Chapter VI

THE following table shows the recurrent expenditure for the whole colony for the years 1957 to 1959.

It can be seen from the above that expenditure on social services constitutes a large proportion of recurrent expenditure. Out of a development budget of $20,704,632 in 1959 (which is additional to recurrent expenditure) no less than $5,730,792 was spent on housing schemes and another $464,537 was spent on other social services. Expenditure on social services has increased both absolutely and relative to other budgetary payments, particularly in the past ten years. Much of this increased expenditure is made in order to bring Guiana’s social services into line with those considered normal for any civilized country; sometimes the motive for allocating funds is mainly political as in the case of the vastly increased expenditure on housing after 1953; rarely is there an attempt to assess government budget priorities on the basis of cold economic facts. And perhaps it is just as well or far less money might be spent on essential social services.

Without getting too involved in the philosophy of education one might distinguish two main characteristics of most educational systems. On the one hand people discuss the ‘liberal’ aspect; the emphasis here being on the provision of means by which a country’s population, or part of it, is helped towards a wider and deeper appreciation of literature, arts, science, and of the good life. The other is the vocational aspect; the provision of knowledge and skills necessary to fill particular roles or combinations of roles in the society. Doubtless the two are often difficult to separate in practice. In British Guiana the formal educational system has always been closely related to a social purpose which does not fit neatly into either of the above categories. It has been one of the main tasks of the educational system to emphasize certain values, cultural forms, and standards of behaviour which would be common to all the diverse elements in the society. From the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a slow development of the idea that the best way to control the slave population was not by physical force alone but by taming the passions and channelling energies into constructive activities. Schools and churches were held to be the best instruments for the transformation of a rebellious slave population into a peaceful and obedient working class. The planters generally took the contrary view that the conversion of slaves to Christianity would lead to ideas of equality and that education would breed dissatisfaction. Both points of view were being hotly debated in England at the same time. The French Revolution had greatly alarmed the ruling classes in England and during the period of political repression which followed it an educational philosophy was worked out which probably became more firmly implanted in the West Indies than it did in Britain. Adam Smith laid down that ‘An instructed and intelligent people, … are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.’[1] Utilitarianism, as developed by Jeremy Bentham and such staunch supporters of the anti-slavery movement as Henry Brougham, placed educational development at the centre of its programme, the aim of which was neither the dissemination of culture nor individual enrichment, but the strengthening of the English social system and the development of industry.[2] Although there were a few notable proponents of the view that a rational educational system should be in the hands of the state, elementary education was in fact developed by the churches, Established and Dissenting, in Britain and the West Indian colonies alike. This was logical enough since the two activities of education and evangelicism were so closely allied. In British Guiana the Colonial Office and the local Governors pushed the idea of education as the basis of civil society; the churches implemented it. Planter opposition was overcome, but not entirely. The Chinese and Indians who were moving into the estate barracks recently vacated by the Africans were encouraged to retain their own customs, and the plantation managers were as anxious to see children at work in the fields as were the parents who derived monetary benefits from it.

The development of elementary education in British Guiana was then not merely similar to the course of events in Britain, it was a part of the same movement. The difference was that while Britain developed into an industrial country with an increasing division of labour and an increasing measure of democratic government, British Guiana remained an economically depressed backwater where the dehumanizing effects of an industrial agriculture were reinforced by the degrading atmosphere of colonial tutelage and racial snobbery. It was inevitable in the circumstances that ‘education’ in British Guiana should consist in the dissemination of the language and culture of ‘civilization’, meaning in this context of England. Although the freedmen were growing more familiar with this culture there was a sense in which much of it was bound to remain alien to their experience.

In England too there was a sharp break between what the pupils learned in school and what they experienced outside it nor were lower-class English children encouraged to believe that they were approximating to the level of knowledge of their betters. But despite the chasm of class difference in England social mobility was increasing and diligence was occasionally rewarded. Where the highest achievement was to become English and yet the very idea of a black Englishman was thought anomalous, the situation was far different. To be educated at all in this sense meant to be indoctrinated with a sense of one’s own inferiority so long as one was not white. The only compensation could be a feeling of superiority over those in whom ‘blackness’ was even less mitigated by command of ‘white’ culture. When criticisms are levelled at the form and content of colonial education it is not so much the technical adequacy that is in question (though this has lagged a long way behind that of England during the twentieth century), but rather the psychologically damaging effect of teaching people to value what is alien to their own being. If British Guiana were a part of England and Guianese were allowed to feel themselves to be English the matter would be different. These considerations must be borne in mind in any discussion of education in British Guiana; the imposition of an arbitrary English standard has no doubt served some useful purpose in providing a common basis on which the heterogeneous population could develop towards unity but the time for a revision of that standard is overdue and is as urgent a task as that of striking a proper balance between academic and vocational emphases.

