A firestorm has broken out across Guyana and its diaspora after a screenshot of a Facebook chat by Lloyda Nicholas-Garrett, the Public Information and Press Services Officer for President David Granger, was exposed in the press.
“I got people in my office so I cannot listen to Les vn (voice note) yet. Well she was in here making sure to try to turn my staff against me. She don’t know these coolie. They still friendsing she while kissing my a**.”
Ms Garrett is accused of “racism” in reference to her comment about “these coolie” who work for her but are judged to be duplicitous — “friendsing” with an evident office competitor while being excessively obsequious to her. “Coolie,” of course, is the term used in the colonial era for Chinese and Indians who performed demeaning labour services for a pittance. In Guyana, even though both Chinese and Indian labourers were brought to provide such labour after the abolition of slavery, the term stuck only to the Indians.
At the abolition of slavery, the society was culturally uniform in the anthropological sense, but culturally diverse in the sociological sense, with the whites, coloureds and Africans forming distinct social strata in descending order of status, power, and economic/social worth.
While, for instance, all accepted the values of what the anthropologist Raymond Smith called a “White-bias” culture, the coloureds had different speech patterns, foods, habits, dress, etc from the African masses, and considered the latter their social inferiors. They adjudged themselves closer to the “White ideal”.
The introduction of Indians into Guyana — with their acceptance of “slave work”, “heathen” religion, and complete alienation from the white-bias culture — allowed the society, and especially the Africans, to designate a new low man on the totem pole. He was the ‘coolie’, whose description by the British was enthusiastically embraced: dirty, duplicitous, and clannish. Their typical immigrant’s focus on economic advancement was labelled as “mean and stingy”, and their stoic acceptance of hardships in fulfilment of their indenture contract was termed “docile”.
The Indians, on the other hand, sequestered in the rural sugar plantations, defensively valued their culture and heritage highly, rejecting the “coolie” categorization and utilizing the British stereotypical evaluations of the African.
In Guyana, the word “nigger” did not become widely used to label Africans, possibly because the British would use it indiscriminately to describe both Africans and Indians. Indians called Africans “blackman”, which most likely they would have picked up from the coloured overseers and factory workers, who took care to distinguish themselves from Africans by this marker. Most of the Indians were of the same pigmentation as the Africans. The “blackman”, then, was lazy (for rejecting the despised slave-work), hedonistic (for his emphasis on fancy clothes and weekend revelry), licentious (for his serial polygamy), and lacking his own culture (for imitating the British).
It was ironic that then, and evidently now, the “natives”, as the British lumped all they found or brought here to labour, are still using the language of the departed master to describe each other. But what is more pertinent is whether the usage is “racist” or not. Some have asserted that all Guyanese use the terms “blackman” and “coolie” to describe African and Indian Guyanese, and also “Buck” to describe the Indigenous Peoples; and that the words therefore cannot, in and of themselves, be “racist”.
This is true; but the import of the word as “racist” or not can be discerned by examining whether the user of the term intended social behaviour to be the consequence of racial genetic origin — meaning that “Indians” or Africans” will always behave in a particularly negative manner. If we are to be honest, there are many in each of the various groups in our society who still cling to this racist stance. In our estimation, the comments of Lloyda Nicholas-Garrett fall into this category, and she should not be allowed to continue in her present sensitive and powerful position in the highest executive office.
