THEN: GUYANA’S AFRICAN PRESENCE
In offering any commentary on the African – Guyanese history, development – or – lack-of-it – achievements and challenges in business, some historical context has to be attempted. We must look back, however briefly, at the “then”.
Most history texts on the Guyana Caribbean usually report that “the exact date when the first slave was brought to Guyana is not known, however it is clear that slaves were working on Dutch plantations in Essequibo as far back as the early seventeenth century. They worked on the Cotton, Cocoa, Coffee, Tobacco and Sugar plantations. During the early period the supply of slaves to the territories was very low, as compared to the demand and owing largely to the reluctance of the Dutch West India Company.
The largest number of slaves came to Guyana between 1796 and 1807, while the colonies were under British rule. The importation of these African slaves changed the demography of the Colony and for a very long period after that slaves were the largest ethnic group within the territory. A large proportion of African Guyanese are descendants of that slave population.
ABOLITION, EMANCIPATION – AND “BUSINESS”?
Though this is no history of slavery, passing reference must be made because the importation of African slaves is responsible for today’s Afro-Guyanese presence. So even a fleeting glance must be offered to that story.
Skipping the sordid saga of the Middle Passage, just one leg of the insidious, treacherous triangle of the Trans-Atlantic Trade in captive Africans, it must be a source of pride to many to appreciate that the Abolition of trade in human-beings was the culmination of the sustained work of both Africans — from Olaudah Equiano and Otlobah Cugano, themselves, ex-slaves in Britain, to the leaders of effective rebellions in Berbice, Haiti and elsewhere – and European abolitionists. The names of the Quakers, the Methodists, Clarkson, Sharpe and Wilberforce represent the British conscience of those who knew the evil of their compatriots’ inhumanity and so fought successfully to end it in 1807.
Then as the economics of production and trade dictated the impending demise of the vast sugar plantocracy in this part of the world, by the 1820’s – with some more conscience, religion and changing values thrown in – pre-emancipation threw up a system of Apprenticeship.
Whilst this attempted economic amelioration did not work for the Plantation—owners, the system saw the remarkable resilience and economic sense of the half-freed, half-bonded slaves between 1834 to 1838. For during those four years, when the Africans, now registered as “apprentices”, actually earned wages for some of the time they were made to remain on their (former) plantations, hundreds of thousands of dollars were accumulated by these “workers”. This money was later to be used to purchase abandoned plantations, or portions thereof. And these Africans, with “full-freedom” -Emancipation in August 1838, established Guyana’s coastal village system thereafter, on those lands legally purchased from their erstwhile masters.
Can it not be argued too that, besides whatever sense or system of business – agriculture, trading, bartering, ——which they might have known in their African homelands, — they could have secretly been observing the manner – exploitative though it was — in which the Europeans, managed their plantations and ancillary resources? For, it will be shown, the freed Africans swiftly moved to become involved in agriculture and commerce immediately after July 1838.
BUT NOT “BUSINESS – AS USUAL”
Even before knowing I’d be preparing these notes, I had cause to be reading some of our Guyanese historians for whom I have high regard. That list would include Daly(s), Payne, Benjamin, Mc Gowan, Rose, Granger and Brian Moore, amongst others.
Checking their work on the post—Emancipation condition of the African Guyanese then, I found that they, generally, coincide with respect to their research, findings and conclusions. Using different language, of course. I summarise, therefore the African confrontation with “business” in that post-Emancipation – Colonial period as follows.
The plantation—owners, beset by the economic consequences of Emancipation, were also amazed at the gumption of their former slaves who established the basis of a village movement and demonstrated intentions of large-scale farming and various forms of commerce. Through sheer spite, partly, and the desperate need to retain the freed people as employees, the planters used all their advantages to thwart, undermine and sabotage the African thrust towards business and independence.
Amongst the Planters’ destructive strategies: the importation of Portuguese, Chinese, Indian and other immigrants to work in the sugar fields and to alter, significantly, the demography of the colony; no longer would the African majority, now free, be absolute and there would be rival groups to compete for all the socio-economic space had to offer; the Planters used their intact political/legislative power to re-demarcate and affect drainage and irrigation with respect to the Africans new property; taxes and licences were imposed, harshly, for every commercial activity the former slaves turned to – portering, huckstering, shop-keeping, boat, mule and donkey-cart transportation; (these taxes were never applicable to Plantation supplies; most consumer items used by the freed man were suddenly also heavily taxed; then as the village economies became depressed, the freed Africans had to contemplate a return to the plantations, Albert, in a new capacity; of course, Portuguese merchants also found credit easier to obtain with no such luxury granted to the Africans.
Little wonder then that these freed “Creoles” and their immediate descendants, having taken advantage of the education offered by the various religious bodies, turned to the professions. They were our first policemen, lawyers and government “civil” servants. But then they were also mere consumers – and customers of the other arrivals — the Chinese, Portuguese and East Indians.
Any Black Business today?
Came political Independence from Britain in 1966. From 1968 to 1992 the People’s National Congress (PNC) administrations controlled political and governmental power and tried desperately too to control “the commanding heights” of the national economy. The latter ambition was undermined by both self-destructive policies, in part, and hostile international economic imperatives.
Both perception and reality suggested that the African—Guyanese-dominated governments of the PNC would have created an enabling environment for Black enterprise – even as the leaders preached economic prosperity for all Guyanese.