Since 1876 primary education has been legally compulsory, but this imitation of the British Education Act of 1870 was not rigorously applied, particularly to the East Indian population living on the sugar plantations. Today the situation is that primary education is compulsory from the age of 6-14 years but is provided free from 5-16 years where accommodation is available. The number of pupils on the rolls of the primary schools has risen from 63,046 in the year 1945-6, to 106,459 in 1956-7. This is mainly due to an increase in population, a trend which will be maintained for many years to come. School-building and rebuilding programmes are endeavouring to keep pace with the rapidly increasing school population and there were 327 primary schools at the end of 1959 as opposed to 279 in 1951. Even so there would be a serious shortage of places if attendance was strictly enforced. Much of the capital for school buildings has come from Colonial Development and Welfare Grants but the increasing demand makes it difficult to maintain the level of adequacy of teaching despite the increased budget allocations for education. Various stop-gap measures have been advocated to overcome the shortage of both school places and trained teachers, such as a shift system, but Guianese are insistent that their children shall be properly schooled and there was a public outcry at the suggestion of half-time school attendance.

Of the 327 primary schools operating at the end of 1959 the government operated 21 directly, 298 were run by various religious bodies and 8 were under the control of sugar estates, mining companies, or other private bodies. With the exception of the 21 government schools the strange system obtains whereby the schools are owned and managed by Christian Churches (or private companies in the odd eight cases), but all the financial burden of running the schools, including the provision of buildings and the payment of teachers, is borne by the government. This is the system of so-called dual control which the People’s Progressive Party proposed to abolish; a course of action which the British government regarded as being particularly blameworthy (see p. 176). The eight cases of dual control by non-denominational bodies are relatively unimportant; it is the continued managerial control of the schools by the Christian Churches which is not only anomalous in the middle of the twentieth century but could become an extremely vexed issue in British Guiana. For the simple fact is that this is not a Christian country. Less than half the population is even nominally Christian, and therefore the imposition of particular patterns of religious instruction is positively objectionable in a country which is supposed to allow freedom of conscience. But the worst effect of the system has been to impose a nominal Christianity upon any Indian who had ambitions to become a teacher. In recent years there has been a realization on the part of school managers that it would be improper to fail to appoint an able person to a position as a teacher on the grounds of his religion, but so long as appointments and promotion depend so heavily upon the recommendation of a clergyman or a governing body of Church members the system is bound to be unjust. The Churches have played their part in the educational development of British Guiana just as they have in England but their day is done. Continued dual control can only lead to a situation where the Hindu and Muslim organizations demand government subsidies for schools. At present these religious groups run their own small schools in which children learn to read sacred Hindu and Muslim literature after normal school hours and money for this is subscribed by the members of the religious community. The government gives small supplementary grants. There is no reason why the Christian Churches should not operate special religious schools on the same basis.

Great progress has been made in the improvement of the content of education at the primary school level but much remains to be done. The old Royal Readers, still beloved by many of the older generation who can repeat long passages by heart, have been replaced by better books with more local content. Greater emphasis has been placed on the teaching of hygiene, simple agriculture, crafts, local geography and history. There is still a very heavy ‘English’ orientation particularly in the choice of literary examples, songs, and such like, and local poetry is rarely heard in the schools. The system of teacher training does not make for rapid change in methods. Most teachers begin their careers as pupil teachers in their own elementary school, and if they pass all the requisite teachers’ certificate examinations they may qualify for entry to the Teachers’ Training College in Georgetown where they do a two-year course. The chances are that by this time their teaching techniques have become crystallized and are difficult to change. As secondary education becomes more widespread, there is an increasing number of better educated teachers being recruited, but the teacher-training facilities are still quite inadequate. The annual output of trained teachers was doubled in 1958 but is still only sixty per year. The growing use of school broadcasting may do something to improve the quality of the content of teaching but this is no substitute for adequately trained teachers and cannot even be properly utilized by untrained teachers. This is especially true in a society where radios are not widely listened to except as a source of music. Recent figures on the qualifications of teachers do not appear to be available, but the position in 1951 was as follows. Of 288 Head Teachers, 108 had been to training college, 110 had teachers’ certificates of some kind, and 70 were uncertificated. Of 1,371 Assistant Teachers, 248 had been trained in college, 698 had certificates, and 425 were uncertificated. There were 180 pupil teachers. The number of teachers employed has risen since then to nearly 3,000 but the proportion of trained teachers has probably declined. The number of Head Teachers without any certificate qualification will drop as older men, who were appointed before these examinations began, are retired.

