Land of six races

Dear Editor,
“One People, One Space, One Destiny”. This caught my attention as I listened to the address of the Prime Minister of Burkina Faso to the General Assembly of the United Nations.
The audience of international delegates, and indeed the world watching on television, was told that those words comprise the motto of the Confederation of Sahel States. The aspiration, in 2016, is to further galvanise the peoples of three African nations belonging to different tribes into thinking and acting as one Confederation.
Guyana’s national motto, like others created in the 1960s as Great Britain relinquished colonial control over countries that today form the Commonwealth of Nations, reflects the coloniser leaving with goodwill and handing over to independent people the stable polity colonial management had created. Guyana’s “One People, One Nation, One Destiny” could easily have been Jamaica’s “Out Of Many, One People”.
Our national motto was not seriously intended to do more than congratulate the United Kingdom for giving the people of the former British Guiana the English language, the English education system, a British-styled civil service, and not driving on the right side of the road – but on the correct side! Unlike the AES’s motto coined in 2026 out of patriotically founded and supported military takeovers, our national motto neither generated nor fostered feelings of unity amongst Guyanese as one people over the past 60 years since independence.
It is good that we have continued to acknowledge we are a land of six races – perhaps not the same six as in 1966 – for our Portuguese-heritage brothers and sisters have never considered themselves White, although they are ever conscious that despite arriving as indentured servants, their European origin and pale skin afforded them many practical social benefits.
Guyana’s sixth race today is, in reality, made up of all who have any racial mix of Guyanese blood. Most “Puddagee” Guyanese are indeed mixed with a drop of some other Guyanese heritage.
To develop onwards and upward from this good starting position towards a true unity of Guyana’s sons and daughters, a unity that goes beyond the inherited British institutions that are an indelible part of what Guyana is, we need to truly aim to see ourselves as one Guyana.
Yes, One Guyana encompasses it all – One People, One Nation, One Destiny – in an easy two-word expression which, when uttered or even thought of, feels like Oneness… like togetherness… like just what it means: One Guyana.
Yours truly,
Ronald Bostwick