(Wordsworth Albert McAndrew, folklorist and journalist, died on April 25, 2008, aged 71.)
Wordsworth McAndrew used to state his core beliefs plainly. In his chapter entitled ‘Guyana – A Cultural Look’ contained in the book Co-op Republic: Guyana 1970, he wrote “In my view, the folklore of a people is at the root of their being, and to cast it aside is to set oneself adrift culturally – an act which one performs at one’s peril.” With this in mind, he made it his personal mission to record the life and language of the common people.
McAndrew steeped himself in local folklore and craftily used the media to deliver his message. In the heyday of radio broadcasting in the 1950s and ’60s before the introduction of television, a good voice was a great asset.
Bright young high school graduates competed for the limited places at Radio Demerara, the British Guiana Broadcasting Service and the Government Information Service. Hugh Cholmondeley, Victor Insanally, Eileen Pooran, Ronald Sanders and Clairmont Taitt were some of the most heard voices of the day.
McAndrew was among them but, unlike the rest, he was always attracted to the unusual. He applied his not inconsiderable intelligence as a broadcaster and as an information officer in the Government Information Service to amass an awesome amount of anecdotes in the argot of rural Guyana.
His folksy nature and friendly attitude afforded him easy access to the ordinary folk whom he regarded as the true custodians of culture.
This ambition had been nurtured in the home. His father Winslow Alexander McAndrew was head teacher of the Muritaro and Soesdyke Anglican Schools, correspondent for the Daily Chronicle and Guiana Graphic newspapers, musician, licensed layreader in the Anglican Diocese and scoutmaster in the British Guiana Boy Scouts’ Association. It was no surprise that Wordsworth would also become a prizewinning steel pan player, radio journalist and assistant scoutmaster of the Queen’s College scout troop where he earned the sobriquet ‘Scouter Mac.’
In the pre-independence years, McAndrew worked at the Guiana Graphic and Daily Chronicle newspapers and joined the British Guiana Civil Service where he served in the Government Information Service. After attending a training course in broadcasting-producing for radio and television at the BBC with Ronald Sanders, he also worked with the Guyana Broadcasting Service where he was appointed programme director and Sanders was made general manager.
McAndrew attracted attention and adulation not only for the subject matter of folklore, which was then an uncommon topic for the conservative airwaves, but also for his expressiveness and eloquence. He committed himself to the collection, conservation, and celebration of folk life using all the oral, visual and written media at his disposal – broadcasts, drama, poetry and newspaper articles – to make his case. His most popular radio programmes – ‘Proverb for Today,’ ‘What Else’ and ‘Creole Meche Meche’ – were employed to educate a skeptical citizenry about life in the countryside which he considered to be the cradle of creole culture.
During the colonial era, however, European, especially British, social rules and cultural values prevailed. Dress, food, religion, residence, occupation and speech reflected that prejudice and local or creole culture was discountenanced. Upwardly mobile middle class Guyanese of any ethnicity tried to conform to mainstream manners.
Contrarian in character, McAndrew resolved to reverse that trend. With layman’s logic, he advocated the study of proverbs in schools as a means of preserving the wisdom of the past. He argued that cultural fusion, which had been evinced in the presence of Amerindian, African, Chinese, Hindi and Urdu words in ‘creolese’ talk, should be promoted rather than proscribed. By the mid-1970s, however, a phalanx of PhDs had invaded the field of Guyanese linguistics. Dr Richard Allsopp, Dr Walter Edwards, Dr Kean Gibson, Dr Ian Robertson, Dr John Rickford and others moved the study of creolese from the level of conjecture to that of science.
McAndrew’s paper ‘Some Possible Africanisms in Guyanese Speech’ presented at the conference of the Festival of Guyanese Word in Georgetown in 1975, though well received, showed that academic researchers had taken the study of language farther than learned laymen could have done with limited assets.
A talented man, McAndrew produced a modest body of poetry. His principal poems – ‘Barriat,’ ‘Blue Gaulding,’ ‘Legend of the Carrion Crow,’ ‘Lines to a Cartman,’ ‘Pushing,’ ‘Independence’ and ‘To a Civil Servant’ – appeared in Arthur Seymour’s anthology, A Treasury of Guyanese Poetry. He also published ‘Three Ps’ (1961) and ‘Old Higue’ and ‘Poems to St Agnes’ (1962) and won the competition for the first pan solo and for the elocution contest at the national music festival.
With the onset of state-sponsored international cultural events such as the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts and with state control of radio broadcasting, there was much less space for McAndrew’s way of doing things. Independent and individualistic, he still spoke as he liked, wrote as he liked and dressed as he liked. He was ill at ease with the bureaucratic formalities and the orthodoxy of the well-dressed career civil servants who ran the Ministry of Culture. He quit the public service and the country prematurely, forfeiting his superannuation benefits and going into exile in 1978 to languish in obscurity as an underpaid copy editor in New York.
Wordsworth Albert McAndrew was born on November 22, 1936 in Alberttown to Winslow Alexander McAndrew and Ivy McAndrew in a family of three brothers and three sisters. He attended Marshall’s Kindergarten and Christ Church Primary schools and Queen’s College. Among other activities at Queen’s, he was president of the Literary and Debating society in 1953 with one CY Thomas as secretary and served as assistant scout master in 1954-56. Later, he became a member of the British Guiana Film Club and the Georgetown Dramatic Club. It was in a belated tribute to his pioneering work that the Guyana Folk Festival Committee in New York established the Wordsworth McAndrew Awards in 2002 to celebrate creative Guyanese of arts and letters.
He married twice, first to Sheila, née Hinds, with whom he had a son, and then to Rosie, with whom he had a daughter. He was also the father of Arnold and Roseanne Singh.