As children approach the school-leaving age, the majority of them just become less regular in their attendance at school and they begin to spend more time working at home or on the farm. They do not read very much after they leave school but the establishment of rural and mobile libraries in recent years has probably made some difference to this. In town there is more incentive to remain literate, especially as there are more employment opportunities where literacy is necessary. Among both town and country dwellers letter-writing is very popular and most people write their own letters in which the spelling and punctuation is generally very bad but the mode of expression and turn of phrase has a charm of its own.

One of the most interesting educational developments of recent years is the enormously increased demand for secondary education. The government owns and operates two excellent schools, the Queen’s College for boys and the Bishop’s High School for girls, which between them have an enrollment of a little over 1,000 pupils. Two other schools, one for boys and one for girls, are aided by grants from the government. But the big expansion has been in the size and number of private secondary schools which were estimated to have an enrolment of at least 6,000 students at the end of 1957. The government has since implemented a recommendation that some of these schools should receive grants-in-aid from the Education Department and seven have been approved for this purpose. It is not surprising that most of these schools fall below the standards considered desirable; on the contrary it is surprising that some of them are as good as they are. With overcrowded premises and a lack of properly qualified staff they do as good a job as can be expected under the circumstances. Fees are quite modest. Doubtless there are unscrupulous individuals who trade on parents’ desire to give their children the chance of a white-collar job, but a majority of school proprietors are trying to do a reasonable job within the limits prescribed by the circumstances and their efforts are of the greatest value to the country. This demand for higher education has been stimulated to some extent by the favourable prices the rice farmers have been receiving, but also by the increasing opportunity for employment created by the various development and welfare grants and projects. It is highly desirable that the trend should be fostered and the time is ripe for the government to assist some of these schools not only with direct grants-in-aid but also with advice and perhaps with training schemes and salary subsidies to enable them to raise the standard of the teaching. The better ones are already much more than factories for the production of Cambridge Certificate holders; the lesser ones might be encouraged to function more effectively if their role as producers of lower-grade clerical workers was recognized and a special certificate, designed for entry to the civil service, substituted for the present Cambridge Certificates.

It is extremely difficult to estimate the number of secondary school students who proceed abroad for further education, but it must be about 1,000. Nearly 500 persons are known to be in the United Kingdom and Ireland pursuing studies of some kind, nearly 100 are at the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica, about 50 in Canada, and an unknown but considerable number in the United States, India, and Europe. Most of these students are financed from private resources there being only about 100 on scholarships of one kind or another. Most of the scholarship holders are bonded to return but it is likely that a considerable proportion of the rest will seek employment outside the country (for a time at least) on completion of their studies.

A Technical Institute, a Trade School for Women which specializes in the teaching of home economics, and the extramural department of the University College of the West Indies complete the list of major educational institutions. Various training schemes for apprentices are run by private firms, notably the bauxite mining companies and the sugar companies. At present the Technical Institute is chiefly engaged in teaching the main engineering subjects at a very elementary level, in running practical courses, and in supervising some of the school programmes in vocational subjects.

