I have always had mixed emotions when I think about our “independence”. I am old enough to have experienced firsthand the violent wrenching apart of our peoples that preceded this supposedly blessed state and left it in “scare quotes” for me ever since. I was in short-pants as the Police fired tear gas to clear “peaceful protesters” squatting on my primary school steps at Uitvlugt during the 80-day strike of 1962. It was an open secret, known even by schoolchildren, that the British and the US wanted the PPP out, and that the independence that was to come to Trinidad and Jamaica that year should have then been ours also.
By 1963, we had three schools in the three sections of my village as the madness expanded from Georgetown. Then, of course, there was the denouement of 1964, as Cheddi (as even schoolboys called him) made one last-ditch but futile attempt to reverse a history written (and funded) by “the best and brightest” of the West. 1964 saw ethnic cleansing in our country – and not only in Wismar – even before the term was invented. We became (and remain) more segregated than South Africa ever was. That’s “independence”.
Even then, I had my doubts that “independence” could deliver us to the promised land of economic development and political equality, which the politicians had assured would be ours once the “white man” was gone. It didn’t strike me as likely, given the deepening divisions that I experienced all around me every day in every activity – whether in school or in the wider world. Everything was now brewed through the prisms of “us” and “them”. The announced “national” motto, “One People, One Nation, One Destiny” was rather ironic – even aspirationally, given the continued opportunistic ethnic-centred politics. The rigging of the 1968 elections when I was in high school deepened my skepticism.
We were attempting to achieve an end-state in Guyana that our models – Britain, Europe and the US – had achieved only after undergoing sequentially, over several centuries, three massive macro-societal revolutions centred on national identity, political participation and economic distribution. Yet we had inherited a state, and not a nation, which was supposed to be resolved by a “motto”? Or inculcate the practice of democratic politics when the Government of the day rigged elections? Or achieve economic equity when members of other political parties were discriminated against in employment? How would we ever be independent?
More generally, how were we expected to pull together directly after independence, after the ethnically directed violence and ethnic cleansing of the early sixties? How could we chart a common course when “kick down the door bandits” were allowed to engage in ethnically directed depredations in the 1970s and 1980s? Or when the enormously enlarged Disciplined Forces looked the other way to deepen the Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma – that even if they achieved political office, their hold on political power would always be precarious? Or, in the last decade, after ethnically directed violence by criminals and reactive state-backed private contractors created ethnic killing fields on the East Coast of Demerara?
The present crop of PNC politicians has hardly progressed on these issues. For instance, Granger and his deputy, Harmon, had no compunction in raising the ethnic/racial bogeyman in W. Berbice after Henry cousins’ gruesome murders, knowing fully well this might precipitate African Guyanese violence against Indian Guyanese. Similarly, Granger felt comfortable to reject his own COI to shutter four sugar estates and throw 7000 mostly Indian Guyanese workers into the streets.
Politically, there was never any “struggle” for independence – just the struggle for accession to office. Burnham exploited the Ethnic Security Dilemma of African Guyanese – that they would be permanently excluded from office as the Indian Guyanese majority voted for the PPP in the majoritarian system – to have them support his elections rigging. Now that Guyana is a nation of minorities because of an emigration, the African Guyanese Ethnic Security Dilemma has been removed. This was demonstrated in 2015 when the PNC returned to office in coalition with the AFC. However, the PNC refused to be inclusive and allowed the PPP to agglomerate enough disappointed voters across the ethnic divide to return to office. The PNC, in refusing to accept the democratic decision, is trying to ensure that our “independence” remains a chimera.
Some “independence”.
