(Throughout the article, caution has been taken to change individuals’ identities. Using real names could lead to the dismissal and blacklisting of innocent people.)
Today, June 13th marks the 35 anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Walter Rodney, a Guyanese, Pan-African & worker’s leader. Last month Guyana elected a new president, 69-year-old retired Army General David Granger. After 23 years of rule by the corrupt People’s Progressive Party, there is a feeling of youthful euphoria across the country. There are those who project the view that the ascent of the Partnership for National Unity-Alliance for Change Coalition represents a break with a post-colonial past of sycophantism, racial division and sharpening social contradictions. This pamphlet will explore whether this hope is justified by returning to the ideas of Dr. Rodney. Three decades ago, Rodney posed questions that are more pressing than ever after this “electoral victory:” Does Guyana need a mere cosmetic change of presidents and ruling parties or a complete overhaul of the existing political and economic system that is in place?
Inspired by a recent trip to Georgetown to train in the boxing camp of former world champion — the late Andrew “6 Heads” Lewis — & motivated by my Guyanese and Caribbean students at York College in Jamaica, Queens, I wanted to reflect on the unfinished Guyanese liberation struggle.
The objectives of this pamphlet are twofold: to introduce an international audience to Guyana’s historic and ongoing battle for self-determination and to sum up my observations for the progressive national forces in order to popularize ideas absent from the mainstream dialogue around the recent elections. I present the following ethnographic and political observations based on my time in Guyana and two plus decades of experience in different, converging fights for human and socio-economic rights across the Caribbean, Latin America, the U.S. and beyond.
Guyana’s fight is not an isolated national liberation struggle but rather one that plays out in the international arena of class struggle. There is a dialectical relationship between the sharpening internal and external contradictions in Guyana and around the world. A victory for the exploited classes anywhere in the world is a victory for the humble forces of every nation. From the perspective of the writer — positioned in the heart of the empire — the greatest act of solidarity with the valiant daughters and sons of Cuffy, Walter Rodney, Jane Phillips-Gay, the early Cheddi Jagan and so many other patriots is to weaken and defeat imperialism from within so that its tentacles are cut off and oppressed nations can at last breathe and prosper on their own terms.
Unlearning in order to Learn
Guyana is a forgotten nation of the Caribbean; a land of some 750,000 people; a blend of East Indian, African, Amerindian and European cultures. It is the largest country in the Caribbean region almost twice over with 214,970 square kilometers of land; larger than the rest of English-speaking West Indies put together. Rich with bauxite, manganese, diamonds, gold, timber, sugar and rice, Guyana has abundant natural resources and is home to a vast stretch of the Amazonian rain forest. Through the end of 2018, Exxon-Mobile continues to announce the discovery new oil deposits, including one of their latest grabs, 295 feet (90 meters) of high-quality oil reservoirs 120 miles off the coast of Guyana.
How then is such a rich country the second poorest in the Western Hemisphere with a yearly per capita income of only $3,596? This is the principle contradiction plaguing Guyana today and from which all other secondary contradictions flow.
While this is not an attempt at an exhaustive history of Guyana, it is vital to set the stage for how Guyanese society has arrived at where it is today.
History is the contested territory of the conquerors and the conquered. The conquerors of Guyana at this point in the historical timeline have a monopoly over colonial and post-colonial history and recount it in a self-serving way. Without a historical foundation it would be impossible to understand where Guyana stands in the world and easy to fall into the pity/charity model projected by the powers that be.
How the British Underdeveloped Guyana
When the Dutch first invaded the northeastern coast of “South America,” the land was populated by different native peoples. The Arawaks, Caribs and Tainos defied Dutch and later British designs to enslave them. They fought back, with many fleeing into the interior hinterland away from the coastal colonial settlements to live to fight another day. The colonizers turned to Africa for their labor-force abducting tens of thousands of Africans into chattel bondage.
Positioned six feet below sea level, Guyana’s coast was not ideal terrain for a plantation society. Rebellions proliferated as the slaves were forced to clear away colossal tracts of swamp to pave the way for sugar cane plantations. The British — at this point in full control of the colony, having thwarted their colonial rivals — found themselves unable to control the Black populations in Guyana, Barbados, Jamaica and beyond. Unable to secure a stable mode of production, the British Empire — under the fig leaf of a moral crusade against chattel slavery — looked to their largest colony thousands of miles across the sea, India and “reinvented slavery” for a third time. Taking advantage of the historic immiseration of India — to which they were the chief contributors — British colonial overlords coerced tens of thousands of Indians to take the trek to the new world as indentured servants. [1]
British land barons enslaved the Indians, using them as a massive strike-breaking force, displacing the African labor force from their position of leverage as the main producers of wealth. Without extending this introduction unnecessarily, it is sufficient to say that these two mass abductions laid the base for the unique historical formation known first to the world as British Guiana and then later Guyana.[2] The greatest fear of the colonial power structure was the unity of these two nationalities. In 2017, the neo-colonial elites remain fearful of the unity of the African and Indian Guyanese people. The potential for the united political coordination of the nation’s producing class and their upsurge against the usurpers of their wealth is indeed their greatest fear.