The educational system poses one of the problems of Guianese autonomy in a very pointed way. It will obviously be some considerable time before British Guiana could consider having a university of its own, and yet the whole development and reorientation of the educational system will depend to a large extent on changes at the university level. The development of studies which have a bearing on the Caribbean area in subjects such as history, geography, agriculture, botany, and even economics will take place at centres of higher learning such as the University College in Jamaica. Particular problems in teaching methods will be studied there and it is to be hoped that new school books will be written in which some of the biases of an English viewpoint in subjects such as history will be removed. Perhaps a certain amount can be done in British Guiana itself but it is highly desirable that most of the changes should flow out of the activities of a university which is alive to the needs and developments in the area. There is a clear need for the growth of courses in such subjects as public and business administration, social administration, agricultural extension, and labour relations. A certain amount can be done in-service or locally by the extra-mural department of the university but there is a real advantage in having such courses run at schools which are a part of, or in close contact with, a university. The benefits are mutual; the university is enriched by the presence of people who are already actively involved in the problems and development of the region. Another example of the inter-dependence of British Guiana and the other West Indian territories is illustrated by the recommendations of the Mission on Higher Technical Education in the British Caribbean which reported in 1957.[3] The members of this mission were of the opinion that British Guiana could best concentrate upon the teaching of craft courses, courses up to ordinary level in engineering and building, and on courses in technical subjects for secondary school pupils. They recognized that higher studies in certain subjects like forestry and marine engineering might best be fostered in British Guiana, but suggested that it would be sensible to develop the Colleges in Port of Spain and San Fernando, Trinidad, as Regional Colleges. These would offer higher level training in such subjects as architecture, building, surveying, town planning, navigation, engineering, commerce, and pharmacy.

Like most tropical countries British Guiana has had a bad health reputation, and there was a time when it was justified. With recent improvements in sanitation, water supply, and the elimination of insect-borne diseases this is no longer the case and both infant-mortality rates and general death-rates have shown a steady decline over the past thirty or forty years. Because of the necessity for conserving the labour supply for the sugar industry the provision of medical attention for the coastal population has always been regarded as a reasonable and economic form of expenditure. No doubt humanitarian motives have also been important, but it is a sound enough viewpoint to regard a healthy population as a good economic resource. By the standards of more developed countries the medical services available to the population of British Guiana today are inadequate but they are a good deal better than those to be found in many countries at a comparable level of economic growth.

In 1957 the total number of medical practitioners practising in the country was 125, of which 66 were employed by the government. Twenty-three dental surgeons were in private practice and four in government service.[4] The government operates six general hospitals, three specialized hospitals (Mental Hospital, Tuberculosis Hospital, and Leprosarium), and seven small cottage hospitals in rural or remote areas. These government hospitals provided a total of 2,658 beds, and another 285 beds were available in private hospitals and nursing homes as well as 276 beds in sugar estate hospitals which will eventually be taken over by the government. In all, 3,219 beds were available, or 6 beds per 1,000 of the population. The differing views as to the adequacy or otherwise of these medical services is well illustrated by the comments of the World Bank mission on the one hand and those of Professor Richardson, who visited the country in 1954 to advise the government on social security, on the other. The World Bank mission (p. 77) stated flatly that ‘…the medical and health services are faced with no urgent immediate needs for additional facilities’. Professor Richardson was of the opinion that not only should free medical attention be extended to a larger number of people but also that additional facilities such as health centres, cottage hospitals, and increased medical staff would be necessary.[5] Professor Richardson’s recommendations were more modest than those changes considered necessary by members of the medical profession. There are few doctors who would not feel that the Public Hospital Georgetown should be replaced by a modern hospital. It is a large wooden building, or rather a series of buildings, and its demolition has been recommended by a Medical Enquiry Committee headed by Dr Clark which reported in 1954. The provision of a new 700 bed hospital at a cost of $11 million has been tentatively approved and plans have been drawn, but no provision for funds was made in the 1956-60 Development Plan and building has not begun. Given a limited amount of money to spend on medical services the conflicting demands are great, and it may be that the provision of more small hospitals in the rural areas will take precedence over large-scale reorganization in Georgetown. The needs of the wealthier section of the urban population are being met by the building of more private nursing homes.

There have been a number of anomalies in the government Medical Service and dissatisfaction among the medical staff has resulted in many resignations and some difficulty in filling specialist posts. The needs of the rural areas are provided for by a number of district medical officers who act as general practitioners paid and housed by the government. These officers are supposed to provide their services free but are allowed to charge a fee high enough to cover the cost of drugs and of travelling. No scale of fees is laid down and it is common knowledge that the fees charged tend to vary according to the type of case and the method of administering the drug. It is even said that some doctors cater to the popular notion that medicine is not really effective unless it costs a lot of money and comes through a hypodermic needle. District medical officers are hard worked; they are on call day and night, and perhaps in the majority of cases they can claim some right to the reasonable financial rewards which country practice is reputed to afford. More doctors and the development of a different system of obtaining drugs is the only way of overcoming any abuses that might exist. The situation of the medical and surgical staff of the hospitals is somewhat different. They too are paid a salary and provided with accommodation but that is the end of the matter. The salaries of specialist staff are not high enough to counteract attractions from other countries or private practice, and for a long time the government pursued a policy of refusing to allow specialists to receive consultant fees from those patients able to pay them. Dissatisfaction was increased by the introduction of a differential principle whereby some categories of specialists could receive fees and others could not. Fortunately most of the specialists who have left government service in search of better conditions have remained in the country as private practitioners so that their services have not been entirely lost. Whether the growth of a large private medical sector is a good thing or not will only be discovered when someday attempts are made to recreate a national health service.

