Ulele Burnham is a barrister specializing in mental health and discrimination law and practises from chambers in London. This is adapted from a talk given to Bishops High School alumni.
By Ulele Burnham
Presentations of this sort are commonly delivered by those who have brought acclaim to the institutions of learning that moulded their lives; those who have hoisted themselves up by their own bootstraps, displaying singularity of purpose having clambered their way, in the face of seemingly intractable odds, to the tops of their chosen life paths. And then there are those like me, who despite enviable privilege at home and at school have had more changes of life direction than you can shake a stick at. Those for whom the firm and guiding hand of Bishops’ High School (BHS) does not appear to have left so indelible an imprint. I started off my university career doing computer science at which I was entirely inept, dropped out for international relations and ended up in law, a career decision about which I remain ambivalent. A fair few may also think that being “Burnham’s daughter” isn’t exactly the greatest platform from which to speak about the education system in Guyana. Thinking, therefore, about what I could credibly offer was no mean feat.
I began by thinking about how my life, with its false starts and multiple blind alleys, could truly speak to the legacy of the school that was said to (and did) produce women, and later men, of such distinction, discipline and dignity. I fixed upon what being formally educated at BHS, in Guyana and in the Caribbean didn’t do, did imperfectly or could do better for the current generation. I wanted to consider how being elastic and fluid in our public and private selves had not been sufficiently encouraged. On reflection, this failing appeared all the more striking in the context of what is an unremitting requirement for all of us who remain buttressed to Guyana, those both at home and abroad, to be versatile. And before I am dismissed for suggesting that secondary education should be an ‘anything goes’ system, let me say that I raise this issue because I want to talk about real harm that can come of a failure to acknowledge and properly support multiple ways of being. It isn’t that rigour, courtesy, excellence and concerted effort should cease to be important, but that a failure to recognise the danger of ‘stagnation’ will amount to a failure to stop the haemhorraging of human life and capital that continues to remain at catastrophic proportions in Guyana and other countries of the Caribbean.
Since High School reunions can quickly descend into mutual back-slapping, I asked myself the more vexed, albeit more urgent, question of how, why and in what ways we have failed our young successors? If this reunion is to mean anything, and if we are to be true to the motto ‘labor omnia vincit’ (hard work conquers all), then we must attempt an answer to the inquiry: what is the work that remains to be done? And what is the all that it should conquer?
Bishops’ High School came into being during the colonial era. As a pedagogical institution it functioned as an instrument of the project of colonial domination, a project that brought, as the sociologist Paul Gilroy suggests, “pure and irreconcilable racial and ethnic entities into being” and “baptized them with blood”. At quite the same time as the racial absolutes of black and white (upon which the grotesque imperial slave trade relied) were established, a plethora of industrial plantations was served by new forms of labour bondage in the Caribbean. Where there might have been what Gilroy describes as complex and shifting “patterns of inter-mixture” given the ethnically diverse populations in the region, these were placed under erasure in service of a tiered system of racial worth, with perhaps its most violent and degrading incarnation to be found in the treatment of native peoples. Schools were precisely one of the means by which this inhumane mentality was bred.
But schools also had the potential to sow the seeds of undoing these fixed, hierarchical identities that they helped to create. The leaders of decolonising movements, were for the most part, products of these purveyors of colonial moral management and conduct. Yet the unravelling of this colonial ordering of people by schools such as BHS was never thoroughgoing. A generous reading of post-independence governance in the Caribbean might suggest that the transformative potential of these elite institutions could never have been realized, because too much damage had already been done to the psyche and humanity of the very men in the proverbial vanguard of the independence movement. What many experienced in this period was an ex-change rather than a real change.
At times we who attended these “elite” institutions believe that we magically
transcended the mentalities I describe. We think of schools as being a kaleidoscope of diversity and harmony because the student population was racially diverse, by 1976 included both genders and at times a variety of social classes. Witness, however, the fact that (certainly in my time) St. Joseph’s, St. Roses and St. Stanislaus were regarded, in the main, as schools to which Portuguese and White Guyanese preferred to send their children; that there was a school vernacularly called ‘Indians’; that people considered most ‘top’ schools to be in Georgetown; that education at ‘multi’ was viewed with the utmost contempt by those occupying the more privileged social strata.
And I should know; my father I believe conceived of the idea of multilateral education, but I have little doubt that he would have been unhappy if that was the school I “got” after taking the common entrance examination!
More to the point, how much work can we say was done to nurture social relationships between those of different ethnic or class backgrounds, and to challenge the notion that we each had an immutable Chinese/Portuguese/Black/Indian/ Amerindian Guyanese identity, that we had to choose and stick to a particular racial identity despite our multiple actual identities, that we had to be frozen like statues, lived diversity disavowed? How much work was done to break down the barriers of social class? How reinforcing were these schools of traditional notions of appropriate male and female behaviour and of men’s and women’s work?
The impulse that is at work in the nostalgic pretence that the issues I have raised did not then and do not now continue to exist, is one which has permitted, most recently, the unleashing of the brutal violence in Lusignan, Bartica, Georgetown and other parts of the country. Where we continue to see, for example, Indo-Guyanese identity as closed and immobile and always in opposition to a similarly static and fixed Afro-Guyanese identity, and we continue to pretend that these practices are not reinforced by our culture, we cannot be surprised that, under pressure, the consequences are literally murderous.
Let me make clear how much the good work that continues at BHS and other schools today ought to be valued. I hold my English Literature teacher entirely responsible for teaching me how to closely read and therefore better appreciate nuance in literary and other texts. The importance of this form of careful tuition should in no way be undermined by my complaint about the paucity of social (and perhaps political) education. I also know that it is, primarily, the ever-present socio-economic circumstances (linked in turn to the country’s political history and ongoing tribulations) that deny all Guyanese the equal right to full participation in society as dignified and whole human beings. But if these fictions to which I have referred are not shattered, hopelessness will continue to occupy pride of place in the future as it certainly has in the past and as it does for so many in the present. Guyana will continue to stand out as the country that by the 1980s had the shaming statistic of a negative population growth rate and that today boasts an outward migration rate of the skilled that stands at over 80%. And there will be no legacy worth building upon, for the teachers we most prize will educate (if we are lucky) only Guyanese with their eyes firmly fixed elsewhere.
Let us not fool ourselves, to paraphrase Gilroy again, that our quest for Black solidarity, Indian solidarity, Chinese solidarity or male or female solidarity – each claiming to be more wounded, more unitary and more deserving than the next – is not what is in large part responsible for decimating that scarce and diminishing commodity: hope. As Freud implored in his writing on Mass Psychology, we need to recognize the destructive force of our own parochial encoding; to recognise that there are few innocents, that we are all culprits in some way. But those who understand their complicity with unequal systems, more so than self-proclaimed saints, have the potential to imagine new ways of acting as productive, viable, and multi-faceted communities.
We can at least hope to act as multitudes bound together not merely or essentially by the fear, suspicion or hatred of other multitudes. This will require us to choose leaders who we love not only because they are mirror images of ourselves. Or rather, when we choose them, the images of ourselves that we wish to reflect ought not to repress the diversity of our beings. Labor omnia vincit: That, for me, is the work to be done and it is the urge to purify and to homogenise that we must conquer.
