A nation’s art, its literature, music, theatre and dance traditions all arise from, are influenced and shaped by its culture. These include mythology, folklore and folk tales, and spiritual beliefs which are all factors of culture – how people live, cope with and relate to their environment. To a large extent artists are individuals who rule their own destinies, driven by the imagination and whatever influences or inspires them from within or without their national borders. But such theorists as Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Frederic Jameson do have a point in their assertions that the political (structural) base determines the (cultural) superstructure as well as the mind and spirit of the artists, often unknown to their conscious thoughts.
One sector in Guyana’s economic life, and in the economic history of British Guiana has thus been an important contributor to the nation’s cultural life, its character, its traditions and its art. That is the mining sector, but to be more specific, the contribution has come from the real pioneers of gold and diamond mining who began to brave the interior in excess of a century and a quarter ago – small individual prospectors who came to be called pork-knockers (porkknockers or pork knockers). A very significant recent work which outlines their history and covers all the cultural factors that evolved out of their activities is the well-researched and very informative comic book An Illustrated History of the Pork Knockers by Barrington Braithwaite (2010) published with assistance from the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission.
Apart from past GGMC Commission-ers Robeson Benn and William Woolford, Braithwaite acknowledges the work of Hazel Simpson, Roderick Harry and Audreyanna Thomas in the