Rice Milling
My parents, Alexander and Albertha Kwok, lived at Mahaica, East Coast
Demerara, about 26 miles from Georgetown.1 At first there was just my brother and
myself, a second brother having died in infancy, but twelve years later, after a few
stillbirths, my three younger sisters were born. We lived in a house that my father built
with three bedrooms and a living room with a front and a back gallery. There was also an
outhouse in the backyard. We lived in a side street off the Public Road halfway between
the Mahaica Railway Station and the Market. The railway station no longer exists since
the railway system was discontinued several years ago!
Mahaica is a flourishing township on the left bank of the Mahaica River, near its
mouth, and 26 miles from Georgetown. About 7,000 persons now live in Mahaica,
mostly East Indians and Blacks (in a ratio of 60%-40%) and with a few Chinese,
Portuguese, Amerindians and Mixed. The main crops grown are rice, coconuts and cash
crops of green vegetables such as boulangers, packchoy, and bora which are sold
wholesale to vendors in Georgetown. Mangoes and cassava are also grown to supply the
local market. Most of the people in Mahaica are self- employed. Some have small poultry
farms of about 1000 –1500 birds and some also mind a few cows and pigs but most are
small peasant farmers.
Mahaica always had its own Post Office, Police Station, Market, Cinema and
Stelling. There are now, also, a Health Center, four lumberyards, three dispensaries, three
gas stations, three schools, five Chinese restaurants, several churches of all
denominations, many rum shops, cloth and grocery stores and one rice mill. There used
to be seven rice mills in my father’s time but their owners have now all died or emigrated
and the rice farmers now sell their paddy to the Government Mill in Mahaicony. The
Cinema also is no longer in existence,
The East Coast Public Road from Georgetown to Mahaica was made of red burnt
brick at that time. In order to obtain this red brick, large mounds of earth were collected
and burnt on the foreshore. The earth became hard and red when burnt and had to be
pounded and crushed by hand and this gravel was then used to pave the road to make it
an all-weather road.2 Of course, whenever vehicles drove along the road, there was a
huge cloud of dust trailing behind them!
My father was a Rice Miller and bought the property with a rice factory in the mid
- 1930s. The main factory building housed his office, the rice mill and a very large
storage bond that was used to store the bags of paddy when it was bought. Paddy is the
threshed unmilled rice with the husk on. The entire ground at the southern side of the
building was concrete and was used as a drying area for the paddy, and there was a boiler
room attached to the eastern side that contained a boiler and two huge concrete tanks.
Wallaba wood was used for fuel and was bought from a local lumberyard and stored
nearby in the yard.
Alexander’s paternal grandparents arrived in 1863 aboard the Ganges. They had five children and James,
the fifth child, became the father of Alexander who was born in 1905.
2
Most of the Atlantic coastal area of Guyana lies below sea level and is protected from the ocean by
extensive walls and dykes. The land is naturally fertile but can become a quagmire in the rainy seasons.
The red earth roads in the countryside served as the arterial connections between the population centers.
1
My father did not grow his own paddy but instead he bought it from the many rice
farmers in the area. There were about 500 acres of land under rice cultivation in Mahaica
all owned by East Indian peasant farmers. Each rice farmer owned 1-10 acres of land and
besides rice, would also grow cash crops and have a few coconut and fruit trees. Paddy
was bought twice a year during the Spring Crop and the Big Crop. The farmers on
donkey carts brought it on jute bags to the factory until very late at night, often after
midnight. After it was weighed it was stored in the Bond. Croptime was the busiest time
of the year at the Rice Mill. The farmers were paid, I think, whenever my father was paid
for the rice he had to mill and sell to the Rice Marketing Board. Milling went on
continuously throughout the year as my father always bought enough paddy to be able to
do so.
My father was the sole Manager of the business and employed several workers,
both male and female, to do all the manual work it entailed. Since he only milled
“brown” rice, it meant that the paddy had to be put into the two concrete tanks to steep in
boiling water. The water was fetched in buckets from the drainage trench in front of our
house. The paddy was left to soak and cool for a few days. It then had to be spread out on
the concrete ground and left to dry completely in the sun before being raked in by a
donkey into the storage area in the factory. It was fed into the mill later by a female
worker to be milled into rice. “White” rice does not require the paddy to be steamed
before it is milled and is the preferred rice used by the Chinese in Guyana but at that time
“brown” rice was popularly used in Guyana by everyone else, and also for export. The
mill was probably powered by dieseline or gas oil.
