Recognising ethnicity

President David Granger announced at the HSS’s Leonora Mela to commemorate Indian Indentureship Abolition Day (March 12) that forthwith, the day would be a recognised “Public day” in Guyana. The President also announced that May 3 will be declared as “Portuguese Arrival Day” just as January 12 was earlier recognised as “Chinese Arrival Day”. These moves signal an apparent reversal of the policy of the founder-leader of the PNC, Forbes Burnham, who decried the use of ethnic labels and had the names of the Indian (to Everest) and Chinese (to Cosmos) sports clubs changed. This is a positive step since it demonstrates an acceptance that citizens should have the right to define themselves within an overarching Guyanese nation.
In Guyana, the various ethnic groups – Portuguese, Indians and Chinese (and free Africans) – with the exception of the Amerindians were brought by the Whites from all parts of the world to replace the enslaved Africans after the abolition of slavery in 1834. Separated chronologically to a great extent, they were segregated into separate economic and geographical niches with profound and lasting consequences for their future relationships. While the separation may have prevented widespread clashes, it further reinforced the initial cleavages of race/ethnicity, language, religion and culture to demarcate social boundaries, which were distinct and have proven long lasting.
Guyanese politics, like all politics, is rooted in the structure of the society and the rules of the political game. The nature of the “faction” influences the political culture; political competition and any political conflict. Unfortunately, the nature of the salient cleavage has remained a contested topic in Guyana and the “conflict about the conflict” is a threshold issue that must be crossed before a stable democracy is established in Guyana. If the competitors for political power do not share a common framework for conceptualising their struggle, they would simply be talking past each other in any attempt at reconciliation. Political mobilisation is always done along some actual or potential fault-line, which has created political factions in the society.
In Guyana, the cultural differences and origins (ethnicity), co-joined with “race”, evolved as the most pertinent marker for political mobilisation. In his seminal work, Friedrich Barth argued that the defining feature of an ethnic group is not the particular elements of culture or kinship that differentiate it from other groups, but the mere fact that boundaries are perceived and persist. The membership criteria and the membership itself tends to change over time as people come and go and invent or develop new traditions and ways of life, but the group itself nevertheless endures as a way of structuring social life.
The dominant politicians of the modern era, especially Dr Cheddi Jagan and Mr Forbes Burnham, however, insisted that class was more “fundamental” and worked to ensure “class consciousness”. In this way, they avoided dealing with the central reality of political action – ethnicity. While most countries are multicultural, and the cultural differences may be the most common axis of differentiation and even political cleavage between the groups, the societies do not all inevitably become as divided as Guyana and a number of other countries have become.
In fact, these have earned themselves a special name in political science: deeply divided societies. The major variables in determining the difference in the intensity of the politics and whether the conflict may become undemocratic in multiethnic societies have been the rules of political competition, the relative sizes of the groups, the resources at their disposal and the strategies of their leaders.
In a world of scarce resources and all pervasive governments, politicians do not find it difficult to persuade fellow group members that their social, economic and identity interests are better served if their group controls the state – that is if they unite their political interests. The affirmation of themselves as a people and the economic interest served mutually reinforce each other.
The challenge for Guyana is not to make the struggle a win-win one.