The PPP’s announcement that March of this year will mark the 100th birth anniversary of its founder Cheddi Jagan, brings home the reality that change in the order of the world is inevitable. It was the Greek philosopher Zeno, who remarked that no one can step into the same river twice, as it constantly flows, so does the “moving finger” of fate. Cheddi Jagan was born into tumultuous but momentous times and perhaps, without committing the fallacy of retrospective determinism, we may speculate he was inevitably shaped by those times.
The son of parents who were both brought to Guyana by women who left India as single parents, he would have appreciated the aphorism of the man who would provide the ideology for his adult life: “men make their history, but not in circumstances of their making.” Jagan’s birth, one year after Indentureship from India had ended and in the year that the Great War (WWI) was to finally end, were in circumstances that had to have been very impactful.
With no additional indentured labourers to undercut the bargaining power of those time-expired ones who chose to remain on the sugar plantations, the struggle for better living conditions was being launched in far-away Georgetown where Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow was organising stevedores and would form the British Guiana Labour Union (BGLU) the following year. The sugar barons, with the connivance of the local Colonial State and the British Government, would attempt to recruit new labour for sugar from both India and Africa. Though unsuccessful, this effort would unleash powerful sentiments that would be fanned into ethnic fears in the succeeding decades.
It is said there are always silver linings behind dark clouds and for British Guiana the dark clouds of WWI provided at least two such linings. Firstly, it was competition for ships and manpower from India to the war-front in the Middle East more than anything else that led to the cessation of Indian Indentureship. Secondly, because of the German U-Boat threat to British ships in the Atlantic, rice shipments from Burma and India had to be curtailed and this gave a massive impetus to the fledgling Guyanese rice industry.
With Berbice having one of the healthiest climes in the colony, even though irrigation was a challenge, the Ancient County fast developed into a major producer of paddy, and with new mills opening up, of rice also. Cattle had also provided an alternative source of employment away from the sugar plantations by 1918. Cheddi Jagan, then, would grow up when the times were certainly “a changin’”.
His father had to have showed leadership skills to have become the “Head Driver” at Port Mourant Estate, and while he might not have acceded to the formal “junior staff” of the enterprise, would have been one of the most powerful individuals because of his access to the estate managers and his power to allocate field work. His de facto “middle class” status – at least to the workers in the fields – would have provided the perspective to enrol Cheddi Jagan at Queen’s College in far-away Georgetown, after the boy had completed primary school in Port Mourant.
The father obviously saw a future beyond the sugar fields or factory for his firstborn, but being located in those fields for his entire life, the father would have imparted some knowledge of the exploitative relationships spawned by what Cheddi was to later dub, “Bitter Sugar”. Jagan, of course, was to launch his political career in the bosom of sugar and those workers were to form the backbone of his struggle for Guyana’s freedom.
In this, the year of Cheddi Jagan’s birth centenary, it is, therefore, very ominous that the industry has been given such short shrift to have dismissed 5700 workers in a year, with no other source of employment in sight.
It would seem that there might be a direct effort to belittle the great man’s legacy, by some who are conversant with Guyana’s history.