The rice was bagged off separately by the mill from the boosie (paddy husk) and
“broken” rice into 180-pound jute bags, and sent in hired trucks to the Rice Marketing
Board in Georgetown to be sold. All rice had to be sold through the RMB and could not
be bought directly from the Factory. At the RMB, the rice was graded for quality as
Super, No1, No2, etc. according to its sheen and the amount of whole rice grains per bag.
The boosie and “broken” rice was also bagged off and sold separately to anyone,
typically for animal or poultry feed.
My paternal grandfather had died before I was born, but as far as I can remember,
my paternal grandmother and her daughter carried on a grocery store at Lusignan, a sugar
estate on the East Coast Demerara .Her sister and her husband also lived with them and
he helped my aunt in the business. Before going to Mahaica, my father used to help an
older brother at his own Rice factory at Beterverwagting, the village next to Lusignan,
nine miles from Georgetown. This no doubt influenced him to set up on his own when he
had the opportunity to do so in Mahaica. He was helped by his mother financially but his
brother did not help in any way, financially, by expertise or in construction.
My father was well respected as an astute businessman by everyone in the village
and my mother took good care of the home and family. She had a maid who came six
days a week to help her generally e.g. going to the market, sweeping and cleaning the
house, plucking poultry, peeling vegetables but my mother cooked all the meals for the
family. We ate mostly the local Creole food such as mince balls, curry, stews of all kind,
soup, cook-up rice, pepper pot, etc, Of course, she also cooked chowmein, and on
Sundays, we usually ate Chinese roast pork and baked chicken. Other Chinese dishes
were cooked on special occasions. She also sewed things like curtains and cushion covers
on a “Singer” treadle sewing machine and did any mending that was necessary but our
dresses were sewn by a dressmaker. There was neither electricity nor running water in
homes at Mahaica at that time so we used a Coleman gasoline lamp and various kerosene
lamps for lighting the house. The gasoline lamp had to be pumped up by hand and was
hung from the ceiling in the living room. It gave off a bright light that illuminated the
front and back galleries as well as the kitchen. Small kerosene lamps were used in the
bedrooms. The gasoline lamp was lit as soon as it became dark by either of my parents
and was shut off also by either one of them when they were ready to go to bed. For
domestic use, trench water had to be fetched in buckets by the maid and stored in barrels
in the kitchen and bathroom. Rainwater was caught and stored in a large iron vat and was
used for drinking purposes. The water was put into an earthenware goblet to keep it cool
and ice was bought every day from an “iceman” who purchased blocks of ice from the ice
factory in Georgetown. The ice had to be broken up by using an ice pick and it was then
put into two large Thermos food flasks, ready for use when needed. An oblong iron
Dover stove (3’x 2’x 2’) was used for cooking and baking (using wallaba wood for fuel).
The pots were placed over holes on top of the stove and there was a chimney leading
from the stove that took the smoke out of the kitchen into the open air. Clothes that did
not need to be ironed were washed by the maid in a large galvanized tub in the kitchen
and were scrubbed on a scrubbing board. A washerwoman came to collect the dirty
clothes that needed to be ironed on Saturday and returned them, washed, ironed, and
neatly folded on a wooden tray, on the following Saturday.
Everyone in the village knew my family but we only mixed socially, visiting and
chatting with a few other families e.g. the proprietors of the grocery store, the bakery and
the haberdashery. We did not take part in any of the village activities e.g. Phagwah,
dances or sports but my mother sometimes took us to the Anglican Church on Sundays
and the cinema. We attended the nearby village school by walking to it until we had to
attend High School in Georgetown as our parents believed their children should get a
good education. We did not visit other parts of Guyana much although we always went to
spend the Xmas holidays at Lusignan where there was always a lot of good food to eat
and drink and we were all happy to be together as a family. My parents also took me to
see the famous Kaieteur Falls before I left to study in Scotland. It was a truly marvelous
sight to see as it has a sheer vertical drop of 741 feet.3 It is on the Potaro River, 50 miles
up on the left bank of the Essequibo River, the longest river in Guyana. When we
attended school in Georgetown, we stayed at first with three sets of cousins and an uncle
before my father bought a property in Bourda and my maternal grandparents came down
to town to live there and look after us. We only went home to Mahaica on weekends and
during the school holidays, travelling first class by train. At the train station we then hired
a horse drawn cab to take us home.
3
Kaieteur Falls, named after Kai, a legendary Amerindian chief, was seen by Europeans for the first time in
1870. It is acknowledged as an awe-inspiring natural wonder because of the height of the free-falling water
(5 times greater than Niagara Falls) as well as its breadth. In 1935 a higher waterfall was discovered in
Venezuela by Jimmy Angel but the Angel Falls is considerably narrower in width.