Dr. Rodney addresses a multinational crowd.
The Global Class Struggle
Six years before Cuba rebelled against foreign domination in 1959, Guyana had its own revolt, the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere in the Cold War era.
The Cold War is a misnomer for what was a Global Class Conflict that played out from 1949 to 1989. Across the world, the principle battlefields were Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. In the aftermath of WWII — with the support of the Soviet Union, the Socialist Block and China — oppressed nations across the Global South stood up to colonialism, actively turning on centuries of foreign-directed impoverishment. The United States government and their junior partners had other ideas and acted wherever they could to ensure that the newly “independent” colonized countries “stayed in their place” and continued to play their role in the international economic system as providers of cheap natural resources and cheap labor. This involved outright assassination of anti-imperialist leaders like Patrice Lumumba and Amilcar Cabral, proxy wars fought against Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and beyond and outright invasions and occupations as in the case of Socialist Korea (1950-3), the Dominican Republic (1965) and Vietnam (1962-1975). These are merely a few prominent examples of nations that imperialism whipped back into their place because they stood up for their self-determination.
A more thorough examination of these third world liberation struggles reveals a death toll in the range of 23,000,000 when we calculate all of those who valiantly fought to overturn centuries of humiliation.[3] Guyana was but one battleground where the workers of the world offered their most courageous and eloquent daughters and sons to the global liberation struggle.
The Ascent of Cheddi Jagan
While still maintaining the ultimate say in all things Guyanese, the British allowed “free elections” in 1953. The People’s Progressive Parties (PPP), led by dentist Cheddi Jagan and lawyer Forbes Burnham, won 75% of the seats in parliament and set out to begin to reverse centuries of political, economic and cultural underdevelopment.
After only 177 days of PPP governance, the British carried out “Operation Windsor,” invading Guyana and making sure nothing was uprooted from its proper place. Guyana’s experience portended the occupations Haiti endured in 1991 and now endures since 2004 under the control of thousands of invading US and UN troops (a “humanitarian” cover for the US). The Lavalas party played a similar role to the PPP in attempting to spearhead a national effort to challenge class relations as they existed.
Basdeo Mangru’s Indians in Guyana charts the rise of Cheddi Jagan as a fearless spokesperson for the Indian sugar workers of the Berbice region of Guyana. The 1948 Enmore massacre of Indian sugarcane plantation workers became a rallying point for the fledgling movement. Jagan along with other Indian and African leaders formed the original People’s Progressive Party (PPP) which would soon emerge as a paragon of working class unity, cutting across ethnic differences. The PPP was an example of a visionary, self-sacrificing leadership grounded in the everyday realities and struggles of Guyana’s producing classes. For a further consideration of the lessons the early PPP left us, see Kimani S. Nehusi’s essay “The Development of Political Organization up to 1953” and Walter Rodney Speaks.
Despite the efforts to thwart PPP leadership, the party continued to grow and again won the presidency in 1957 and 1961. Cheddi Jagan’s autobiography The West on Trial captures the solidification of the PPP as a unifying anti-exploitation leadership and the challenges that this endeavor brought with it. Jagan details what those both hopeful and cruel days looked like in the early 1960’s, from the perspective of an embryonic government attempting to break out of the Western sphere of influence. British and US intelligence worked with their old partners to foment dissent, strikes, and mobs to attack the new liberation project. Because Jagan was Indian the media and the M15 — British intelligence — tapped into the ancient racial powder keg and organized mobs of disenfranchised Africans to attack random Indians and government supporters.
Writer GHK Lall has written two books Sitting on a Racial Volcano and A National Cesspool of Greed, Duplicity and Corruption which document this tried-and-true strategy of racialism that government elites resorted to in order to break the unity of Indian and Afro-Guyanese peoples. Whipping up hysteria, they warned that Jagan represented a threat to the security of Afro-Guyanese interests. In a series of dynamite attacks prodded on by foreign intelligence agencies, the mobs tried to kill the people’s unifier himself. The race riots left 170 dead. Duped and manipulated, the African working-class lined up on the wrong side of the class barricades.
A Blueprint for Imperialist Intervention
The old colonial powers simultaneously unleashed an economic war against Guyana sending a clear message that life under a forward-thinking PPP administration would be intolerable for everyday people. In Venezuela today, this economic war comes in the form of scarcity, devaluation of the Bolivar and isolation. The imperial strategy is to make life unlivable and foster dissent from within. The 1980 Mariel boat exodus and subsequent economic migrations from Cuba were the results of this same blockading and squeezing strategy. This is all well-documented now and FOIA requests have laid bare thousands of pages of State Department memorandums outlining the execution of such plans on nations who dare to be self-determining.