The provision of more regional medical services including health centres is something that can well be tackled by the new local government bodies when they come into being (see Chapter VII) . Ambulances are particularly needed in the rural areas. By far the most spectacular public health measure to be carried out in British Guiana has been the eradication of malaria by means of a very skilfully designed scheme of house-spraying with DDT. Much of the basic work for this campaign was done by Dr Giglioli, now Medical Adviser to the British Guiana Sugar Producers’ Association and previously one of Bookers’ estate medical officers. The success of the spraying depended on the knowledge that the vector was the Anopheles darlingi, that the female of this species had a definite preference for human blood, and that it could be attacked as it rested on the walls of houses just before laying its eggs. The application of residual DDT to the interior walls of all houses in the country has had the spectacular effect of eliminating malaria completely in a country where stagnant water and breeding places abound. The old methods of applying oil to water surfaces, introducing fish into drinking water vats, and breeding bats to devour the mosquitoes sound positively antiquated today and yet they were the only methods of attack before 1945. Great though this achievement has been, far too much has been claimed for it. Some writers give the impression that the greatly increased birth-rate and greatly reduced death-rate are solely due to the eradication of malaria.[6] This is ludicrous, as any detached consideration of the vital statistics will show. To suppose that women suddenly started to have far more children as soon as malaria vanished is quite incorrect. The increased birth-rates depended upon a significant increase in the number of women attaining childbearing age, and this in turn was dependent upon the improvement of mortality rates due to improved sanitation and medical services in the pre-1940 period.

Other public health measures are reasonably well advanced and are made easier of execution because of the compact nature of the settlement pattern along the coast. Infant welfare and maternity clinics are well attended, though much more education in child-care is still needed if the intestinal diseases which keep infant-mortality rates up are to be reduced. The provision of piped artesian well-water is now nearly universal along the coast and the old rain-water vats are disappearing. More important is the fact that people no longer drink water from the drainage and irrigation trenches as they used to. Sewage disposal is still something of a problem in the rural areas; where pit-latrines are used, as they are the minimum facility permitted by law, they provide a breeding ground for the Culex mosquito which is the vector for filaria and is immune to DDT. With the use of new drugs it is hoped that a successful campaign can be launched against this disease in the near future.

Amerindian health is a difficult problem because the 20,000 or so Amerindians are scattered throughout the interior. A special medical officer is employed to make periodic tours administering preventive inoculations and supervising the work of five medical rangers who treat minor ailments, de-worm the children, and spray dwellings with DDT.

The background of plantation slavery and indentured labour gives a special significance to British Guiana’s social security problems as it does to most features of contemporary social life. From the earliest days of slavery until quite recently the resident plantation labourers were provided for from the cradle to the grave. It may have been an extremely early grave; that depended to some extent on whether it was cheaper to work people hard until they died and then buy or lease the labour of more, or to conserve an existing labour force by providing it with reasonable medical attention. The operation of these iron laws of economics may have been modified occasionally by a humane master or by the vigilance of the Colonial Office and the Anti-Slavery Society but labourers were looked upon as an economic resource. Because of the shortage of labour after about 1800 probably more attention was paid to the well-being of plantation labourers than to that of industrial workers in Britain. Certainly it came to be an accepted fact that the ‘government’ or the plantation authorities had a certain obligation to provide services of one kind or another.