Granted that more than generous loans from the governments themselves and the National Co-opertive Bank did facilitate certain Black hoteliers, auto dealers, rice farmers, and bankers themselves, James Rose posits that “In spite of official encouragement and support, the growth of a Black business elite did not really materialise. Then came the post-1980 recession and economic conditions which threatened to emasculate the old commercial class extended the range of opportunities for a Black economic take-off. Blacks had survived the long night of economic despair. They had perhaps the most resilient of all ethnic psyches. They were ‘movers and shakers’ and survivors and were the best equipped to exploit the adversity of the recession and the enabling condition created by Burnham’s import substitution programme. They packed their suitcases with next to little, braved the bureaucratic autocracy of Customs and immigration officialdom, manipulated language barriers and cultural differences and kept a nation which was virtually on the brink of starvation adequately, if expensively, supplied. For nearly a decade, they bore the brunt of a hostile bureaucracy and created the image of a new breed of international small trader.
“This corps of suitcase traders did not all earn fortunes but undoubtedly, some did. They expanded into settled business. Others encouraged by the signs and possessed of international contacts, also invested in settled business. Slowly, but most assuredly the long awaited breed of the Black business elite emerged on the Guyana landscape…
“No one complained that credit was hard to secure and there were no indications that interest rates, at 3o and 40 percent, were devouring the basic infrastructure of Black business. No one admitted that Black business had found itself in the line of fire. They were all reluctant to admit impending failure. It was possible to ignore the portents because, for the first time in Black experience, credit was easily available to Black business. After all, with interest rates as high as 40 percent, the traditional business houses were most reluctant to borrow and, since banks had to lend to retain their viability, they threw open their doors to Black businessmen who entered and, child-like, became entrapped. Even virtually nailed to the wall, Black business covered its misery in silence, preferring to slide into bankruptcy than seek the technical and managerial competence which it now needed to survive”.
HE CHALLENGES, THE RESPONSES
To conclude these comments, I’ll do two things I’ve done over the past sixteen years, when this specific issue comes up.
Firstly I ask these questions: Who owns most of the auto spare-parts outlets and hardware stores? How many local black lumber dealers can you name? Can you name six big, successful black pharmacies? Do Afro-Guyanese control more than five(5) big manufacturing concerns in Guyana? Are there any Afro-Guyanese, black-banks? Or travel agencies? (You get the drift?)
Then I repeat this tale about a few Afro-friends I know who started a monthly newspaper in August 1993. The paper was the “Business Monthly”.
The writers/researchers and editors did a remarkable job in highlighting, through research and surveys, the nature, set-backs, challenges and paucity of Black Business in Guyana. I – and they – mean solid, original business enterprises, whether agro-based, financial or commercial established, developed and owned by Guyanese. And they – the Business Monthly team – examined why, compared to “others”, there are so few significant Black enterprises – or why they tend to fail.
Space here doesn’t allow a full representation of the paper’s view. But because I was so impressed with some findings I’ll again repeat a few: (1) Black folks in Guyana did not enjoy any business tradition, in that their parents and grandparents were never in any significant formal, established enterprise that produced goods and services for sale to large markets, or in any real merchandising, like importing, exporting on a whole or retail basis. (2) The Black culture with its religious background never emphasised the acquisition of wealth. (The camel and rich man-reward-in-heaven nonsense prevailed). (3) There was no inheritance of land, money or plant assets – the bases of lasting business enterprises.
It was, therefore, always difficult for ambitious Afro-Guyanese to raise the capital necessary finance businesses. The Afro-Guyanese lacked both collateral and the requisite “track record”. It seemed to be historical record that, despite the ability to purchase plantations, to create villages in the face of a hostile plantocracy and Mr. Burnham’s Co-op Bank which had to finance all the races, the Black Guyanese were deprived of management skills, the profit motive and the rugged, shrewd, competitive forcefulness to succeed in commerce manufacturing and industry.
That was the Business Monthly sixteen years ago. (Incidentally, the owner and publishers of that “Black enterprise” became victims of their own findings. Naturally, Business Monthly is no more).
TODAY! NOW…
Oh, my beleaguered people, where are your own “Captains of Industry”?
By 1997, or thereabout, when the perception (and reality?) of an “anti-Black, hostile PPP-Government environment” had been spawned, the African Cultural Development Association (ACDA, the ethnic-specific African – grouping, announced a Grand UNIT TRUST FUND. Doctors Clive Thomas and Kenneth King would guide this economic lending and learning agency, to undo what the Globe Trust Bank was later to do to mainly poor Afro-Guyanese “savers”: provide capital and management/entrepreneurial skills for those who needed it most. Tell me the fate of that UNIT TRUST.
Then, just in December 2006, another “new” ACDA business-intellectual activist, Mr Eric Phillips, announced his African Business Council (ABC). I recall commending yet another Afro-Guyanese-oriented economic initiative, replete with its Constitution and Council of Economic Advisers. I looked toward to more Afro-Guyanese contractors winning IDB bids for national projects, etcetera. How goes the ABC today?
Notice I refrained from attempting comparisons between Afro-Guyanese in business and other groups. That is not to say that someone should not attempt the Indo-Guyanese-in-business record. For now I wish the Afro-Guyanese community A Reflective Emancipation 2010.