There is a very important lesson that we can draw from the West’s destabilization campaigns against Guyana in the 1960’s. U.S. intelligence will work with and through any forces — even those that are seemingly progressive (the Kurds, indigenous nations in Ecuador or Bolivia, etc.)— to make life ungovernable for a left-wing government that they cannot control. In Poland, the Reaganites used the Solidarity trade union movement in the 1980’s. In the cases of El Salvador and Mozambique, the U.S. financed murderous death squads — which they presented to the world as freedom fighters — to stamp out any seeds of hope in these burgeoning worker’s states. In Cuba, most recently they sought to enroll Rastafaris and the hip hop movement in a new anti-government protest movement. The forces of reaction will not hesitate to form unconventional temporary alliances aimed at the long-term crippling of nationalist leadership and workers’ states.
Those claiming to be socialists should keep these decades-old tactics in mind today after the same imperial forces overthrew the Libyan state and seek to do the same in Syria. Before this record of Western meddling, Jagan concluded that the West was not merely on trial but was guilty of ensuring that Guyana remained a deeply stratified and exploitable neo-colony. The exploiter nations continued to be what they have always been in the words of the Dr. of History Walter Rodney, “one armed bandits” that took took took and left nothing to benefit Guyana.
The Paramountcy of the Nation’s Sell-Outs
In Guyana, British and U.S. imperialism acted to maintain their interests through a proxy government in the form of the People’s National Congress (PNC). Framed as the party that represented African interests, the PNC ruled with an iron fist from 1964 to 1980. The PNC “nationalized” the major means of production not for the benefit of everyday people but rather for the benefit of a small clique and their foreign backers. Nationalism in name was theft in deed. Jagan’s former comrade, the Afro-Guyanese politician Forbes Burnham, became imperialism’s man on the ground in Guyana. While the Burnham and the PNC postured as the representatives of the most oppressed strata of the population, in actuality they ruled with violence, patronage and corruption in collaboration with the multinationals, the IMF and the World Bank. Throughout this bloody period, official U.S. government correspondence concerning Guyana always maintained that “the rule of law flourished” (Dr. Odeen Ishmael, “The Walter Rodney Files”). The forces of reaction didn’t care about the color of the skin of Guyana’s governing class as long as they managed national affairs to benefit U.S. interests. The elites had a level of class-consciousness and a degree of unity that their rival class aspires to one day achieve.
Dr. Walter Rodney — Pan-Africanist and Marxist scholar and leader of the Working People’s Alliance — called 1979 the “Year of the Turn,” vowing to seize power from the lackey Burnham. The WPA — working in collaboration with the PPP and other nationalist forces — exposed the hypocrisy of the PNC. Those who claimed to defend African interests had done very little to ameliorate African suffering. In the words of Jagan:
“We don’t describe this government as a Black government. We say it’s got a duel tendency — that is in relation to other races it is Black, but at the same time it’s anti-working class, and the majority of the Blacks are working people therefore it’s against Black people.”
The WPA illustrated that nationalism failed to solve the colonial problem. The former colonialists were sophisticated enough to rule through Black junior partners giving them a certain amount of power as long as they maintained business as usual. From the WPA’s perspective, what was needed then was a complete overthrow of the neo-colonial state and a transformation of property relations.
This is what made the African Rodney such a formidable challenge to the Burnham tyranny. Because of his integrity, reputation and leadership, Rodney cut across ethnic divisions. How could Burnham resort to tribalism if his chief adversary was also an African? He had no choice but to resort to naked repression. The Burnham state repressed trade union activity, organizing efforts in the sugar cane industry and any critic of its policies. Scholar Clive Thomas documented the “fascistisazation of the state” in an article entitled “State Capitalism in Guyana.” According to Thomas, 1 out of every 35 citizens was enrolled in a spy or security agency to repress dissent before it could spread. The state raided WPA meetings, beating up and intimidating its members. On June 13th 1980, a military agent assassinated Rodney. They rounded up, incarcerated or exiled rest of the WPA’s leadership. In the words of Bajan poet George Lamming, “Guyana had become a land of horrors.”
Who is to Blame?
This concise survey of foreign meddling in Guyanese affairs is especially important for the nationalist youth of Guyana. It is impossible to understand what Guyana has become without understanding the centuries-long underdevelopment of the productive forces of the country.
At a gathering with youth leaders in Georgetown this winter, I was confronted by a deep-felt pessimism about Guyanese people and their potential to organize. The barrage of finger-pointing and self-blame would lead an impressionable participant to conclude that Guyanese people were too brainwashed, lazy and impotent to rise up on their oppression. Intrigued by the portrait of resistance that I presented of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the social upheaval that rocked the U.S. for the past three years, many youth expressed defeatism remarking that Guyana would never see these types of intense social confrontations. An interesting exchange ensued in which I responded to their cynicism assuring them that we too saw before us a sleeping giant that was most difficult to stir into motion. These groundations sought to refocus the blame not on the oppressed but on the oppressor.
