Nigel Westmaas is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College, New York, and was a former WPA executive member
By Nigel Westmaas
In an article in the Daily Chronicle of September 9, 1917, Rev. Herbert Wood, a Pastor of the Providence Congregational Church wrote the following on poverty in Georgetown:
“I am extremely pleased to be able to do anything that will ameliorate the conditions of the poor in this city, and as a minister I can say that there is no need to seek for povertyat this end of the city. It leaps at one from every yard and street…Every week I come into contact with poverty that is pitiable and appalling…I venture to throw out an offer to reveal to anyone in a single day’s visitation scores of instances of absolute starvation, homes in which there is no food and no cash. I have visited the slums of London, but these will not bear comparison with the utter pennilessness of many of the homes in the slums of Georgetown…”
The great Hubert Critchlow and other pioneer trade unionists and activists fought the good fight for labour and social rights. The British Empire, for its part, mixed gross brutality, as against the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s with liberal episodes as with the Moyne Commission that helped stimulate the reforms after meeting and taking testimony from many Guianese in 1939.
In 1947, Eusi Kwayana recalls visiting the Mon Repos sugar estate with Cheddi Jagan. He said when Jagan asked an older sugar worker how things were in the (non-grinding) estate the worker answered, “Thing so bad, like God lef a place and run go-way.”
In short, colonialism and the British rule that accompanied it, unlike what one letter writer recently implied, was certainly no bed of roses. Time has passed since the time of the logies and atrocious conditions of the urban working class, but poverty, and its ally crime still rule in contemporary Guyana.
Poverty not only consists of perhaps the most unkind sight in the world, that of a hungry child, but includes lack of rights to education, no security, abuse from the powerful, lack of educational opportunities, disempowering institutions, weak community organization, collapse of civic-mindedness, crime, breakdown of family life and violence, psychological pressure, and a wide range of fixable human ills.
What is the state of discourse on a holistic approach to poverty in Guyana? What is certain is that the intensity of debate and discussion of the country’s struggle with poverty is not as vigilant as in the past where it flooded daily discourse, the newspapers, literature and where even journals were founded to fight inequality. There is a surfeit of historical and current evidence on the state of the poor. But apart from a few daring columnists, a few organisations and the famous Guyanese letter-writing tradition, there is little sense of tangible protest and proposals, or of a coming together to fight poverty and crime and re-install a sense of collective purpose.
Meanwhile the rejoinders and excuses are easy for governments obsessed with “mandate” in the era of globalization – ”it’s dem” (the big countries and foreign companies) not “us” that produce poverty and crime at home. We also listen to “developmental messages” from government spokespersons, a language that draws on international jargon but fails to gather the historical and contemporary roots of the local crisis, and studiously avoids national unity initiatives or holistic responses to calamity. While there is a large measure of truth in the fact that the rich countries spawn poverty in what is (no longer) called the “Third World”, Guyana inclusive, it is not the whole story. The commitment to ending squalor – if attended with urgency – can draw upon the best economic and social brains in Guyana but is brushed aside in one form of unreason or other. Meanwhile, contemporary trade unions are dormant, defunct, manipulated or weak.
The defeat of poverty is perhaps seen as ‘unrealistic’, but if it is human to wish to win the Lotto, strike it lucky with a Green Card lottery or even ‘tief’ to exist, then it should not be an issue for others to desire the annihilation of poverty and to urge some measure of equality. The outrage of old on poverty has been replaced by pessimism for alternatives.
One option, socialism, is now a derelict expression, eliciting very little hope in this time and place. Many movements and countries (and their leaders) have made it a terrible word for what they did in the name of socialist values and economics. But is this a case of the practice replacing the values of the concept? Perhaps as the world is still nervous about the term it might be safer to say it is a social ‘ism’ that people should live in dignity and social equality. The term doesn’t matter once the people know and feel that the state is honest about doing everything possible to alleviate their suffering and restore hope.
Interestingly, the first known public comment on ‘socialism’ in Guyana is credited to an article in the London Times newspapers which described the embryonic post slavery village movement of 1839 as “little bands of socialists.” Advanced obviously as a criticism, the reference, measured by the tenor of the time, amounted to high praise for the impulse and creativity of the early independent British Guiana villagers.
In a strange twist of fate, class awareness has sort of emerged out of the current recession in the centre of world capitalism. Who would have anticipated the response of the George Bush administration to the US economic crisis, to wit, the de facto nationalization of the banking system? Even more surprising are the uncharacteristic attacks by some American right wing critics who complain of “socialism” in the US state and subsequent Congressional responses to the growing recessive calamity. The calls by President Elect Obama for restrictions on the filthy rich and urging a curb on their appetite for profit, echoed in congressional debates, likewise amount to unprecedented potential for “social” change in that country. Alas, in America’s case, one has to stress “potential” as the resilience of the rich and powerful there is well known.
The struggle to overcome poverty at home or anywhere is not romanticist, it is human and necessary. Obviously, the fight will not emerge in the old forms but it might be useful to reflect again on how even the British Empire in the form of the Moyne Commission of 1939 listened to and took detailed testimony from many sectors of society, rural and urban, leading to reforms in some of the social and political conditions of the working people.
There must be a will to action to defeat poverty. To repeat a cliché, there is “no substitute for social justice.”
In the New Year, we will continue the final two installments of the Barbados-Guyana series by Barbadian journalist Michelle Springer.
(This is one of a series of fortnightly columns from Guy-anese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
