Chapter VIII

THIS book has dealt with some of the social, economic, and political problems which confront a very small society of half a million people living on the edge of the South American continent isolated from their continental neighbours. Although it has been argued that this group of people, diverse in origin and relative newcomers to this land, already constitute a society, ready to take an active part in determining its own destiny free from direct control from Britain, this is not to say that the future development of the country is not highly problematical. During the past twenty years a ‘national’ sentiment has been finding expression in politics and in the demand for ‘Guianization’ of everything from the civil service to school textbooks. This national sentiment has arisen as a specific response to colonialism. In its inception it is nothing more than the demand of a middle class of non-Europeans for equality of opportunity to achieve power within the social system, but it can be used to canalize the dissatisfactions of the lower class and to alter the whole basis on which the society has been integrated in the past. It can help to destroy some of the psychologically crippling effects of a system based on an aristocracy of colour and it can help to give people a new sense of pride and dignity. Political independence becomes a goal towards which everybody can work and its attainment is the means of creating some sort of unity. It is certainly not the end of the question of nationalism but rather the beginning. Much of the world is moving away from nationalism, or at least away from some of its worst manifestations. Guianese need not develop a narrow-minded chauvinism in order to achieve the double purpose of erasing the effects of colonialism and developing a necessary degree of political unity. Fortunately (and this is one good effect of colonialism to set off against its more damaging manifestations) there is no problem of ‘tribalism’ in British Guiana; although each ethnic group tends to preserve a residue of cultural peculiarities and to exaggerate their importance, the whole society shares a common cultural equipment which can serve as the basis for unity, as the foundation for creativity and future growth, and as a bridge to participation in the wider communities of the Caribbean and of the world at large. What sort of materials does the Guianese intellectual, writer, artist, poet, and musician have to work with, how much awareness is there of the problems and pitfalls of nationalism and what patterns of activity are developing at the ideological, cultural, and artistic levels?

In nineteenth-century Guiana, after emancipation and when the Indians, Chinese, and Portuguese were coming into the country, two important cultural processes were taking place. The Europeans were developing some sort of intellectual life and the non-Europeans were losing most of their distinctive cultural characteristics. Visitors to British Guiana often deplore the fact that one cannot find African carving, Chinese painting, Indian weaving and metalwork. The reason is that each ethnic group passed through the rigid discipline of plantation labour and traditional arts and traditional skills were obliterated by industrial discipline. Not completely, as we shall see below, but Guianese society did not support a class of specialist craftsmen and artists among its plantation workers. The leisure class that the plantations supported lived in England though by the nineteenth century their fortunes were in decline. The local representatives of the planters, the attorneys and managers, were hard-working, often hard-drinking, men with little time for ‘culture’. There were exceptions, of course, and certainly many of the government servants, clergymen, and teachers were educated men who engaged in spare-time literary and artistic pursuits with all the intensity of purpose typical of the latter half of the nineteenth century. They produced a large number of books and articles dealing with their experiences as Empire-builders and missionaries. Titles such as British Guiana, or Work and Wanderings Among the Creoles and Coolies, the Africans and Indians of the Wild Country were popular with the new lending libraries catering to the newly educated lower-middle classes in Britain. Today sensational writing usually focuses upon British Guiana’s animals rather than its people, though the Amerindians are not yet immune.

In 1844 the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana was founded and became the focus of the intellectual life of the colony’s elite. It has done extremely good work since then in building up a library, starting a museum and a small zoo, and in publishing its own journal, Timehri. This journal has provided an outlet for the work of amateur naturalists and observers of the social life of the country as well as more technical papers on agricultural and scientific topics by professionals. It is therefore a most useful source of historical material, though back copies are now difficult to find since the Society’s premises were destroyed by fire some years ago. A new building has been erected incorporating a fine museum but the old collection of books and manuscripts is irreplaceable. The articles in Timehri were, and still are to a large extent, the work of expatriates writing about the history of the colony or about those aspects of its practical life that interested them as administrators and planters, or persons connected with these activities in some professional capacity. The present editor is a locally-born European who is extremely active in running the society and the museum while occasionally taking part in politics and keeping up his academic standing as an Americanist. Another of his projects which has been extremely worthwhile has been the editing of a series of reprints of old books relating to the country. Printed by one of the local news presses they sell for anything from five to sixteen shillings. About fifteen titles have been published already.

The same kind of part-practical and part-cultural interest on the part of the European population produced the Georgetown Botanic Gardens. Originally a very practical agricultural enterprise for the study and propagation of economic plants, they have become one of the city’s most valuable amenities since their foundation in 1879. The small zoo mentioned above is housed there and the several lakes which were produced by the excavation of earth to make up the roads and flower-beds are now inhabited by that Georgetown curiosity the manatee. These water-dwelling mammals, which are reputed to be the prototype of the mermaid, were first introduced into the gardens in 1891 and have since grown into a large family. Only recently has it been discovered that they could be put to work eating the weeds which choke the many hundreds of miles of drainage and irrigation trenches throughout the country.

