Legal luminary and former Chairman of the Alliance For Change (AFC) Nigel Hughes and former leader of the Rise Organise And Rebuild (ROAR) Party Ravi Dev sat down during a panel discussion to reflect upon the architects of Guyana’s independence.
The discussions were conducted during a special edition interview on Television Guyana (TVG) which will be aired today.
Addressing the reason for the shift in thinking in wanting to no longer be ruled by the British, Dev explained that the idea has always been there.
“We were dragged from various continents; Africa, Asia, even Europe and dumped into this land here and that struggle for independence was started. You’re talking about Cuffy, you’re talking about Damon but in terms of this modern drive for independence, I think it began with the struggles on the sugar plantations. Labour had a sense of exploitation and it led to struggles in the 1930s throughout the Caribbean and it led to a British Royal Commission being set up,” he said.
Commissions were very popular with the British whenever there were problems. Dev recollected that when the Commission was sitting in Georgetown in February 1939, there were riots in Leonora, on the West Coast of Demerara, where four persons were shot and several others injured.
This incident, he indicated, prompted the Commission to head back to Britain and made some recommendations which would now mark radical change from how Guyana was governed, placing the seeds that would ineluctably lead to other leaders making this call for total independence.
Sharing his take, Hughes expressed that the entire movement preceded those series of events.
“You had difficulties in 1905, you had difficulties in 1924. You had what I think is the greatest symbolic unity march, there were East Indians workers who struck in support of the African dockside workers who were already on strike and they were marching all the way down from plantation Ruimveldt and I think there were 12 of them (who) got shot outside the Ruimveldt Police Station and they were marching in solidarity, the sugar workers were coming in support of the dockworkers,” he disclosed.
This movement, Hughes said, exemplified the self-determination that existed among Guyanese and from there, Guyana was always on a trend towards self-determination.
The panelists pointed out that there was a strong connection between the struggle for independence and the labour struggles in Guyana.
“If you go back to our modern leaders, Dr Jagan and Burnham, both of them came out of labour, both had a labour base,” Hughes stated.
Weighing in on the topic, Dev noted that when one looks at the nature of the State (fighting against State power), it came back to that struggle to labour.
“Critchlow in the docks in the 1919; he started the first union… But to continue from Critchlow movement, which focused in the city, that whole movement against the British interest boiled over in the 30s and you had people organising on labour…When we look at our political leaders of those days, I am not putting them down when I say that those leaders were more reformists than looking for fundamental change and (Karl) Marx said that ‘men make their own history, not in circumstances of their own making’, so I want to give those people the benefit of the doubt, people like Jong Mahador Singh of the BGIA (British Guiana East Indian Association) and the League of Coloured People led by John Carter and all that, they also were negating for more space in the politics of it but they were seen as reformists,” Dev asserted.
He said it was only when the labour struggle came out and boiled over while the Commission was sitting, Guyana turned over to more radical politics.
Discussing how the struggle changed when Dr Cheddi Jagan came into play, Dev explained that when Dr Jagan returned to Guyana in 1943, he made attempts to work with some of those leaders including BGIA (British Guiana East Indian Association); however they were not radical enough. Then in 1975, Dev explained that there was a movement where a Caribbean political group met in Georgetown and they decided to launch a Caribbean labour congress, and Jagan was exposed again to labour.
“Jagan’s political consciousness was raised in that meeting in 1975,” Dev concluded.
Sharing his views, Hughes posited that one needs to paint an accurate picture of what it was socially and economically in Guyana in the 1940’s in order to truly grasp how deep the struggle was for independence.
“It was a highly stratified society. Africans had moved to the urban areas, Indians were bound and unbound, I know that for example, on the Berbice, Corentyne corridor, this division that we think came as a result of political differences between Dr Jagan and Mr Burnham existed long before that but perhaps they were the beneficiaries of it. So, in 1834 and 1838, economically, the Africans felt they were displaced by the British when they brought labour to replace them. And they had no interest in those two communities coming together because of course they would have been threatened and so it was in their interest from the start to ensure and engineer differences between the two communities. So that difference that we think has been there of recent vintage has been there as a result of our historical environment,” Hughes explained.
The panelists continued to explore and discuss various aspects that contributed to the struggle for Guyana’s independence and the roles of key figures in the movement.
To watch the full programme, viewers can tune in on TVG Channel 28 at 20:30h tonight.
