It does not appear that the enormity of the tragedy that is unfolding on the sugar plantations of our country has touched the Guyanese public at large especially in our urban centres. But out of all the plantations, Wales should remind us that contrary to the received wisdom, the sugar industry still employs Africans, Indians and all other groups in Guyana. And the “severance” pay these 10,000 Guyanese to be laid off will receive, will not tide over a typical family for six months.
To paraphrase our national poet Martin Carter, we are all involved as we have been from the beginning of this project we now call “Guyana”. While we were brought in a linear sequence, we yet all had to pass through the sugar plantations that have been called a “total institutions”. “Total” because every aspect of our lives was controlled to the “T” for one purpose – to be the most efficient producer of sugar. That was the raison d’etre of the colony and of each of us and we all retain traces.
Guyana was founded as a colony by the Dutch who had fled Brazil, to produce sugar for an eager European market – but at prices that could only be achieved through slave labour. And though, as Eric Williams argued, that labour produced the wealth on which the industrial revolution was built and which gave the Europeans an advantage they enjoy to this day, the individuals providing the labour were dehumanised and equated into animals.
Maybe it was not surprising that, to use the felicitous phrase coined by Marx a decade later, the freed labour became “alienated” from the land and the honour to coax from it, life’s sustenance. The scorn was transferred to the land so when indentured labour replaced the slave, he too was cathected with assumptions of a lesser humanity and this is what appears to have survived to this day. Ironically in Guyanese of all persuasions.
Today it may surprise some to learn that fully one out of three canecutters is of African heritage and perchance one may see this as a sign of progress. A lessening of the self-hating scorn in the wider society, even though one member of the culturati – a pretender to even Carter’s mantle – has used “canecutter” as a trope for all that is backward and uncivilised. As the ultimate put down, he made reference to “some Canecutopian official or their ignorant spawn” for committing some faux pas or other.
And it is why, one of the canecutting father of the valedictorian at UG a few years ago could recount how he took his son to the canefields and made sure the lad would look beyond the canefields. Not for the honest labour; not for the salary that is perhaps more than a graduate earns nowadays, but for respect never given to the canecutter after all these years. The story can be starkly summarised by juxtaposing the millions canecutters are supposed to earn versus the refusal of the 40% of our unemployed youths to accept that job. It is reminiscent of the challenge the African-American comedian Chris Rock threw out to the whites in his audience to a deafening silence: “Which one of you would exchange your place with me – a Black millionaire?”
Today, the government has thrown the sugar industry to the wolves and it is conveniently forgotten that during the dark days on the seventies and eighties as the economy imploded from mismanagement, the sugar levy – extracted like blood from stone – kept the entire nation afloat.
But there is the denouement predicted by Carter:
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.