The kind of intellectual activity represented by the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society was shared in by those non-Europeans in the local population who had the requisite knowledge, education, and social standing. It represented a bridge between the intellectual life of Britain and the life of the colony. While many of its interests were in local things it placed them either in the context of universal science or of the standards and sentiments of metropolitan Britain. Gradually two processes began to take place. The standards and culture of Britain began to filter down into every level of Guianese society, becoming ever more diluted and distorted perhaps, but still providing a common referent. It pushed out most specifically African, Chinese, and Portuguese culture and is on its way to pushing out Indian and Amerindian culture as well. At the other end there developed a process in which Guianese pushed upwards to a fuller education and a better understanding of the world by mastering what Europe had to offer. This was not a process in which Guianese were ‘taught’ western culture; it was rather a process in which Guianese became involved in a wider society. In between the gradual replacement of African, Chinese, Portuguese, Indian, and Amerindian culture by a version of English culture, and the upward thrust of Guianese intellectuals towards a wider and more universal understanding, there is a gap—or so many Guianese and West Indian intellectuals feel. They become worried about what it means to be a Guianese or a West Indian rather than a carbon-copy of an Englishman (unlike the French the British have never encouraged colonials to become completely assimilated to the mother society), and they speak of discovering their own identity. Before considering this quest, which may be a false one, let us examine very briefly some of the elements of folk-culture which survive from old traditions or have emerged as syncretisms.

Practically all the folk art of Africa has disappeared from British Guiana except for elements of music and dance which have undergone considerable modification. Some almost ‘pure’ African drumming can be heard, but the general attitude towards it on the part of educated Negroes is surprisingly negative. Drumming is considered to be not only lower-class but almost unspeakably detestable. This is because of its association with rituals of spirit possession and the consequent condemnation by the Churches, which set the standards of respectability. On the other hand village bands, or more elaborate orchestras based on Georgetown, play for dances in the village school with the full blessing of the Churches and these bands retain much of the rhythm of Africa. Folk songs are a part of the living tradition of the country and it would take a specialist to work out with any certainty the exact degree to which various elements have been incorporated in them. Certainly the European tradition is very strongly represented. Since the mechanical and electronic reproduction of music became popular British Guiana has converged with the calypso style of the rest of the British Caribbean, but her peculiar ‘shanto’ songs with their paddling rhythm are still to be heard. British Guiana also boasts a type of song which is unique so far as I know. This is the Que-que (Kweh-kweh), a combined song and round-dance performed on the night before a wedding in the Negro villages in Berbice. Most of the songs are sexually suggestive and in this respect are very similar to the songs sung by women at Hindu weddings.[1] ‘Anancy’ stories, the folk-tales of West Africa, survive in modified form and scraps of other African culture such as Ashanti day-names can be dredged from the memories of old people. All these surviving elements are divorced from important institutionalized behaviour, or survive as covert elements in it, like the Que-que dances.

The East Indians have preserved more of their original folk-culture than other groups, except the Amerindians, but it is questionable whether it will survive the next fifty years. Already there has been a wholesale elimination of elements of custom that do not fit the dictates of Brahmanical Hinduism or the austerities of Islam. In the fields of music and art other forces are at work. Amplified records of Indian film music have replaced the music of traditional orchestras at weddings. A few of these orchestras still exist and play music at religious festivals, and they have been encouraged to survive by the growth of Indian programmes on Radio Demerara. Wedding songs are sung mainly by a few old women. The art of painting and decorating marriage altars, making marriage costumes and head-dresses, and the art of making images for temple worship are all in decline, but they may be expected to survive in some form since marriage is the central symbol of ‘Indian culture’. Temple images can always be imported from India. The shape of things to come is exemplified by the current practice of decorating Hindu marriage booths with electric lights and tinsel originally designed for Christmas trees. Not more than two Indian potters survive; one of them working on the West Coast Demerara produces most of the pots used for ritual purposes. He still throws them on a hand-turned wheel and bakes them in a slow-burning heap of cow-dung. Goldsmiths abound and again much of their work is in producing the bracelets, rings, necklaces, and ear-rings which form a part of the traditional marriage gifts. But their work is also in great demand among non-Indians, and it has become customary throughout the whole population for engagement to be marked by the presentation of bracelets, necklaces, and ear-rings as well as the normal engagement ring. The quality of gold and silver-work is sometimes quite good though it cannot compete with the finest products of the Far East. Gold and silver are fairly cheap in British Guiana and the export of jewellery could be developed into a much more lucrative trade than it is at present if the standard of work were improved. There seems to be an excellent case here for sending craftsmen abroad for further training.