Mired in unemployment, poverty, mud and ideological sewerage, what hopes do the dispossessed have? Overwhelmed at the despair that towers over them, they strike out against those who are closest to them, their own sisters and brothers and themselves. According to Kaieteur news — one of Georgetown’s most circulated newspapers — Guyana has the highest rate of suicide in the region and is number 15 in the world in terms of homicide rates. But this has nothing to do with any hustling, huckstering or homicidal instincts of the poor and everything to do with a completely hostile economic terrain. People’s attitudes do not create economic realities. Quite the opposite. What is human behavior but a reflection of the social conditions that gave birth to them? There will be no social harmony or healing within Guyana until these larger systemic issues are addressed from the roots up. While my presentation may have given the impression that New York City and the U.S. were on the verge of revolution, as organizers we in fact suffer through the same frustrations and pessimism that they were describing. How important to remember the creative force of the masses, to never lose faith in the people and to harness the only social force capable of breaking the oppression and making history.
The Zombification of Society
Albouystown offers a glimpse into the soul of Guyana. This community has a reputation for crime, gangs and violence. Those who are not from Albouystown do not go to Albouystown. It is the Trenchtown of Guyana only mentioned selectively in the media after the latest harrowing case of rape or murder.
Dilapidated wooden homes are propped up on perilous stilts to elevate families above the flooding. It is sealed off with a deteriorated cemetery to its north, overflowing moats and hastily constructed wooden bridges to the south and west and the Starbroek market to the East. Crews of unemployed men gather around corners “gaffin,”[4] sharing a drink or a smoke. The scenes of joblessness and idleness were no different than the gullies of Rio de Janeiro, Santo Domingo, Kingston or the South Bronx. Trash was strewn through the streets and was piled up blocking the shoddily-constructed motes used for drainage. Abandoned to navigate hostile social terrain, the mostly Black sufferahs competed with one another over what measly crumbs the system tossed down to them.[5] This was the product of five centuries of underdevelopment and not of shiftless youth who do not care about their community, as the mainstream daily newspapers drill into us.
As was customary for many of these brothers, they stayed up all night hanging out listening to reggae and hip-hop while the intoxication took its toll on people’s senses. I made an appearance with the local boxing crew taking in a few Banks, the national beer. Surprised at my presence in his neighborhood, one young man dressed like a Rasta, was making his rounds and stopped by my side, repeating to me “I is the agency. You not talk them.” He was telling me that if I wanted to arrange something with one of the women who were there, he was the man to talk to and he would charge a reasonable sum to hire out a woman for me. I calmly rejected his offer a handful of times but he was persistent.
The next character to enter onto the scene was Akeem, a self-described street fighter of 1000+ victories. A large man, stocky and built, he weighed in at a solid 250 lbs. The hair emanating out of his nose and ears told me he was in his late 50’s but his physique told another story. He entertained himself yelling vile phrases at the young women grinding on top of one another. He was cruising for a bruising or perhaps cruising to dish out a bruising. He moved in on one girl then another alternating between unsolicited grinds and gropes. A young woman Tandy acted as a spokeswoman for the group and got into his face telling him to “leave them the f*^$ alone.” The clash only emboldened him. It was what Akeem was looking for. He cursed her out until the confrontation escalated and he was face to face with four of five women. He ripped off his shirt and threw a flurry of punches into the air, a few feet from the women, with the hand speed of a man twice as young. Akeem was ignored for long enough that he disappeared back into the night. The same aspiring pimp made another round narrating the scene: “Dem old men……….dem freeeeesh.” His timing and succinct sayings made it seem like he was the timeless ephemeral sage of Albouystown.
The hours passed, the hustlers came and went and the beers vanished into thin air. As I looked out over the winin’ multitudes, I asked myself: how many potentially-free spirits were hemmed in, unable to roam a land so immense?[6]
The night offered myriad forms of escape from social reality but the light soon again exposed the pain before us. Why was so much beautiful human potential stuffed into pockets of doom bound for self-conflagration? It must have appeared that I was bored with the scene before me and falling asleep because the night’s narrator made a final round giving me a whack on the back, “Why ya slumbering?” He pointed up at the mighty sky “The sun come up…….…zooombies!”
Divided and Conquered
I arrived in Guyana with my own glorified assumptions. I never thought a poor person would hold up Forbes Burnham as a hero, someone I considered a pawn on the global chessboard. Imagine my surprise to hear Afro-Guyanese slum communities lionize him as their defender in recent history. I debated with “6 Heads” Lewis himself and his entourage at the “Forgotten Youth” Boxing Club. I stated what I thought was common knowledge, what any anti-imperialist knows to be true, that the former dictator Burnham was nothing more than a puppet of the U.S.’s interests in this region of the world. They were shocked that I introduced this view. They laughed at me. They asked me if I had ever heard of “Apaan Jhat.” This Hindi phrase is a recycled colonial stereotype that East Indians only look out for themselves and “put their race first.” I asked if they had ever heard of U.S. based theft machines called multinationals? The boxers, trainers and observers began to call over their colleagues and asked me to repeat my statements.
