Since I had already featured Kowsilla of Leonora on International Women’s Day in 2013, I had decided not to share her expanded portrait in Chapter Nine of my work in progress. I changed my mind the day that our former president and current presidential candidate called the black- and brown-skinned migrants/refugees at our southern border “animals.” “[They’re] poisoning the blood of our country,” he said on another occasion. His remarks hurt. It matters not that the blood of these people has fueled and continues to fuel our giant corporations worldwide. Kowsilla (1920-1964) was such a person.

Kowsilla’s abruptly shortened life was so inconsequential to the powerful British sugar producers that her ultimate sacrifice at Plantation Leonora only merited a brief description in our local newspapers. In recalling those early days of growing up in then British Guiana, I regard her as a worthy and memorable representative of the rural working-class women of her generation. With little information about her life, I took on the challenge of re-creating her story.

To tell her story, I turned to Kowsilla’s ancestral history as a descendant of Indian indentured laborers. I found Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur (The University of Chicago Press, 2014) an excellent resource. What strong and courageous women! I also considered the cultural norms of the rural East Indian population during Kowsilla’s early years.

I hope that I have done justice in re-creating her unrecorded life.

Chapter Ten: Kowsilla of Leonora – A Self-Determined Woman

During the turbulent years of the 1960s leading up to the colony’s independence from Britain, agricultural workers risked their lives in the struggle for fair wages and better working and living conditions. For me, Kowsilla, also known as Alice, represents thousands of nameless female rural workers who joined the picket lines together with their male counterparts. I was in Junior High School when, in March 1964, she and striking sugarcane workers at Plantation Leonora made the headline news in the local newspapers. The accompanying photo depicted a young, attractive, East Indian woman. She didn’t smile or look directly at the camera, but her expression was that of a self-determined woman.

A descendant of East Indian indentured laborers, Kowsilla was born in 1920 in Seafield, Leonora, to parents who worked in the cane fields. We know very little about her life except that she was a single mother of four children who earned her livelihood as a huckster. This lack of information about a simple, working-class woman is not surprising. To the white, male guardians of the historical record, she was just an inconsequential peasant woman who had foolishly believed she could disrupt the industrial engine of the British sugar producers.

Based on cultural norms among the rural East Indian population during her adolescent years in the 1930s, her parents would have arranged a marital partner by the time she became sixteen years old. By 1964, her four children would be adult men and women, ranging from twenty-four to twenty-seven years old with children of their own. No mention of a husband suggests that he must have suffered an early death. As a Hindu woman without the protection of a husband or father, she would be living with her oldest son, his wife, and children.

Once under Dutch control and named after two Dutch children, Leo and Nora, the village of a majority Hindu and Muslim population was the epicenter of East Indian life and culture on British Guiana’s West Coast, 9.6 miles (15.5 kilometers) distant from Georgetown on the east bank of the Demerara River. For over two centuries, following British control of the territory in 1786, the 12.4 square mile (32 square kilometer) Plantation Leonora changed ownership several times until its closure in December 1986. Sandbach Parker & Company held the reigns during the 1964 uproar.

Leonora’s large marketplace served its residents as well as those from neighboring villages. I imagine Kowsilla standing behind the counter of her small stall in the market, surrounded by rolls of fabrics acquired from wholesalers in Georgetown. The village women, stopping by at her stand, exchange news of goings-on on the sugar estate and upcoming events of the leftist People’s Progressive Party (PPP) led by Premier Cheddi Jagan (1961-1964)—a man of their own kind who had also grown up on a sugar estate. He intimately knew the trials they faced in their daily lives. During his visits to Leonora with his American-born wife, Janet Jagan, Kowsilla hung on his every word and believed in his vision for our future independent nation. She dreamed of a better future for her grandchildren.

When Janet Jagan formed the Women’s Progressive Organization (WPO) in 1953, Kowsilla, then in her early thirties, soon signed up for membership in the Leonora branch office. Well respected by the women in her community and committed to fighting for their rights as women, she rose to the leadership position. In February 1964, she was aware of the trouble brewing over labor union representation for sugar workers across the sugarcane belt.

Until the 1961 emergence of the Guiana Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU), the Man-Power Citizens Association (MPCA), established in 1937, was the dominant union representing the agricultural workers in the country. In 1963, disgruntled with the MPCA for catering to the interests of the white sugar planters, fifty-six percent of an estimated 25,000 sugar workers opted for affiliation with the GAWU, backed by Cheddi Jagan’s political party. The MPCA refused to comply with sugar workers’ requests to stop deducting union dues from their wages. For their part, the Sugar Producers Association (SPA) refused to recognize what they regarded as the militant GAWU, arguing that they already had contractual obligations with the MPCA.

In The West on Trial: My Fight for Guyana’s Freedom, Cheddi Jagan noted that canecutters reporting for work at Plantation Leonora on February 6, 1964, were told that there was only work for half of them. Ignoring their pleas to work that day, the plantation supervisor told them (p. 307), “Go to Dr. Jagan for work. You can stay home and make placards for him.” Management also refused to negotiate with a delegation of the affected canecutters.

