Raymond T. Smith

Hopetown 1975

More than twenty years after my first study of Hopetown I was able to return for a three month period of fieldwork, this time accompanied by my wife. We had some difficulty finding a house to rent, but eventually it was suggested that a relatively new building on the waterside edge of the village might be suitable. It was distinctly odd in its design, quite unlike the normal Hopetown house. As one climbed the stairs to the living space one entered a long narrow living room. No less than four or five small bedrooms branched off to the right. We readily agreed to rent it for the time we were to be there, but remained curious about the design until someone suggested that it had been built as a brothel but the villagers had risen up in anger and it had never been put to the use for which it was designed. Whether this story is true or not we never found out.

Much had changed since 1952: the main road through the village, the Public Road, was now asphalted allowing vehicles to speed along dangerously; street lights had been installed and electricity was available throughout the village supplied by a generating plant serving the region; local government had been reformed with the village now incorporated in a wider regional unit. But for all these improvements there was no striking increase in the level of living. A modest improvement in farming had taken place, with many villagers raising pigs, and one entrepreneur operating a large poultry farm. The largest store that had been owned by a Portuguese was now operated by an East Indian who had worked his way up from a humble business selling nutcake on the street until he now owned the store and a thriving taxi business running a regular service to Georgetown. Recovering from the racial violence of the 1960s a number of Indian businesses were newly established in the area and the independent estate that separated Hopetown from Bel Air was operated in a highly efficient manner by an Indian rice farmer who had taken the trouble to build a water conservancy.

In spite of all these improvements the population was shrinking as people left to go to North America or Britain. The street lights were rarely operational because the electricity bills were often not paid. While some houses were improved many others continued to deteriorate and the streets away from the main road remained unpaved. These conditions have not been reversed in the years since 1975. When I last visited Hopetown in 1997 there were isolated improvements such as the hospital and school at Fort Wellington, and some modern houses served by the intermittent electricity supply, but overall the state of the village compared unfavourably with that of the prosperous rice villages such as Windsor Forest. One notable addition to Hopetown was a large house built by a a couple who had returned to Guyana from Britain. Edwin Jones had been a child when first worked in Hopetown in 1951, and had been taken to England where he grew up. He served in the British army and married an Englishwoman who was a trained teacher. Upon his retirement from the army they decided to return to Hopetown and then built a large house with the idea of using it as an Eco-Tourist Lodge with a small school and historical museum in the bottom flat. The house is most impressive, being built with local materials including fine woods, but also fitted with the most modern plumbing and furnishings.

Sapodilla Farm 1997

Left to Right: Edwin Joseph, Flora Tong-Smith, Rev. Brewster Semple, Jane Joseph