Angry at their condition, there was a deep distrust of Indians who were presented as overly-ambitious and avaricious. When I heard the derisive comments directed towards fellow Guyanese I asked about the true puppet-masters — white, Black, Indian or otherwise — who presided over the circus of self-hatred? My interventions resonated with some of the brothers but others were too busy surviving to care. What mattered most was tomorrow’s rice and dhal.[7] After a few rounds of banter, I realized I was wasting my time and returned to the punching bags guaranteed of some return on my investment.
I thought Walter Rodney would be a rallying point for all downtrodden segments of society to reread and revisit in their quest for self-liberation. Many people under 35 didn’t even know who he was. Others remembered him but didn’t see how his life was relevant in anyway today. Others repeated the official government line that he was responsible for his own “misadventure.” They accused him of plotting violence, conflating the everyday violence meted out by the post-colonial state with the right of oppressed people to defend themselves. These were reminders of how thoroughly the oppressors are able to disconnect us from our roots of rebellion. Our enemies are presented to as our protectors and our heroes as irresponsible adventurers or radical terrorists. Under our very noses, history is turned upside down onto its head.
The “respected” press functions as tabloids to instill fear into the public. Newspaper headlines and front-page photographs captured a horrific murder, rape, burglary or tale of bribery on the part of the opposition or the government. The media has the power to make and break leaders with the publication of a story. Beyond some harmless tales of philanthropic generosity and cricket scores nowhere was there anything uplifting to be found for the would-be mutineer. Face to face with a mutilated image of one’s self and one’s history, young Rodney’s were aborted before it was born. Distorted images line the soul of a society stripped of meaning. The sufferah’s collective self-esteem and faith in one another is so wounded that all that can be heard in the echo-chambers is the call for more prisons, more police and stiffer punishment for criminals. These were all reasons that when I spoke to Guyanese audiences I shifted my focus away from internal affairs. They caused discord whereas international struggles seem to inspire more. They could clearly see the racial and class contradictions in Ferguson, Santo Domingo or New York even if they presently considered their own reality daunting and ultimate victory unlikely.
Pradoville: The Other Side of Town
At a conference, speakers asked journalists and camera-men if they could stop recording so that they might speak anonymously for fear of repercussions for their critical commentary. Considering the ongoing political repression, I have altered enough details in my writing to ensure that nothing can be traced back to anyone. Any approximations to real people are purely coincidental.
After providing a brief tour of one pole of Georgetown, let us now enter into Pradoville, the opposite extreme. Here stand gated communities where the most prestigious and powerful of citizens live. Individual mansions cover acre upon acre of land. Why does one family of four need sixteen rooms when so many other families are crowded into rickety hovels? There is meticulous security detail, private gardens, in-ground swimming pools and all the amenities the poor can only get close to in their dreams. An inner-glimpse of this world exposes the lie that Guyana is “poor.”
A call came in from the ministry of Foreign Trade and International Development that the chief minister was willing to meet with me. I had to first pass their security clearance by providing my name and passport number. The doors that open up when you are a white American professor traveling in the exploited periphery of the world. I have been spoiled in my travels to meet and interrogate leaders from all sides of the political spectrum, absorbing pages of notes and political lessons in the process.
How this meeting came to be traverses such a web of relationships that it remains confusing to recount. I studied Latin American literature and graduated from the university with a fellow who went on to become a very successful real estate salesman. He married a Haitian woman from New York. She grew up in the Caribbean capital of the world aka Flatbush, Brooklyn. Her best friend growing up was Guyanese. This Guyanese woman had some childhood friends back home who received me and showed me around. One of the friend’s friends was close to the wife of the aforementioned minister. And this was how I came face to face with Lester Carmichael, one of the most powerful military and economic men in all of Guyana.
Afro-Saxons
When I arrived at Paradise Island, an exclusive American restaurant, the Minister was sitting with his entourage, two university professors who were former military attaches and two Guyanese businessmen who had recently retired to their homeland after a lifetime living in Toronto, London and Paris.
In hours of banter over scotch and appetizers, Carmichael touched upon race relations in the US versus the Caribbean, recent US films, international travel, the military structure of Guyana and a seemingly infinite assortment of other topics. Post-doctoral degrees from Ivy League institutions, a consultant overseeing various international think tanks, one of the top military ranks in the country… this man was beyond accomplished. I went toe-to-toe with him on some themes but retreated back on others.
Minister Lester Carmichael was holding court. This was his show. He measured who would speak and for how long. He was not going to be challenged. It was as though the very syncopations of our breath occurred on his terms. And I was not going to challenge him. Not tonight anyway. I knew how far I could push and prod. I didn’t want dinner to end prematurely because I didn’t drink to his homophobic jokes. This was an opportunity for patient intelligence-gathering not aggressive political polemics. I could see clearly who he was but he could not put together who I was. His security detail claimed to have performed a background check on me. I’m glad google was not part of their reconnaissance. Besides he was paying and no matter how over-valued my dollars were, I had no interest in footing any part of the handsome bill.
