Wismar Massacre: what’s in a name?

PNC leader Aubrey Norton joined former Region 10 PNC Chairman Solomon Sharma in rejecting the word “massacre” used by Professor Dr Baytoram Ramharack in the title of his recent book describing the horrific events in Wismar on May 25, 1964. According to the COI Report, there were “57 cases of assault, including rape, which were treated at the Mackenzie Hospital” (hundreds more were unreported). Two persons were killed and at least 197 houses (eventually 220 counted) were destroyed, in addition to several cases of looting… The number of families displaced is 744, comprising 1249 adults and 2150 children, making a total of 3399 individuals… (yet) no member of the volunteers or Police admitted witnessing any cases of assault or rape, looting or arson.” They all had to be evacuated to Georgetown the following day.
Mr Norton also quoted from the COI to support his rejection of the word “massacre”: “The recent disturbances in Wismar-Christianburg-McKenzie have been examined by your commissioners in the context of the wider pattern of planned violence, murders, arson, bombings, reprisals, and counter-reprisals that characterise life in British Guiana during 1964. Although the number of deaths caused by violence and the amount of property destroyed was greater in the rest of the colony, Wismar does, however, bring the months of violence into sharp focus.” Mr Norton then asserted conclusively: “This conclusion that the violence and property destroyed in the rest of the country were far more than what happened in Linden precludes the description of what happened in Linden being called a massacre since the activities in the rest of the colony were far more than what happened in Linden but not described as massacres.”
Mr Norton, however, disingenuously ignores the reason for the COI’s comparison of six months of violence across the country with that of two villages, Wismar-Christianburg, on a single day: that it brought the countrywide violence “into sharp focus”. And what was that “focus”? Ironically it was stated in the paragraph preceding the one cherry-picked by Mr Norton: “We (the Commission) have come to the conclusion that the disturbances… were politically and racially inspired… (and) the destruction was not ‘spontaneous’ but was organised and well organised.”
And it is this wilful act of omission that betrays Mr Norton’s rationale for fixating on a definition of the term “massacre” and then asserting that the events of May 25th, 1964, don’t satisfy that definition. Shifting the focus to the body count allows him to ignore the broader, documented reality of the event: the systematic “ethnic cleansing” – a term not then in existence – mass sexual violence, arson of hundreds of homes, and the forced exodus of the entire population of Indo-Guyanese from the Wismar-Christianburg area. He ignores Nietzsche’s caution that “all ideas in which an entire process is semiotically summarised elude definition. Only something which has no history is capable of being defined.” In 1964, Indian-Guyanese were grappling with the enormity of the tragedy and have ever accepted Cheddi Jagan’s initial description. But Mr Norton linguistically deflects – since he himself mentions the historical context – in a classic example of definitional parsing (or semantic pivot), used to limit political liability, de-escalate historical blame, and woo his party’s constituency.
He ignores, for instance, the COI’s report that “Several witnesses have alleged that Mr Robert Jordan… (PNC MP) bears a major responsibility for the events of May 25 and 26. Mr Jordan was said to have been seen on Thursday, May 21, and again on Saturday, May 23, inciting African people to violence against East Indians.”
Probably hoping to recover the constituency he recently lost to WIN, he condemns what he terms the “false categorisation of Linden and Lindeners” by reframing the community not as aggressors, but as actors caught up in a wider, multi-sided national conflict. But he – and all Guyanese who want us to go forward more harmoniously – have to interrogate the group psychology which allowed, as the COI said, “a total section of a community to be attacked and outraged and subsequently had to be evacuated. Nearly all their property was maliciously destroyed, while the majority of their erstwhile friends and neighbours either took part in the destruction or stood idly by.”
We must follow David Scott’s stricture that “histories of the past ought to be interventions in the present, strategic interrogations of the present’s norms as a way of helping us to glimpse the possibilities for an alternative future.” (“Wismar Massacre” book launch, Grand Coastal, May 20, 2026, at 17:00h)