Looking behind massacres

Aubrey Norton, joined by some other individuals from the African-Guyanese community, continue rejecting the term “massacre” to describe the May 25th atrocities at Wismar-Christiansburg. He uses the word “disturbances”. Last week, in my column “Wismar Massacre: What’s in a name?” I noted that “all Guyanese who want us to go forward more harmoniously – have to interrogate the group psychology which allowed, as the COI said, “a total section of a community (to be) attacked, outraged and subsequently had to be evacuated. Nearly all their property was maliciously destroyed, while the majority of their erstwhile friends and neighbours either took part in the destruction or stood idly by.” This week, I “interrogate the group psychology” of the African-Guyanese community at that time emphasizing that we should not engage in a fruitless “blame game” but rather learn from our history.
The use of a particular word to describe an event is one that should connote the actions of note in the event. In Wismar, it was the sudden and widespread violence inflicted on the Indian-Guyanese community by their African-Guyanese neighbours who “came down like the wolf on the fold”. The Commission – as does Norton – used the term “disturbances”. This is a favorite euphemism – along with “riots” – used by the British to preserve their legitimacy by suggesting a mere temporary breakdown of order to be quelled rather than unmasking systemic factors in operation.
These “disturbances”, however all have a political nexus that must be analysed. In the colonial era where the state and British capital were coincident, the word was used to describe workers’ strikes protesting their working conditions which was then put down by the “leaden argument” that killed dozens. In 1905, in Georgetown “riots” by the urban lumpen elements received the same condign treatment. In the 1960’s the competition to succeed the British took a dangerous ethnic turn when Burnham broke the unified national PPP when he mobilized African-Guyanese to oppose the PPP that was left with an overwhelming Indian-Guyanese base. And precipitated new “disturbances”.
By framing the political struggle as an ethnic one, the PNC exploited the historic grouse of African-Guyanese that Indian-Guyanese was the cause of their relative deprivation having “undercut” their wage demands. Burnham also exploited what we defined as the “African Security Dilemma”, by emphasizing the Indian-Guyanese numerical advantage under universal suffrage. Ironically, mobilizing along ethnic lines was defined as a devious “Indian” strategy simply because the Hindi – read “Indian” – term “Aapan Jhaat”, vote for your own” was in the public domain. The economic progress of the Indian-Guyanese community, which retained its immigrant economic drive was also identified as a threat to African Guyanese since, if they also acquired political power, African-Guyanese – in the contemporary words of future Nobel Prize winner Arthur Lewis – could be “exterminated”.
This fear had been explicitly raised since the 1920’s when the possibility of Guyana becoming an “Indian Colony” was raised as a means to secure new immigrant labour. In 1945, Critchlow somersaulted on an earlier call for universal franchise, because of the fear of Indian-Guyanese numbers. Burnham identified these fears when he was a law student in London in 1946 when he wrote to his sister Jessie “I feel strongly about the Indian attitude, but the time has not come yet for me to broadcast those feelings and muddy the waters.”
This feeling of being a people under existential economic and political siege by Indian-Guyanese was exploited in Wismar in May 1964 by the local PNC Legislative Member Robert Jordon, after an elderly African-Guyanese couple were murdered aback of Buxton in the midst of widespread tit-for-tat violence on East and West Coast Demerara. Social reality was solidified to define Indian-Guyanese as singular and therefore all complicit in the conspiracy to exterminate Africans. This framing justified the “condign” treatment of a massacre as a “necessary defense.”
On naming the Wismar May 25th events, the Legislative Assembly was convened on the same day. Burnham alluded to widespread coastal violence and, blaming the PPP for initiating it, callously noted: “action causes reaction and that what may start as an act of bravado may snowball into a holocaust.” A week later, in the same forum he declared: “…one notes the massacres and lawlessness on the West Coast and Wismar.” He admits there was a “massacre” at Wismar on May 25 but falsely equates it with what occurred across Guyana over the course of over three months.”
Norton is dangerously playing “follow the leader.”