His mannerisms, choice of words and world outlook would have made the Duke of Edinburgh proud. Ostensibly a Black man, he had been reared an “Afro-Saxon,” who existed as a necessary cog in the everyday functioning of white supremacy. Here was a soul surrounded by white mirrors, a snapshot of the servile class that was mis-guiding Guyana to continued doom.
The decorated minister — a potential future candidate for president — sought to make others insecure when they spoke in his presence. He couldn’t be challenged. One of the businessmen became the butt of his jokes. He had been assigned the role of court jester and was ultimately confined to silence by the chief. Finally, just after midnight, he turned to me and asked “So what is it that you are after? What do you want to ask me?” A decent ethnographer always has one hundred questions in his arsenal. I began to unleash them. I knew he could not give me any of the true answers I was looking for but what he could provide was a reaffirmation of the ruling clique’s worldview. I played his game and began to inquire about the assassination of Walter Rodney.
He immediately downplayed the importance of Dr. Rodney’s research. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a seminal work on the underdevelopment of African societies in order to develop the colonial metropolitan centers from Lisbon to Brussels. Our omniscient chief claimed Rodney’s research was shoddy and discredited. He claimed to have met with Ethiopian economists and historians who exposed Rodney’s slapdash work. When I asked him for specific examples he could provide none. He attacked Rodney’s persona mimicking the line that he was responsible for his own death. Here was a man who quite possibly knew the inside story behind the walkie-talkie bomb that took Rodney’s life but parroted the line that the victim was responsible for his own murder. Strange that a man with such “African pride,” a self-described “Yoruba man” and “descendants of chiefs,” would attack the ultimate martyr of Pan-African empowerment and unity.
After dinner he offered me a ride assuming I was staying in the posh Princess Hotel/Casino. He was surprised when I informed him I was staying in Kitty, a majority Black, working-class community. He drove a crimson 2015 Cadillac Escalade that towered over the other vehicles in those narrow streets. As he drove around Georgetown, I continued to pose questions. The minister could not have been more disconnected from everyday Guyanese reality. He explained apologetically that his driver was on vacation so he was driving tonight. Soon, it became clear he had no clue where he was going.
We arrived at an intersection and he rolled down his tinted windows to ask directions. I was surprised he didn’t ask his built in Siri navigation system. Perhaps since he was not accustomed to driving he didn’t know how to use it. A lone Indian man was staggering around at the stoplight. Lester called him over. A most frightening, dehumanizing image awaited him! It appeared the man had been scalped. The entire top of his head was covered in blood and was oozing a multicolored infection. It was a gruesome sight but our protagonist did not miss a beat. As nonchalant as could be, he simply inquired where the street was that we were looking for. The man staggered into the back window, mumbling and motioning unintelligibly. Before any of us could even wrap our heads around the intensity of the situation, Carmichael rolled the window back up and we were off.
We crossed a cemetery where there was an intense smell emanating from the corpses. I inquired if the smell had to do with the difficulty of burying bodies six feet deep when the land of Guyana itself was six feet under sea level. He feigned ignorance claiming that he had never noticed the stench before. It was as if any reminder of the desperate state of the city forced the chief to look reality square in its eyes and that was too uncomfortable for him. The nation’s leaders were more in touch with American NFL playoff results and with snowstorms in the U.S.’s Northeast than they were with the realities of their own people. This strong, outwardly bold Black general’s soul had been molded in the furnace of white supremacy. He had learned coming up through the military academy how to play the game of acquiescence. The colonizing mission could not continue without the willful participation of the Afrostocracy. The enemy then comes in white or Black face. Papa Doc Duvalier, Blaise Compaore, Mobutu Sese Seko…there have been an abundance of Black leaders who were white-hearted and served the interests of capitalism.
Days later I bumped into this same homeless, hopeless man on a corner not too far from the one we had passed. His head was still half-torn off. A local crew on the corner, gathered around a coconut water stand, informed me a dog had bitten the top of his head over a year ago. There had never been any intervention on the part of the state to help this clearly troubled man. The depreciation of his life was a snapshot of the neglect, disconnect and abandonment that characterizes social affairs in Guyana. What a perfect contrast to our prior protagonist, who is a sure future presidential contender and a safe bet to quietly preside over this sad state of affairs.
Jerry’s
There are few foreigners in Georgetown except for a scattering of missionaries, Peace Corps volunteers and NGO employees. This is a forgotten world. From the perspective of the privileged, “there is nothing to see in GT.” The tourist who passes through Georgetown very rarely leaves the airport or the main hotel en route to the Amazon or Kaieteur Falls, the largest single drop waterfall on earth. Because of the dynamic with the swamps and muddy beach waters and the reputation for being a “violent, backwater third world country,” there was no tourist base. Unlike Jamaica or the Dominican Republic, there was no culture of hustling foreigners because there were no foreigners to hustle.
