16 Facts About Elsa Goveia

Elsa Goveia was born in British Guiana and became a foremost scholar and historian of the Caribbean.

Elsa Goveia was the first woman to become a professor at the newly created University College of the West Indies and first professor of West Indian studies in the UCWI History Department.

Elsa Goveia's seminal work, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century, was a pioneering study of the institution of slavery and the first to put forth the concept of a "slave society" encompassing not just the slaves but the entire community.

Elsa Goveia was one of the pioneers of historical research on slavery and the Caribbean and is considered the "premier social historian" from the 1960s to her death.

Elsa Vesta Goveia was born on 12 April 1925 in British Guiana to middle-class, ethnically mixed Portuguese and Afro-Guyanese family.

Elsa Goveia won the Pollard Prize for English history in 1947, becoming the first West Indian to win the scholarship, graduating with First Class Honors for her degree in 1948.

Elsa Goveia's courses focused on topics which had been elucidated in her doctoral thesis.

Elsa Goveia, instead, analyzed the sociological impact of the slaves, free blacks, and other elements of society and how they functioned both as separate communities and as part of the whole.

Elsa Goveia recognized that the entire culture was built upon a "slave society" wherein relationships were defined not only by color but by maintaining a structure based upon superiority and inferiority; the interdependency of the group produced coherency in the society.

Elsa Goveia did not advocate remaining silent and shamed about past slavery, instead arguing that only by acknowledging and confronting the past could "human beings change what human beings made".

Elsa Goveia researched and wrote parts of the project over a two-year period for the Pan-American Institute, which published it in 1956.

Elsa Goveia published other essays and analyses, such as "The West Indian Slave Laws of the Eighteenth Century", which appeared in a series published by UCWI called Chapters in West Indian History, which were perceptive and insightful.

In 1958, Elsa Goveia was made a Senior Lecturer and then in 1961 was appointed as a professor in West Indian History.

Rather than a "colonial society", which effectively left out slaves and free blacks, Elsa Goveia's focus was on the whole society and did not merely examine how slavery effected the state, but rather how the people involved were effected by the institution itself.

From 1961, Elsa Goveia had health issues which curtailed her publishing output to an extent, but she continued teaching until her untimely death at age fifty-four.

Elsa Goveia died at her home in Hope Mews Kingston, Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica on 18 March 1980.