Your Eyewitness was pleased to read about the improvements being made in Albuoystown – which has long been one of our more notorious ghettoes. The other was Tiger Bay which seemed to’ve deteriorated out of existence as slow gentrification ate away at its southern border. The inimitable Mighty Sparrow had made the latter famous when he immortalized it his calypso, “BG War”. This was immediately following our Black Friday of Feb 16, 1962, when the PNC burnt down half of Georgetown in their opening salvo to remove the PPP Government. With some still beating war drums, his take is quite relevant: “Well they drop a hydrogen bomb in B.G./ Lord have mercy, they drop a hydrogen bomb in B.G./ Lord have mercy, Riot in town mama/ Ah hear the whole place on fire, From Kitty to the waterfront all that/ Burn down flat, flat, flat.”
Then the Master gave his take: “I ain’t care if the whole of B.G. burn down; I ain’t care if all of Bookers burn down/ But they will be putting me out meh way, If they tackle Tiger Bay/ And burn down the hotel, Where all meh WAHBEENS does stay!!” Tiger Bay was then a hive of urban slum life, with dozens of “hotels” – pronounced “hut-tel” – with rentals by the hour for the working girls dubbed “wabeens”!! “They lock up over a thousand people; Well that was trouble/ They send for Policemen in the country
To bring unity; But Police and all afraid/ Stand up and they watching stores get raid; Walk in the store take everything/ And when you done set fire to the building….A woman walk in a store on main street/ Slippers on she feet/ Dirty petticoat, long time straw hat; And she smelling worse than that!/ But she walk out like a lady; High heels, glasses, jewelry/ The straw hat she had on wearing before/ She take matches and she burn it inside the store!”
“They send for soldiers quite up in England; With big confusion/ They bring down warships with cannon like peas, To shoot Guyanese/ But Burnham said all right now, I’m the only man to stop this row/ He give we the signal and that’s the case, Now we have peace and quiet in the place.” This, of course, was Sparrow’s sly dig at Burnham, who’d replied, “He who calls off the dog owns the dog” to the request of the Governor to quell the riots.
Everybody and their uncle – including Sparrow knew that the CIA which had facilitated the urban elements that supported Burnham – was behind the mayhem. No one could say the PPP had “infiltrators” like the riots that followed the 1997 elections!!
Will someone sing a kaiso for Albuoystown??
…cultural resistance?
Talking about the “wabeens” of Tiger Bay, reminds your Eyewitness of one of the unique features of our early urban landscape in what was dubbed the “slums”. While many have focused on the poverty, crime and pickpockets of Albuoystown – which most are more familiar with than Tiger Bay, one historian explained its ethos thusly: “in the decades after emancipation, one of the ways in which the Afro creole resisted complete cultural domination was that in defiance of the Victorian social norms of modesty, dignity, orderliness, productivity and decorum, they exhibited counter values of gregariousness, bravado, loudness, ribaldry, rowdiness, aggression and even coarse vulgarity.
“This manifested itself was in the practice of ‘cussing’ and ‘buseing’ which he contended was a manifestation of their poverty and deprivation. …It was the women of the ghettos like Tiger Bay for whom this yard culture provided the means to resist white cultural dominance and to fight back against social injustice and racial discrimination.”
Ghettoes were also bastions of cultural resistance!!
…salient facts
The Police Force held a wreath-laying ceremony to honour “67 fallen heroes between 1913 to 2023”. Shouldn’t we mention that one thirds of them – twenty-two – were murdered in just two years, 2002/2003 in the slow fyaah; mo’ fyaah strategy?!
