At Independence, it was said with some regret, “We inherited a state but not a nation” yet our national motto declared: “One Nation, One People, One Destiny”. Even if it was merely aspirational, it confirmed the colonial assumption that an independent country was not just a territorial expression but one containing a populace with a common identity that made them into a “nation”. The organisation formed after WWII to accommodate the expected decolonisation wave, after all, was called the “United Nations”.
The State System that evolved in Europe after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 when the Holy Roman Empire dissolved, introduced the principle of “cuiusregio, eiusreligio” – the religion of the king is the religion of the people. In effect, with the pervasiveness of religion in the lives of the people in the individual states, but with the abandonment of a common language, Latin, each country evolved separate and distinct “cultures”. During the colonial era from the 17th to 20th Century, the inhabitants of European colonies were expected to imbibe and practise the cultures of the “mother country”.
To become “one nation” at Independence, it was expected that all the people of Guyana would practise one culture – British culture. In fact, before Independence, an anthropologist, RT Smith explained our ability to live together, even though we were “the land of six races”, was because everyone had a “white bias” in our world view. Our early leaders Dr Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham rejected much of the “white bias” as a “colonial mentality”, but their Marxist-based ideology still assumed the ideal of “one people”. Their “class bias” articulated the aspiration as “the small man is the real man”.
It was quite ironic even though these early leaders wanted a “unity” in the people, in order to secure political power they used whatever means at their disposal. One of those “means” was while all citizens might have had a “white bias” and used the language and premises of the “whites” to evaluate each other, they yet saw themselves as different because of their insertion into the country at different times and the different cultural repertoires they arrived with. In recognition of this reality, another anthropologist, MG Smith defined us as a “plural society”: the peoples of Guyana may live in one country, but expressed themselves through institutions that were significantly different because of religion and culture. In other words, we were ethnically different.
And it was along these ethnic cleavages the politicians mobilised before and after Independence. However, they introduced a schizophrenic element into the self-definition of Guyanese by publicly avowing our “unity” and “one nation, one people” while in private courting voters along ethnic lines.
Evidently reacting to this schizophrenic labelling of “identity” that has long fractured the country’s developmental efforts, the new APNU/AFC Government articulated as one of its major goals, the achievement of greater “social cohesion” in the society. It created a Ministry within the Ministry of the Presidency to achieve this state of affairs and on May 11 launched the first “National Social Cohesion Day”.
Delivering the feature address with much of his Cabinet and the diplomatic corps present, President David Granger declared: “Social cohesion recognises that our nation is now and always will be multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. Miscegenation is forever and I have recently seen the results of my DNA test so I’m forever mixed. Our diversity is an asset not a liability; we are proud to belong to a society of many faiths. We are proud of the tapestry of our ethnicity.”
It would appear that the President is clearly articulating a more nuanced vision of what our nation can be – a hyphenated rather than a claustrophobic, arbitrary “unitary” one. His comment about “miscegenation”, however, needs explication. Our Nobel Prize winning poet Dereck Walcott said, “Miscegenation means there’s something wrong genetically. Miscegenation is not an idea that we would have in the Caribbean.”