It has been pointed out repeatedly that the general tendency in British Guiana has been to devalue all forms of folk-culture and to place exaggerated emphasis upon certain elements of English culture. Even among the Indians, where there has been a definite attempt to preserve some Indian culture, the trend is towards the elimination of traditional ‘coolie’ culture and the substitution of a more self-conscious and intellectual complex based on written sources and capable of being cast in universal rather than particular terms. This will become even more essential as communication with other ethnic groups and other religions increases. In a sense Indian ‘culture’ in this context is becoming more ‘westernized’ as it is worked into a shape which fits the conditions of life in Guiana. A complementary process has been taking place in India itself under the impact of European culture and technology.

In British Guiana the devaluation of folk culture and the growing emphasis on the value of anything ‘English’ in origin was an inevitable accompaniment of the process of building a unified society, but it had its evils, the greatest of them being the separation of the bulk of the population from the source of its values. In school, children learned about the English countryside, English history, and they read English literature. In itself this was no bad thing; the difficulty was that they could not identify themselves as ‘English’ and were not encouraged to think of themselves or their immediate surroundings as interesting, valuable, or potentially creative. The stagnation of the system is clearly shown by the fact that people still refer to a slavery that was abolished well over 100 years ago as if it were still a factor in present-day problems. It is as if one were to attribute Britain’s balance-of-payments problems to the Napoleonic Wars.

When the first stirrings of self-assertion found their way into the literary and artistic consciousness they were directed to proving that the Indians or the Negroes had made ‘progress’ in relation to the standards of the dominant group, and in this they were the analogue of the claims of the politicians to a share in the direction of the country because of their standing as cultured gentlemen. Books such as N. E. Cameron’s The Evolution of the Negro or Peter Ruhomon’s Centenary History of the East Indians in British Guiana, 1838argue that Negroes or Indians have much to be proud of. Both writers were staunch Christian churchmen, both books are heavily influenced by this fact, and both betray the dilemma of the Guianese intellectual searching for a sense of belonging and of worth.

While the benefits of English education may have produced bizarre effects in so far as it produced a marked tendency to ignore the realities of life in Guiana, it did provide the basis from which a ‘national’ culture could develop on the basis of the individualist and scientific traditions of thought. It also provided the basic tools of language, music, and to a less extent of painting. So far it is only in literature and poetry that there is obvious concern with developing a Guianese outlook, and there is no desire to turn away from the mainstream of European literature and poetry. A Guianese art, literature, and music that is parochial will not satisfy Guianese intellectuals. The main vehicle for the expression of these ideas and for the publication of poetry and prose is a literary magazine entitled Kyk-(from the name of the old Dutch fort meaning ‘look-over-all’). This magazine appears half-yearly and is edited by Mr A. J. Seymour, himself a poet and now the head of the Government Information Services. The difficulty of building a local artistic and literary tradition is a recurrent topic of discussion in this magazine and in a sense it reflects the difficulties of the whole society in so far as it is trying to become conscious of itself as an independent entity. The problem is to establish standards of value that are relevant to the local community and to create symbols for their meaningful expression. But because of the aversion to mere parochialism, this national self-consciousness has to be expressed in terms that are universally understood and the standards of value which it embodies must be universal standards. Some writers, attempting to cut through the tangled knot of racial identity and to discover a more fundamental symbol of Guianese unity rooted in nature itself, have stressed the symbols of the land, of the mystic power and strength of the aboriginal peoples, and the symbolism of discovery. They have tried to use the complex history of the country to suggest the formation and birth of something new—of something which is more than the sum of its parts and which can exist on equal terms within a world-wide community. The other main direction taken by Guianese writers and thinkers has been revolutionary. For this group something of value has to be created; it lies in the future not in the past. The past can only arouse anger or pity and the key to human dignity lies in action. Theoretical communism has had a particular appeal to one group of Guianese intellectuals because it places the peculiar problems of the country in a universal context and provides a rational explanation of everything from poverty to colour prejudice. It teaches that the problems of Guiana are not peculiar to her alone but are part of a world-wide pattern to which there is a solution which conforms to the values of equality and achievement and which avoids the isolation that a narrow nationalism would involve. The particular history of Russian communism since 1917 is very imperfectly known and the Russian suppression of the Hungarian revolt did not make a very deep impression on more than a few. When Dr Jagan says that he is a Marxist but not a member of the Communist Party he is perhaps expressing his desire to accept some of the main principles of communist political philosophy without worrying too much about the implications of its application in the real world. It is evident that in the present state of world power politics it is not possible to ignore the practical implications of ideological commitment, and a small number of the more revolutionary writers have already begun to pursue these questions beyond the slogan-shouting stage.

