I wonder why so many are now expressing outrage at the grotesque treatment meted out to that innocent Amerindian boy, who dared to presume, when asked to show up in his people’s traditional costume, it was meant literally. What the administrators meant, of course, was he should have dressed up in THEIR conception of what was his “native costume”.
But the reaction to the boy’s costume by a Georgetown elite school goes far beyond just “proper” clothes: it goes to the heart of a process that has been deployed to oppress and subjugate those without power from the moment those Dutch planters showed up on our shores with their African slaves back in the 17th century. The scanty native African garb – quite suitable for their tropical home, mind you; like the Amerindians’ – was derided as a sign of their “uncivilised” lifestyle. And what was “civilised”? Whatever they, the Europeans chose to do, eat or wear etc.. One anthropologist called this a “white bias” in Guyanese values that obviously persists into the present.
From day one, then, the Indigenous Peoples were deemed “uncivilised”: that they lived in the “jungle” tautologically reinforced the tag. Africans gradually jettisoned their culture – its products, practices and perspectives — to survive, and adopted those of the Europeans. Yet, when they did so, they were snickered at for trying to be what they could never be: white. But that did not stop them from trying – into the present. The illegitimate offspring from the rape of African women by white men introduced a new element in the Sisyphean struggle of the non-white to be white: they now formed an intermediate “coloured” strata that was “closer” to the ideal.
They, of course, to solidify their “closeness” to the Europeans, had to also emphasise their distance and difference from the African masses. They emphasised “proper” dressing– read, as close as they could to the European – and “proper” speaking. Africans who followed those rules could be co-opted into the Coloured strata – and would “marry up”; that is, marry a coloured woman. Burnham was an exemplar of this process.
But the arrival of the Portuguese, the Indians and the Chinese indentureds offered the ordinary Africans an opportunity to “raise” their status by showing how much closer they were to the white standard in speech, religion etc., to these people who replaced them in the fields at wages they had refused. The Portuguese and Chinese, being smaller in numbers and adept at business, soon worked out a modus vivendi with them after the initial scorn. But the East Indians, arriving in an unbroken stream into the 20th century, became the despised “other” and low man on the totem pole for all the other groups on the coast. They were “coolies” – “pagan”; “dirty”; “scavengers”; miserly”; and of course couldn’t speak or dress “proper”.
Over the years, they had to “civilise” themselves by adopting the white values, now represented by the Coloured and African elite. In his autobiographical novel “Swarthy Boy”, his lower middle class – but coloured family – warned Mittelholzer not to associate with their Indian Luckhoo neighbours. They were declasse. Two decades later, Cheddi Jagan never forgot the embarrassment his schoolmates inflicted on him when, coming from Port Mourant to Georgetown to attend Queen’s with the children of the elite, the person he boarded with had him cut grass for his cows. I was amazed he repeated this story to me in 1989 at the NY Sheraton at the first GOPIO meet. Words do hurt – more than stones.
It was the Portuguese who took the lead to “civilise” Amerindians in the interior by introducing them to Christianity, in the form of the early despised Roman Catholicism which they had doggedly established on the coast. But it is clear that even a genuflection to their “traditional ways” by Amerindians is seen as backsliding backwardness.
I remind these arbiters of propriety of the words of Martin Carter’s – himself an amalgam of Black, White and Amerindian: “I come from the nigger yard of yesterday/ leaping from the oppressors’ hate/ and the scorn of myself;/ from the agony of the dark hut in the shadow/ and the hurt of things; / from the long days of cruelty and the long nights of pain/ down to the wide streets of to-morrow, of the next day/ leaping I come, who cannot see will hear.”
Yes; one day, those who still oppress others through their self-reflexive scorn will one day “hear”.