While Guianese may have grown to expect a certain amount of paternalistic care, they have never been as ‘coddled’ or as completely dependent in their attitudes as some observers suggest.[7] Even in the days of chattel slavery societies existed in which the members contributed food for funeral feasts and for the provision of proper rituals, and these societies have survived into the present as Friendly and Burial Societies. Many of them provide a wide range of benefits including sickness payments and they often cater for recreational needs by running dances or organizing outings for the members. Among the Indians, too, mutual benefit societies are often based upon a temple organization, but since the Indian kinship system tends to ramify rather more widely, support in adversity is often given by kin. Both Negroes and Indians have built and maintained churches, temples, mosques, and schools out of their own meagre earnings. When it is said that the Christian Churches built and operated the primary schools in British Guiana it should be remembered that the bulk of the funds for this came from the pockets of lower-class Guianese who even contributed to missions in other parts of the world. In Georgetown a large home, the Dharam Sala, houses 193 inmates who are destitute or hungry, it provides clothes and food for the needy, Christmas treats for poor children, and runs a nursery school for 200 children. This organization was founded in 1921 by Pandit Ramsaroop Maraj and is today run by his son. The government now gives a small grant but the bulk of the funds and all the initiative comes from voluntary effort. If it were really necessary to refute these shallow judgements of Guianese character one could point to the tremendous initiative and self-reliance shown in the founding of the Negro villages and in the development of the rice industry, against considerable odds.

The government and the plantation managements do provide a certain amount of social security and they have tended to assume that any kind of dissatisfaction can be eliminated by the provision of more. An enormous amount of money has been spent on housing and sincere attempts have been made to provide loans so that people could buy their own houses and feel a pride and security in ownership. These efforts have been appreciated and there is certainly a need for improved housing, but a very common reaction among ordinary people has been that they would prefer to see the money going to provide investment that would create more jobs. They argue that if they have security of employment they can buy their own houses through loans on insurance policies and the like. They ask what is the use of sitting in an architect-designed concrete house with nothing to eat; it is a reasonable and hard-headed economic argument.

At the end of 1954 the government made some revisions in its social security programme in accordance with the recommendations of Professor J. H. Richardson. He concluded that the then existing measures adopted by the government for the relief of destitution and the mitigation of extreme poverty were out of date and that they carried the taint of charity and pauperism derived from nineteenth-century England. He recommended a substantial increase in old-age pensions and public-assistance rates; to $10.00 per month in Georgetown and $8.00 per month in the country. Public assistance was to be on a sliding scale from 50 per cent. of the maximum and the amount granted would still be determined by a means test. The new rates of both old-age pensions and public assistance would only be payable to persons with incomes of less than $12.00 per month in Georgetown or $10.00 per month in other districts. It is of course extremely difficult to assess incomes accurately in a country where casual labour is the rule and the operation of the system depends very much upon the officers in the field. The government accepted these recommendations and proceeded to increase the rates by stages over a number of years. Professor Richardson also recommended that the use of terms such as ‘Poor Law’, ‘pauper’, and ‘poverty’ be abolished, though it is often difficult to convince a hungry man that he is not poor.

In addition to the old-age pensions paid to persons over 65 years of age by the government, a start has been made with the introduction of contributory schemes by various companies in the country, and Professor Richardson suggested that the government should meet the costs of administration of a Provident Fund. Contributions would be made by both workers and employers and would be used to buy annuity policies with commercial insurance companies. The difficulties of operating such a scheme in a country such as British Guiana where casual and daily-rated labour has been the rule are great, and anything like a general coverage would only be feasible when the economy has been transformed so that the labour force has been stabilized in a series of regular occupations.

The question of housing is a very controversial one. Professor Richardson pointed out that house ownership is one of the best forms of social security and that it encourages social stability. He recognized that there might be disadvantages as well as advantages for a man who wanted to move to another area in search of work, and if British Guiana is to develop rapidly it is clear that population movement is likely to increase. It has been one of Dr Jagan’s most persistent charges that the sugar companies were encouraging the building and ownership of houses in the vicinity of the plantations so that they would have an ‘industrial reserve army’ on hand—the classic means of keeping wages down to subsistence level according to Marxist analysis. Whether this was ever the dominant motive on the part of the sugar companies is difficult to say; it seems more likely that they responded to a series of pressures. The old overcrowded estate ranches had to be replaced by something better and it was very desirable to try to create reasonably self-reliant communities close by. The problem of finding labour has been a constant preoccupation of the sugar industry since it was founded and it is not to be expected that it would disappear overnight. However, with the rapid growth of population and the gradual introduction of more efficient and rational means of production it appears that the sugar plantations will soon require a smaller and more regularly employed labour force than in the past. In these days of militant trade unions and nationalist political parties it is unlikely that the direct competition between individual labourers for employment is the main factor in determining wage levels. If it is, then the remedy lies in the creation of more efficient bargaining machinery or more efficient economic planning at the governmental level. Still the fact remains that the housing policy so far pursued does lead to the creation of relatively immobile population clusters around the sugar plantations, and such a policy should be reviewed in the light of future labour needs in a developing economy.