The GAWU did not back down. The next day, they called a strike for recognition as the bargaining agent for the country’s sugar workers. By February 17th, the majority East Indian workers on all sugar plantations joined the strike.

Kowsilla and her family followed the labor crisis with growing concern. Most families in Leonora depended upon the sugar plantation for their livelihood. She favored the GAWU, knowing that they were on the side of the sugar workers and not the white plantation owners. She had to support the struggle, no matter the uncertainties and risks. Together with other WPO members, she joined the picket line of female East Indian workers outside the sugar factory.

Their peaceful demonstration was short lived. After sugar workers ignored the management’s deadline to return to work within 72 hours or have their services terminated, the plantation administrator hired scabs or replacement workers, mostly blacks from Georgetown who had no experience in agricultural work. Some of the black workers also served as “vigilantes” to protect estate property from sabotage. They terrorized the East Indian strikers. Fear of being beaten and attacked in their homes during the night kept Kowsilla, her family, and neighbors on edge.

She knew the danger. She was eighteen-going-on-nineteen years old when Sumintra was shot dead in February 1939 by colonial police who were called in to end the protest outside the Leonora sugar factory against low pay and poor working conditions. As the most outspoken and fearless woman from among the female weeding gang, Sumintra stood out beside three male strikers as one of the ringleaders of the protest. Their village lost four outstanding leaders that day.

Sumintra was not the first East Indian woman to rebel against the colonial plantation system. In A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (p. 157), Guyanese historian Dr. Walter Rodney reiterated that the spirit of rebellion among the East Indian indentured immigrants “revealed itself within the ranks of the outwardly placid Indian women whom management, as well as male workers, apparently expected to remain isolated from social decision making…. During the 1890s, there was increased awareness of the adverse conditions under which indentured females worked—including field labor performed in advanced stages of pregnancy. From time to time, estate disturbances started in the weeding gang, which was essentially the women’s sphere.”

On Friday morning, March 6, 1964, Kowsilla was already awake when the cocks began their revelry at the break of dawn. A waning moon illuminated her kitchen table where she kneaded the wheat flour dough for that day’s roti flatbread. On the twenty-ninth day of the strike, her concerns grew for her relatives and friends who risked losing their work. Though the leaders of the GAWU assured them of getting their demand, she harbored doubts about how much more suffering they could endure. At least, she did not have to worry about her fabric stand in the village market. Her son, responsible for buying goods at wholesale outlets in Georgetown, was taking care of business for her.

While the men picketed at the gate of the sugar factory, Kowsilla joined her neighbors Daisy, Jagdai, and other female sugar workers on the wooden high bridge about forty feet (12 meters) from the main gate of the administrative building. The high bridge offered them an excellent view of all movement at the factory gate where striking male workers took their stand. More important, in forming a human barricade on the bridge, they also prevented the black scabs from entering the factory to work.

As they squatted on the high bridge, the women gave little thought to their precarious position over the confluence of three punt trenches flowing below them: an east-west trench, and two north-south trenches running along both sides of the earth dam. All bridges were raised an estimated six feet to allow sugarcane-laden punts to move freely along the punt trenches from the fields to the factory. Tractors drive along the earth dams, pulling the punts along the trenches.

As the sun rose in the cloudless sky overhead, they were taken by surprise when a tractor approached from behind them. The tractor driver shouted at them over the sound of the rattling engine. “You-all ain’t hear what the Boss-man say? Get off the blasted bridge before somebody get hurt!”

Without time to run to safety, several squatters jumped off the bridge into the punt trench. Kowsilla, Daisy, and Jagdai stood firm. “Don’t budge,” Kowsilla told her friends. “We can’t let the rich man thief we children-them future.” By the time the three women realized that the man was intent on running them over, it was too late to get out of the way.

The weaponized tractor severed Kowsilla’s body in two. She died on the way to the Georgetown Public Hospital. Daisy and Jagdai suffered broken spines. They survived but remained crippled for life. Fourteen other women were severely injured.

After the tragic event, the Special Riot Unit used teargas to clear the rest of the squatters. Perturbed by the incident, many of the scabs left their jobs. Enraged at Kowsilla’s death, violence broke out between the East Indian strikers and the black strikebreakers. What began as a workers’ grievance turned into a racial reckoning across the colony.

Acquitted by a jury, Felix Ross, the black tractor driver, walked free for killing Kowsilla. After all, he was just a pawn, following the orders of the plantation management.

Although the striking sugar workers held out for over five months until July 25th, the GAWU failed to gain recognition. It would take another fourteen years for the GAWU to receive recognition as an official trade union representing Guyana’s sugar workers. By then, in March 1978, the sugar industry was nationalized by the independent government led by Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. The sugar producers—Bookers and two other minor British sugar corporations—opposed recognition of the GAWU to the very end.

In her final act of defiance and courage against the colonial power dominating their lives, Kowsilla held close to her heart the future of her children and grandchildren, as well as all other children in her village and across the country. With her blood, they would, someday, enjoy a new life.