Dear Editor,
I refer to Mr Colin Bascom’s letter captioned “Our relations with India should not be at the expense of our core values as a nation” (07.01.17) wherein he evidences a morose nervousness and grudge about Indian aid to Guyana. Mr Bascom needs to rid his letters of that characteristic since he sounds like a voice from a world which has passed away.
Bascom makes a number of errors in his presentation and I will take up two of them as an example.
(1) “The education policies that President Burnham pursued at the time were beneficial to all Guyanese” wrote Bascom.
Burnham’s educational policies brought disaster to Guyana’s educational system, a disaster from which it is only now slowly recovering. Under Burnham, the great secondary schools, especially Queen’s, Bishops and St. Stanislaus were reduced in quality. Grammar school education which before Burnham was open to all, now became restricted by Burnham’s insistence on the so-called comprehensive schools, and good teachers became fewer and fewer due to Burnham’s attempt to politicise education as when he drove Cambridge scholar Clarence Trotz and famous teacher Hazel Campayne from being principals of Queen’s and St Roses respectively. The poor salaries and conditions also drove qualified persons out of the profession.
The Guyana University which began with world-famous Lancelot Hogben as Vice-Chancellor soon fell into the doldrums. Standards collapsed and that university is only now trying to move out of its fifth-rate status. Burnham also founded President’s College and for several years, half the education budget was spent on it leaving the rest of the primary and secondary schools neglected.
(2) The second example of Bascom’s sketchy historical knowledge:- He believes that African slaves started the rice industry as an industry in the 18th century, and not Indian immigrants in the 19th century. The story is as follows: The planter class always had the problem of feeding their slaves. In the 18th century they introduced rice from Carolina (now USA) to experiment with it as a food source for their slaves. The slaves had no liking for rice and rice cultivation would in any case have absorbed too much scarce labour. The experiment was therefore abandoned.
Some plants and seeds were about for some time thereafter and some escaped slaves took these with them and tried to grow the grain in their bush settlements along the rivers. Rice plants were always a tell-tale and the planters were always able to easily recapture escapees who attempted to grow rice.
Then rice cultivation completely disappeared and the planters experimented with other sources of food for their slaves such as breadfruit from the Pacific and ackee from West Africa. Rice was forgotten by the beginning of the 19th century. When Asian immigrants came here, part of the rations with which they were supplied by contract was rice since Indians and Chinese were rice-rearing people. By the middle of the 19th century, Indian immigrants, to get more of their home food, began to grow rice in a peasant fashion. Gradually, rice came to be sold on the local market by the last quarter of the 19th century. During World War I, it became an export crop.
Minister Robert Persaud was perfectly accurate in saying Indians started the rice industry as an industry. There was absolutely no continuum with Carolina rice over the century which elapsed before Indians began their planting. And this could be evidenced by the fact that Carolina rice is of a different variety from the Indian rice grown in Guyana and which made the rice industry. Merely planting an item for which there is no sustainability does not make an industry.
Yours faithfully,
B Walker
Editor’s note
According to the `ABC of Rice Culture’ by Maurice Bird published in the March 1928 Edition of The Agricultural Journal of British Guiana, rice was first imported into this country from the French colony of Louisiana (now a state of the US). It was cultivated in small areas to supplement plantains and corn in the slave diet. The article goes on to say that there was no extensive cultivation, but the maroons planted it, particularly those living in the Mahaicony Creek.
The liberated Africans were also growing a little in 1848.
The Journal says that in 1853, padi was imported from Georgia in the United States, and in 1865, the people living on the West Coast Demerara took up rice growing, the area under cultivation continuing to increase until about 1872.
It was about this time that rice was being planted in Abary, West Coast Berbice. Cultivation was later extended to Essequibo through the encouragement of A R Gilzean, the manager of Anna Regina, who persuaded the Chinese labourers on this estate to grow it. In 1866, says the article, there were 200 acres under rice on the Essequibo and small acreages in the Mahaicony, Abary and Canje districts.
Bird cites some figures for imports and exports, saying that during the forty odd years between 1844 and 1888, the colony imported 43,500,000 lbs of rice, whereas from 1914 to 1917 it exported 24,372,500 lbs. The volume continued to increase thereafter, and in the year 1927, 25,752,208 lbs were sent into export.
The author credits the Indian population with building up the industry from 6,000 to 60,000 acres.
