Guyanese Narratives and Independence

Another May 26; another Independence Day. But are we any closer to becoming a nation than on that day in 1966 when we received all the symbols of “nationhood” – flag, national motto, national hero, pledge of allegiance, etc.? I say not, and this is so for so many reasons, not least of all because we have been unwilling to craft a national narrative on which we all agree. Right off the bat, there’s the date itself chosen by Burnham – to the PPP and most Indian Guyanese, it was a callous, cruel, permanent reminder of the violent ethnic cleansing of the Indians of Wismar. Benedict Anderson said nations are “imagined political communities”, and every nation that has amounted to something has a narrative that captures its essence and holds the people together. Americans, for instance, have their “American Dream” narrative – that if they work hard and play by the rules, the sky is the limit as regards their upward mobility. Whether it reflects their reality is another story.
To say that the nation is “imaginary” is not to assert that the narrative is a tissue of lies, but, as historian Ernst Renan noted, it is about what we choose to remember as well as to forget. Sixty years after independence, each of our groups still holds on to its own narratives, which, ever so often, clash. And it is these contending assertions we have to re-examine and arrive at some sort of modus vivendi over what to remember and forget if we are ever to become a nation.
Invariably, these nodes of disagreement have to do with one or the other group proffering reasons why they are exceptional and therefore must be exempted from the universal norm of equality to the national patrimony guaranteed to all citizens of the state. Some of these clashing claims are about “who suffered more”, “who arrived first”, or “who did more to build Guyana”. Such assertions buttress claims for preferential treatment that create tensions among our “six peoples”. Take, for instance, the oft-reiterated claim by ACDA that African Guyanese should receive 18 per cent of Guyana. They point to the fact that our Indigenous Peoples have been allocated 13.8 per cent of our land mass as precedent for their claim.
In the African Guyanese narrative, their justification for land is that during slavery, their labour was expropriated without any compensation to develop Guyana, and as such, it is morally appropriate as “reparations”. They also claim greater suffering than other groups and have even challenged the claim of the Indigenous Peoples to have arrived first. The frisson occasioned by that narrative is that, as pointed out by the Indigenous Peoples, they negotiated treaties with the European powers which asserted sovereignty over Guyana, allowing them rights over lands they had occupied “from times immemorial”. At Independence, Stephen Campbell, representative of the Indigenous Peoples, was a party to the team negotiating the terms of devolving power from Britain and had those rights incorporated in Annex C of that agreement.
The two claims are therefore not equivalent and ought not to be linked in any narrative. Then again, on the matter of “reparations”, the CARICOM Committee headed by Sir Hilary Beckles has explicitly made claims against the European powers, primarily Britain and Holland, which unconscionably benefited from the exploitation of African slave labour. The local Guyana Committee is the only one in the Caribbean that is seeking to simultaneously extract reparations from its own government. On a quite mundane level, doesn’t the local reparation claim undercut the larger moral and inchoate legal claim against the European nations?
But the danger in these kinds of narratives is they raise the issues of arrival, suffering, and contribution by some groups in such a manner that can lead to conflicting claims from other groups. For instance, during the period of indentureship, the Portuguese, Indian, Caribbean Africans, post-slavery Africans from Africa, and Chinese immigrants were all severely exploited and suffered immeasurably under the plantation regime. Should they also start claiming reparations against the Guyanese state in the form of land grants?
My suggestion is that we have to craft a narrative which accepts that as citizens, we have all suffered and contributed to the creation and building of Guyana. With new horizons opening up from the oil revenues, we should all enjoy equality of opportunity. Affirmative action, of course, can be taken for groups that we all agree were discriminated against.