These 12 Guyanese Villages Were Bought By The People Enslaved On Them — Find Your Family Name

In November 1839, eighty-three formerly enslaved people walked into a colonial office on the Demerara coast and bought the sugar estate they had been held on. Five hundred acres. Ten thousand dollars. Paid in coin, wheeled in on a wheelbarrow, because there was nowhere in British Guiana for a Black family to keep money and they had buried four years of wages in their own yards. The estate was Plantation Northbrook. They renamed it Victoria. It was the first of more than a hundred. Britain paid the owners of British Guiana £4,297,117 for 84,915 people — the largest compensation payout of any colony in the empire. Within four years, those same people had spent over a million dollars of their own money buying the land back. No forty acres. No mule. A wheelbarrow. In this video: the twelve villages and what each one cost, where the money actually came from, why your surname may not appear on the original transport and what that does and does not mean, the three-part test using the Deeds Registry in Georgetown and series T 71 at Kew, and why Indian indentureship began as the planters' answer to Black Guyanese owning land. Comments: don't give me your surname. Give me the village, and I'll tell you which of the three waves it came out of. Subscribe to The African Genome. #Guyana #Guyanese #VillageMovement #Buxton #Beterverwagting #BlackHistory #AfricanAncestry #Surnames #Caribbean #Demerara