According to President Granger, Social Cohesion is now the official goal of the APNU/AFC coalition. While there have been valid complaints by many citizens who are still hazy about what is the end game, intuitively they accept that “cohesion” cannot be a “bad thing”. The commemoration of 50 years of our Independence poignantly brought to the fore rueful thoughts about “what could have been” if we had not been as divided as we have been during that time.
Guyanese do not need experts in sociology or politics to also apprehend that while social cohesion is a state of affairs that is desirable, there are no silver bullets to getting there. In other words they understand efforts must take place simultaneously in a whole number of dimensions – at a minimum including social, political, economic and cultural ones.
Starting with the last, the cultural problematic is fundamental because it plays such a key role in forming our individual and collective identities. Who we “are”. When we were brought to labour in the plantations the Europeans – in our case, first the Dutch and then the English – invented both “race” and “culture” to “keep us in our place”. Which is to say, subservient and second class at best. The Africans were described as “savages” who had no “culture” and as such their “bestial practices” were to be extirpated as a salutary practice. They were to be “thankful” and grateful for being “exposed to civilised culture”.
The problem, however, is that when one is imitating a “standard” that is intrinsically yoked to the physical characteristics of “race” then it becomes absolutely impossible to ever reach that standard. Even those “Coloureds” who because of the rape of African women, had “half” or “ three quarters” white “blood” could never become completely “civilized”. This did not stop many from trying, even into the present. This one-sided clash of the dominant “white European” culture with the “African” did produce a hybrid culture – called “Creole” – that was the lived experience of the ordinary African, who stubbornly retained aspects of ancestral culture.
Persons become individuals with distinct identities through their own experiences and inculcated beliefs to form their memories that act as narratives of their “selves”. But man, unlike other animals, is enmeshed in social relations in which his identity develops and in turn those social relations are generally mediated by cultural norms in both the public and private spheres. In a society that is culturally homogenous, these are quite integrated but if the two cultures are different and clash, as with ordinary Africans, this can cause dissonances for the individual.
For ordinary freed Africans, this strain to emulate white/European culture was much greater than the Coloureds, since they were seen by others as an intermediate group. They were relegated to the lowest strata who could only move up by becoming educated, acting “proper” in imitating white behaviour and marrying “fairer” to join the coloured. This constructed identity out of the values and beliefs of the culture form the framework for the individual’s interpretation and organisation of new experiences. This would become very relevant when new immigrants would be introduced into the society to provide cheap labour on the sugar plantations. And form a new basis of comparison.
It is of more than passing interest that when the Portuguese from Maderia were brought as indentured servants they were not then, nor later, classified as “European” – even though they were phenotypically that. They were “Portuguese” to the British and seen by the freed African people and later indentureds as such – never white, notwithstanding the pretensions of the ones who later moved up the economic and social ladder.
While they imitated the ruling British/European lifestyle, their Catholic variant of Christianity also served to distinguish them culturally. Many of the ones in the lower economic oracles intermarried with Africans and adopted Creole Culture. There were very few men among the Chinese who were brought as indentured labourers and most intermarried with locals and adopted Creole Culture even while contributing their cuisine to the new land.
(To be continued)