Another question arises as to whether housing represents a serious problem at all, and whether one is justified in assigning it a very high priority in a situation of scarce resources. In Georgetown there are many areas where overcrowding is serious and constitutes a real threat to health; in the rural areas the condition of many houses is extremely bad but in a tropical climate where life is lived mainly out of doors in any case this is not as serious as it may appear. There is also the added complication that the people who live in the very worst houses will probably not be affected by these schemes for the simple reason that they cannot afford to buy a new house even on the most favourable terms and cannot afford to pay even moderate rents. Those who can afford these things, as in the case of the rice farmers, have been building new houses on their own account anyway. In the rural areas there is a much greater need for proper roads and streets, piped water supply to individual houses, and electricity. Plans are being implemented to provide these things but they have lagged behind the housing programme by a long way.

As in other British colonial territories a special Department of Social Welfare was formed in British Guiana following the submission of the report of the 1938 Royal Commission. Because of British Guiana’s peculiar local government system, which was largely controlled by a centralized government department, it was decided to combine the offices of Commissioner of Local Government and of Social Welfare Officer. Assistant Social Welfare Officers were appointed and particular attention has been given to the development of Women’s Institutes, Youth Clubs, and cottage industries. The emphasis is upon general community development in the rural areas, though some work has been done in Georgetown in the way of youth club development. The sugar plantations have had their own parallel organization and staff from the beginning. Most of the activities of these social welfare officers are not new; they have long been carried out by the Churches. Some new emphases have been introduced of course, and the goodwill and enthusiasm of the clergyman’s wife has been replaced by training in nutrition, handcrafts, home economics, and organizational methods. The government’s Social Welfare Department has tended to become, not surprisingly, a sort of general repository of activities and schemes which are not easily classified and assigned elsewhere. It has also been, quite rightly, the spawning ground for projects and schemes which have grown and been elevated to a position of greater autonomy. The Cottage Industries Division, for example, has now been transferred to the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the probation work originated by the department is now undertaken by a separate Probation Service.

After the suspension of the constitution in 1953 a team of community development experts from the United States was sent to British Guiana by the International Co-operation Administration as part of the general programme of assistance. The members of this team included an agricultural economist and an agricultural machinery expert as well as specialists in community organization. Apart from the general work undertaken by some of these specialists a number of villages were selected for intensive community development with the emphasis upon a rounded programme attacking the problems of the village on a wide front; health, housing, education, local economy, and recreation all received some attention.

The main drawback to the programmes of social welfare and community development as they exist at present is that they are either forced to attempt too much and cover too wide an area to be effective, or to concentrate attention upon local units which are not sufficiently viable to be able to make the innovations permanent. The proper solution has been outlined by Dr A. H. Marshall in his excellent report on local government.[8] There he suggests that large local authorities be created which would include the sugar-plantation communities and that these bodies, which would be able to afford to employ first-rate staff, should take on responsibility for many of the social services at present provided by the central government agencies and the Sugar Producers’ Association. Under the suggested system there would be much more room for local initiative and interest because the members of the local authority would control matters of very real interest to the people who voted for them. There would not need to be any radical reorganization since the district commissioners already co-ordinate a lot of the work of the officers of central agencies, and these officials and their staffs could be assimilated to the new authorities.

[1] Wealth of Nations (London, 1950), p. 273.

[2] For an excellent discussion of the development of elementary education and literacy in England see Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago U.P., 1957).

[3] Mission on Higher Technical Education in the British Caribbean, Report, 1957.

[4] Most of the information in this section is taken from Annual Report of the Director of Medical Services for the year 1957 (Georgetown, Argosy, n.d.).

[5] B.G., Report on Social Security in British Guiana, by J. Henry Richardson (1954).

[6] See for example Swan, pp. 82–83.

[7] One of the latest pieces of misreporting of this nature is to be found in the British Guiana Constitutional Commission, 1954, Report (Cmd. 9274), p. 16, where they say: ‘There seems today to be a common—almost arrogant—presumption that from some fathomless sources all things desirable should as of right be provided.’

[8] G.B., Colonial Office, Report on Local Government in British Guiana, by A.H. Marshall (1955).