On Old Year’s Night, I stumbled upon two white guys who stood out as much as I must have. They were celebrating in front of Jerry’s, a notorious after-hours spot in the poor neighborhood of South Cummingsburg. Though there was often no running water and nothing but a fan to confront 90 degree plus tropical temperatures, Jerry’s was listed as a 4 star hotel. I took up residence there for one night that I would not soon forget. The music blared out at from 9pm until sunrise puncturing eardrums and affording the guests no sleep. If I couldn’t sleep through the merriment I decided I would join it. I joined hundreds of people in the streets. I looked up at the second floor where my room was. In the next room over a small child peered out over the street hiding behind the blinds.
The two white foreigners made their way toward me amidst the throngs of revelers. I thought they were Dutch or who knows from where. It is always interesting to imagine someone’s story without knowing them. Phil was from Utah and Steve was from Long Island, N.Y. They were American Airline pilots in their late 40’s. They were both half-cocked, slurring their words and smoking everything in sight. I had never been so close to the pilots who keep us safe when we are 40,000 feet aboveground. They carried big bellies and big wallets. They each had two local women in their 20’s grinding on them. They paid the young women to be their girlfriends when they flew to Guyana. I listened to their stories while sharing my own, all the while wondering if their wives and children back home could ever imagine what they were up to. I was reminded that only a new relationship between the exploiter and exploited nations could one day give birth to a set of new social relations between the world’s people based on mutual respect.
Before us was the neo liberal zombification of society where people have been deprived of life, the ability to grow and question the world around them. Dignity was a casualty of the free market where free foxes strolled among free chickens. I jotted down some slang words in my pocket notebook, tucked my anger away for the time being and disappeared into the night.
“Visa!!!”
One feels the neglect and corruption omnipresent.
Drainage is a central issue. The Dutch and later the British built this colony atop a most inhospitable swamp. Slaves first had to clear the land and build up infrastructure on top of mangroves. This was done for quick sugar cane profits so questions of human movement, vehicular traffic and public health were never addressed. The residential segregation reflects this.
Guyana has among the highest rates of unemployment alcoholism and suicide in the world. Samuel earns US $300 a month for 50 hour weeks of repetitive bar-back work. He threw up his hands asking me rhetorically “why would I want to stay here? The economy offers us nothing here.”
The three options for working class Afro- and Indian-Guyanese youth are migrate, hustle or dig out sludge from moats for a few dollars a day. Capitalism permits token numbers to slip through the cracks but the overall economic forecast is bleak with little immediate chance of social revolt. The subconscious message that descends from the summits of society is clear: Swim if you can, swim if you can make it, swim as far from here as you can.
Just during the years 1970 to 1980 at the height of the Burnham dictatorship more than 90,000 Guyanese citizens left their homeland to try their luck abroad. (Thomas 382) This has included a high percentage of college educated professionals constituting a brain drain that sucks the country dry of many talented people. These are the challenges faced by youthful visionaries and organizers. One activist — himself forced to spend a part of his youth in London — described the journey of Guyanese youth in the following terms (and here I paraphrase because I was so lost in his enthusiasm I could only get down a note at the end of his remarks): “We are like salmon. We hatch and we swim upstream dodging trash, dodging stray police bullets…swimming swimming…dodging thieves in the night, dodging corrupt government officials. And then if we are lucky…Visa!!! If we survive we leap up to grab a visa and get as far away from here as possible.” His message was clear: It is not easy to be a patriot in a country that awards silence and conformity and punishes patriotism.
A young woman shared her story of being forced to leave for Toronto with her family. Now having returned home to contribute to her homeland’s development, she stayed in touch with her Canadian friends. She related how when she shared photos or skyped with her friends back in Toronto she marveled at the beautiful landscape in the background. She felt trapped in a Georgetown overrun by flooded ditches, sewerage and streets strewn with trash. While she was half-sarcastic her anecdote revealed some powerful truths. I quoted Rodney challenging who was ultimately responsible for the Guyana’s descent into this hellish situation:
“Sales operations in the United States and management of the fourteen (Unilever) plants are directed from Lever House on New York’s fashionable Park Avenue. You look at this tall, striking, glass-and-steel structure and you wonder how many hours of underpaid black labour and how many thousands of tons of underpriced palm oil, peanuts and cocoa it cost to build it.”
“The Future Belongs to those who Prepare for it Today.” –Malcolm X
I do not want my reflections to be interpreted as overly pessimistic. “The truth is always concrete.”[8] I paint a portrait of that which is so that we can analyze contemporary social phenomena and transform them. Nor do I pretend to be an objective social observer. In a world ablaze, neutrality is cowardice. Academia may have harnessed certain skills such as writing and research but it never gave me the tools to understand and analyze the balance of class forces that today characterize the neo-liberal, post-colonial unipolar world. I had to foster these skills on my own and learn from mentors who would almost never be allowed to teach this way in “respected” academia.