The most persistent theme in the deliberations of Guianese intellectuals and their greatest hope for the future is in their participation in a West Indian culture. They feel that the West Indies is big enough and homogeneous enough in its culture for its experience and its ideals to form a basis for a new art and a new literature with its own audience in the developing educated circles of its cities. At the moment London and New York act as magnets drawing away many of the best writers and artists from the Caribbean. They have felt the lack of an audience for their work in their home countries and have been intoxicated with the stimulation of really big cities. This is a natural enough feeling which has been shared by academics as well, but the rate of development of Kingston, Port of Spain, Havana, and San Juan has been so rapid in recent years that there will be increasingly more incentive to remain and develop within the region. In the past the choice was often between staying in a small island or going off to the metropolitan city; as the barriers of language and distance between Caribbean territories are overcome the local horizons will widen.

These, then, are some of the forces and influences at work shaping the minds and inspiration of present-day Guianese writers, artists, and thinkers. The problems that confront these people are not abstract questions affecting only a cultured minority; they are the problems of the whole society. ‘Nationalism’ has emerged as a protest against the degrading effects of colonial domination but nationalism carries its own dangers unless its values are made clear. The artist, be he writer, painter, or musician shares with the politician the responsibility of making the values of his society explicit, of creating symbols for their expression and relating them to the values of the world community. He has to grapple with the problems of West Indian federation, continental destiny, pan-Americanism, communism, and racialism just as much as the politician, because these are the facts of his life today.

The manuscript of this book went to the printer in the early summer of 1961, and since then two events have occurred which are of particular significance for the future of British Guiana. At the elections held under the new constitution in August 1961 Dr Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party won a clear majority and has assumed office. It is now almost certain that British Guiana will be granted complete independence during 1962 or 1963. So far Dr Jagan has shown considerable political acumen in his efforts to win friends, and his early visit to the United States shows that he realizes the importance of close ties with the countries of the hemisphere and of participation in pan-American economic development plans. No doubt his journey will also take him to the countries of the Communist bloc, and this is to be expected of a man professing a policy of neutrality.

Important though these global ties are going to be, it is the relations with the countries of the old British West Indies that are going to try the statesmanship of Guianese leaders for some time to come. After a public referendum held in September 1961 Jamaica has decided to withdraw from the West Indies Federation. The future of the federation is now uncertain and will remain so until Dr Williams, the Prime Minister of Trinidad, announces his country’s policy. Trinidad may well decide that it cannot shoulder the burden of the small, economically backward islands of the Eastern Caribbean alone and therefore the whole structure of the federation may be dismantled. Another possibility is that the apparatus of the federal government may be kept in being to provide some sort of regional centre for ‘functional’ federation without any political power. But Jamaica’s withdrawal also creates a new situation which may be favourable to the emergence of an Eastern Caribbean federation based on Trinidad, British Guiana, and Barbados, with the small islands of the Leewards and Windwards as appendages. Historically these eastern territories have had very close ties and there has been considerable movement between them. Trinidad has a very large East Indian minority, and in an Eastern Caribbean federation East Indians would not feel completely swamped by other ethnic groups. However there are still immense difficulties in the way of such a federation, both political and economic. Much planning and research will be necessary to determine just how the economies of the eastern territories could be made complementary and how Trinidad could be given sufficient freedom to develop without having to support the rest of the area. British Guiana has little to offer except space, and much capital and skill will be needed to turn it into a place that will attract migrants from the small islands. Politically there is no movement uniting Dr Jagan and his party to the other territories though some working group dedicated to the idea of political independence may emerge. Trinidad is unlikely to produce a party pursuing doctrinaire socialist policies at this stage of her economic development and it will be a test of Dr Jagan’s flexibility to see how he can develop relations with this influential neighbour.

So far as British Guiana’s internal affairs are concerned the outlook is equally uncertain. Much needs to be done to improve the machinery of government if it is to be capable of bringing about the kind of transformation that is desired. There is always the danger in a newly independent country of trying to solve every problem by political means and of projecting all mistakes and frustrations upon ‘imperialism’ and ‘neo-colonialism’. Ghana is a good example of this particular error, and while Dr Jagan has expressed a desire to follow Ghana’s policy of non-alignment, it is to be hoped that he does not adopt President Nkrumah’s methods of trying to make up for lack of economic foresight and sophistication by propaganda and imprisonment.

[1] Smith and Jayawardena, ‘Hindu Marriage Customs in British Guiana’, Social and Economic Studies, vii/2 (1959), pp. 181-2.