a result of their loud singing and bell ringing which interrupted the peace.

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Since the society at the time was dominated by organised religious ceremonies ruled by the Europeans like the Catholic and Anglican faiths, the type of worship the Shouters participated in was foreign to the people and it was shunned greatly. From their shouting, dancing, shaking and falling to the ground all came from traditional African backgrounds. This attracted a great amount of attention and the people of society started to join the Spiritual Baptist faith. This religion was labelled as non-Eurocentric and the police wanted to silence the faith. It is believed that the reason for this was that the Baptists practises originated in Africa and everything African was automatically correlated with humiliation and degradation of slavery. Since the majority of the population of Trinidad was under Eurocentric views they agreed to the banning of this religion hence the Shouters Prohibition Ordinance was passed.

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The authorities took this ban very seriously and for thirty-four years, the Spiritual Baptists could not freely perform their religious practises. They were not allowed to have any “Shouter Houses” to host meetings; the authorities could enter meetings without warrants and arrest, beat or even jail worshipers. However they did not give up they resorted to fleeing to the hills to continue practise of their religion. The Spiritual and Shouter Baptists managed to survive and in the 1920’s and 1930’s, they decided to go to court and fight to break the many misconceptions about their religion. It took many more battles and arrests for the bill to repeal the ordinance was passed on 30 March in 1951. This meant the Spiritual Shouter Baptists were free to practise their religion.

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In 1996, the Spiritual Shouter Baptists were granted an annual public holiday on the 30 March by the United National Congress (UNC) Government. They were also granted twenty-five acres of land in Maloney to build churches, schools and a spiritual park. The faith then gained a tremendous amount of recognition not only in Trinidad and Tobago but also in other parts of the Caribbean islands.

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After emancipation and the failure of the apprenticeship system, the European planters were in need of a cheap labour force. In order to solve this labour problem they first turned to Chinese immigrants, then Madeirans, some Europeans and finally the only one that was successful was the East Indian immigrants.

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The freed Africans had been bargaining with the European planters to work on the plantations for 30 to 40 cents, but the East Indian immigrants agreed to work for less on contracts. This left the Africans unemployed. Perhaps in Trinidad and Tobago when the indentured labourers were brought to fill the gap in the sugar cane fields and the Africans were bargaining for better wages, racism could be seen stemming from here. So immigration schemes contributed to the tensions between the Africans and the immigrant groups. This was mainly due to the low wages the Africans had received previously and their memories with oppression.

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During indentureship, there was a lot of religious intolerance surrounding the East Indians towards Hinduism and Islam. This is known as paganism. The indentured peoples were critised heavily for their laws and personal manners. They were even labelled as docile, feeble and the planters even referred to them as ‘low-life’. According to Gladstone, “They had no religion, no education and in their present state no wants eating, drinking and sleeping. They were called pejorative names like low life manual worker or coolie.

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There was so much opposition towards indentured immigration in Trinidad that by 1848 a weekly newspaper called ‘Trinidad Spectator’, which was edited by a coloured Creole, declared that “an active spirit of opposition to the coolie” was springing up in the island. Even in the 1870’s the continuous importation of indentured labourers was seen as undesirable by the Anti-slavery Society.

The intolerance of the East Indian immigrants could be broken down into two views. Firstly, they were disliked for their social habits and for the mere fact that they were not Christian. This led to the Caribbean society at the time excluding the immigrants.

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‘The Port of Spain Gazette’ described the Hindu practises as “heathenish rites and barbarous processions.” It was also said that with the increasing number of East Indian immigrants the Europeans saw them as possibly a new threat as they could now have rebellions.

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The Anti-slavery society also heavily disapproved the East Indians’ patterns of dress and behaviour. According to them, they thought their clothing were indecent. In 1870, in the ‘San Fernando Gazette,’ a statement was written about the immigrants, “the coolies are a worthless and filthy set and their continued importation was one of the greatest causes of our misery.” Here, it can be clearly seen the amount of intolerance the East Indian immigrants had to deal with, from their dress to their religion, everything was criticized by the freed Africans. To some extent, this may have caused some of the racial tensions between the two races, which is a problem that no one addresses up to this day.

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An example of the fight against religious intolerance could be seen in July 1990 in Trinidad and Tobago when a group called Jamaat al Muslimeem had attempted a coup. It included an armed attack on the country’s parliament and holding the Prime Minister at the time A.N.R Robinson and other members of the parliament hostage for six days.

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The reasons behind the violent coup attempt and the group’s behaviour are as follows. When the group began in the early 1980’s there was a problem of social and economic crisis together with increased racial and ethnic tensions between those of Afro-Trinidadian descent and Indo-Trinidadian descent. Yasin Abu Bakr is an Afro-Trinidadian that converted to Islam and he is the founder of the group. He founded the group as a movement to advocate on behalf of all Afro-Trinidadians who were mostly Christians. According to the Jamestown Foundation, although it was an Islamist group, his pan-African nationalist ideals gave rise to a heightened sense of black consciousness and the “Black Power” movement. Islam had a special resonance among adherents of the Black Power movement, including non-Muslims.

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The terrible legacy that slavery left behind in the Americas had influenced how the Afro-Trinidadians viewed their identities. The African slaves had their ethnicities, languages and religions erased from them and the Europeans had imposed new cultures, languages and religions on them. So now, Christianity had become associated with slavery and colonialism. Therefore, for many Afro-Trinidadians, converting to Islam was significant as they gained a sense of cultural identity, which was a form of resistance and empowerment.  This group spoke out against poverty, racism and government corruption. The main purpose behind the coup was to demand respect for Trinidad and Tobago’s Muslim minority.

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Another example of intolerance of religion is where the colonial government set a legacy of not recognising Hindu marriages. When Hindus arrived in Trinidad to work as indentured workers, they brought their cultural practises, their religion and many other. From the day of arrival, May 30 1845 to 1945 it took the state of Trinidad and Tobago to legally recognise Hindu marriages under the Hindu Marriage Act.