Unsilencing Wismar’s Ethnic Cleansing of May 25-26

On May 26, Guyana will commemorate the “independence” that was given to the PNC Government by Britain in 1966, after engineering the latter’s victory in the December 7, 1964, elections. But 1964, and specifically May 25-26, 1964, also marks a rupture in the history of the relations between African and Indian Guyanese, which needs to be bridged.
The political competition between the African-Guyanese-based PNC and the Indian-Guyanese-based PPP segued from the PNC’s “sweeping out the PPP with brooms and the PPP’s victory” in the 1961 elections through the burning and looting of Indian businesses in Georgetown on Black Friday, February 16, 1962, and the spread of tit-for-tat ethnic violence and arson across the Demerara Coast after the Public Service’s 80-day 1963 strike and GAWU’s 135-day strike of 1964.
The culmination was the pogrom against Indians of Wismar-Christianburg on May 25-26, putatively in retaliation for the murder of an elderly African couple, the Sealeys, aback Buxton. Two hundred twenty Indian homes were razed, two Indians murdered, many women and girls raped, and almost the entire 3000+ Indian population forced to flee. Six weeks later, the explosion of the Son Chapman launch/ferry killed 43 of the all-African passengers headed towards Wismar from Georgetown. The retaliatory killing of five more Indians who had remained at Wismar was almost anticlimactic. Magistrate Burch-Smith’s inquest into the bombing of the Son Chapman found its causes to be “inconclusive”, while the COI into the Wismar pogrom declared it to be “politically and racially inspired”.
Four decades later, interviews by Red Thread found that the traumas of some survivors who had relocated to ECD are still palpable. However, while the Son chapman tragedy has been commemorated annually since 2004, the Wismar ethnic cleansing has unfortunately long been silenced. Burnham’s choice of May 26 as Independence Day – which ipso facto has to be a national celebration – was a cruel jibe at Indian sensibilities as noted by Cheddi Jagan. Baytoram Ramharack has just published an academic account of the Wismar ethnic cleansing and the Son Chapman bombing that should provide the factual background for a national discussion and reconciliation.
In the context of Wismar, I use “silence” in the tradition of Rolph Trouillot: “…an active and transitive process: one “silences” a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing.” These silences reflect power relations and can occur at the source – the original reports; the archives that purportedly select what is “important”; the creation of different narratives; and finally, as factual history, which Baytoram is offering. It is quite possible that the reason for the early silence about the period may be because the political leaders “wanted to move on”, but in the new millennium, there were some who evidently thought otherwise.
One such person is Brigadier (retd) David Granger, who, in a 2003 paper (“Hurricane of Protest – The Impact of Civil Violence on African-Guyanese in 1964”), elaborated on the Son Chapman and other killings of Africans without ever mentioning the preceding Wismar or other atrocities that targeted Indians. The following year, a “Son Chapman Tragedy Commemoration Committee”, with the PNC integrally involved, organised a 40th anniversary event at the fatal spot at Hurudaia on the Demerara River. Robert Corbin, leader of the PNC, said, “A nation that fails to record its history is bound to make the same mistakes,” but evidently, the Wismar violence was not part of Guyanese history.
After Granger became PNC leader in 2011, he attended the then annually observed commemoration ceremony, now with a monument that declared, “Those who forget the lessons of history do so at their own peril.” But Dr Alissa Trotz and Red Thread interrogated the purpose of this commemoration and queried the silencing of the preceding tragedy of the violence and ethnic cleansing of Wismar. On July 6, 2020, reinforcing the silencing, the PNC representatives bemoaned the “pain and hurt” of the survivors and relocated the monument to the centre of Linden.
We cannot undo the past, but we, simultaneously, from our present, should have our eye on our future – a future we hope to create with the knowledge gleaned from the past with accounts such as Baytoram’s. We can better understand the dangers of ethnic polarisation and create the national unity where all Guyanese can live in peace and not be manipulated into conflict. I repeat my proposal to erect a memorial for all the 176 Guyanese who perished in the 1964 disturbances and need restorative justice.