The gruesome murder of eleven-year-old Adrianna Younge has displayed a level of callousness and indifference to a common humanity that should shock the conscience of this nation. Only a few days before, three women had been brutally murdered by the husband of one, who had survived years of brutal abuse. It would not be hyperbolic to point out that hardly a week goes by without these acts of gratuitous violence being perpetuated by Guyanese on other Guyanese – mostly men against women. And the murders are only one end – the extreme end – of a spectrum of violence that begins from the quotidian child beatings, through armed robberies, rape, and domestic violence of terrifying horror. Thomas Hobbes, in the Epistle Dedicatory of De Cive, used the phrase “man to man is a wolf” to illustrate the brutish, anarchical and violent condition of man in the natural condition, prior to the establishment of a civil state.” It would seem that, notwithstanding we have a state, Guyana is in a moral abyss overrun by wolves.
What is at the root of these depravities? As with all human behaviour, there is no one clear-cut answer; but since the phenomenon is so pervasive, it would suggest that the causes are structural, rather than individual; and that the structural reasons go beyond the usual ethnic or class labels we assign to ourselves, since the perpetrators of the horrors span the ethnic and class divides. Violence, evidently, is the one type of behaviour that encompasses us all Guyanese.
And maybe we can do worse to begin with this fact as we begin to address this sickness. Guyana, we must concede, was spawned in violence when it was colonised by Europeans, who insisted that the Indigenous Peoples were not “civilised”, and THEREFORE it was justified not only to seize their lands, but to exterminate them, if necessary.
The symbiotic violence inflicted on our First Peoples, by pronouncing definitively that they had no culture or made no contribution to human knowledge, has become structurally entrenched in all operations of our state, society, and individual psyches. The violence was broadened and deepened when Africans were brought as slaves and defined as “chattel” – property on which violence could be inflicted as on the draught animals on the plantations. How could we expect this infliction of violence not to have an effect on the culture of slaves and their descendants? Fanon might have proposed the violence damaged the psyches of the coloniser and the colonised, but the former has moved on, leaving the latter to, at best, free themselves with “the tools of the master”.
The indentured who were brought to replace the ex-slaves – who refused to go along with the pretences of “free labour” – were interpellated in a Foucauldian regime of “discipline and punishment”, which turned the violent control mechanisms inwards and outwards. The point of this historical exercise in our present-day violent expressions is part and parcel of inherited, all-encompassing structures that envelop us all. Take the Police Force, which is supposed to “Serve and Protect”, and has been conferred with the state’s ultimate sanction: to take the lives of citizens in pursuit of this goal. This “Force”, however, as its name declares, was born into, nurtured, and is still sustained by, an institutional culture of “force”. Many of its members see the public as targets for graft and violence.
We can examine all the institutions in Guyana, public and private, and if a handful of them have reformed their authoritarian culture, that would be surprising. Starting with the immanent colonial authoritarian state augmented by the PNC under Burnham, this can be taken to absurd levels, such as having a “Human Rights Association” whose eponymous name is supposed to define its functions. But how many citizens have actually seen, or even know, the names of the members of this organisation? Citizens are treated as objects, and given no agency in articulating which of their rights are actually being violated. What do they know?
Can we be surprised that citizens are increasingly violent?