We cannot imagine a future of healing and growth for Guyana outside of a complete overhaul of the international economic system. Billions of dollars in the form of reparations are due to all countries which have merely passed from an official colonial position to a thinly disguised neo-colonial status. Careful research pinpoints those Dutch, British and American multinationals that have bled Guyana for so long. Alcoa, The World Bank, Reynolds and other major transnationals will one day be forced to pay the piper. Today, in an unintelligible twist of logic and doublespeak these corporations brag of their human rights records and charitable contributions to poor countries. Their public relations campaigns ring as genuine as those of unapologetic leeches who thank their hosts and unabashedly promise to continue living off of them far into the future.
The future of Guyana lies in closer cooperation with today’s maroon states — Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba — and other countries who may not be revolutionary but dare to survive outside of the sphere of US domination. Russia, Iran, Syria, China and Vietnam among others fall into this category. This is a Pan-Caribbean struggle, a Pan-African struggle, a tri-continental struggle and an international struggle. As this analysis has shown, the overlaps between what occurred in Haiti, Cape Verde, Guyana and the other oppressed nations of the Global South are glaring.
Rebirth will be painful and will carry with it all the risks and consequences that it ushered in for Guyana in 1953, 1963 and 1979. But there is no other way forward. The umbilical cord connecting Caribbean states to the west has been infected from day one. We must detonate the illusions: “Education is the key to success.” Whose education? Whose success? There is no room for more than a few of us at the top. This system is not designed for us. “Pull yourselves up by the bootstraps.” Unemployment, low wages, ignominious service jobs, fake smiles. This alien system is not of our creation. It is not a question of navigating it but of uprooting it. Is this new president David Granger’s vision? Or does he plan to feed more sand to the desert?
How can the conscious youth leadership of Guyana return to the ideals and commitment of the Political Affairs Committee, the predecessor to the original PPP (the PPP that spread out across the shanties, villages and hinterland to popularize the ideas of class unity and struggle)? How can Guyanese patriots emulate the work Walter Rodney was doing in Kingston, Dar-es-Salaam, Atlanta, Georgetown and beyond, channeling every manifestation of class discord into a mighty orchestra of rebellion? How can you redirect the focal point of people’s anger away from distractions (ethnic rivalries) towards the source of the contradictions? How can the masses seize the wealth and sharpen the struggle at the point of production, the site of the ultimate antagonism? Both nationalities are essentially at war over crumbs while the true bandits are free to pillage the land. “Not one blade of grass” serves as a national anthem of sorts promising that “No ain’ givin’ up no mountain, no tree, we ain’ givin up no river. That belongs to we! Not one blue saki, not one rice grain, not one Cuirass, not a blade of grass.”[9]
In the words of Che: “The present is of struggle. The future is ours.”
And what a future awaits us! To see the CEO’s stripped of all of their investments, power and hubris. To see the bribed politicians and their henchmen unseated from the summits of power and locked up in proletarian jails. To see the stock market lose all of its meaning. To see property relations overthrown as we know it. Investments would not hinge on exploitation but on empowerment. There would be fresh reserves of plentiful wealth to be invested in schools, nutrition, daycare, transportation and the fulfilling of all of society’s needs. International solidarity would come from other liberated territories to help train specialists in the scientific know-how necessary to develop the land and resources for the benefit of all. Exiled parents in Toronto and Richmond Hill, Queens would return home to their children. Children — today deprived of their dreams — could begin to tap into their infinite potential.
At long last Guyana would exist for the development of the Guyanese people. Only then will the nation’s motto of “one people one nation one destiny” finally ring true.
[1] “Coolie: How Britain Reinvented Slavery” is a documentary that covers this topic.
[2] Fiji and Trinidad share a similar trajectory as the British carried out equally nefarious colonial projects there dividing the two main ethnic groups against one another.
[3] For more on this topic, watch “Bolivarian Venezuela: People & Struggle of the 4th World War.” Read Noam Chomsky or Sam Marcy.
[4] Conversing.
[5] Rasta parlance for the oppressed.
[6] Winin’ as in sensual Caribbean dance moves.
[7] A type of peas typical in the Guyanese kitchen.
[8] Wilhelm Hegel.
[9] The saki and cuitlass are two types of birds in Guyana.
Like all colonial partitions, the border between the two countries divided peoples who had inhabited the region for thousands of years, namely the Mandinka, Serer and Wolof people.
This guarantees the Jammeh government a steady stream of foreign currency from anyone desiring to traverse Senegal, because they have no choice but to go through Gambia. The four times I traversed the border, I was at the mercy of despot’s military border agents who arbitrarily named their price for a toubab to pass.
Whisky-guzzling old men walked with young Gambian girls at their arm, employing them for the night. Crimson-colored Australian and English women —overexposed to the punishing sun— rented out dreadlocked, athletic local striplings to entertain them for the night.
