We speak about one nation in Guyana; we refer to it that way in our motto and some of us quote the motto as proof of our oneness. The harsh truth is that we have the potential to be one nation, but as of now we are not there. There may have been intimations along those lines in the early days before independence, but with the arrival of the possibility of power, ruling power, coming into play, we divided along the two major ethnic lines, and we have stayed that way; we don’t have a magnet of any kind pulling us back together. Consequently, the greatest gift we could give ourselves in our 50th anniversary celebration is to commit our energies going forward to developing in the Guyanese ethos a body of knowledge, an awareness of the entity called Guyana, that could then be the magnet drawing us to be truly one nation, overcoming our current cultural inclination to divide.
That one entity can only come if we introduce our young people, starting in our homes and in our schools, to the information of what is special and powerful and unique and memorable about Guyana. It must become an automatic part of growing up in Guyana; that you understand there is a wider, greater good than your personal ethnic good. Obviously it will not happen overnight; generations will have to pass; but unless we engage the process now, all of us, all successive governments, decades later, will still find us struggling to overcome the problems that not only come from our division but feed on it. President Granger is right about that amalgamation we urgently need; without it, we will never know our full potential.
All the talk about “nation building” and “one people” will remain just talk until we take the fundamental step of understanding the overarching value to all of us that Guyana has. We must begin to feed this awareness, through our governmental reaches and our personal ones. As an example of the latter, just recently through a letter in the press from Milton Drepaul, we learned of the passing of one-time Government engineer Ricky Lowe who, Milton reminded us, was an unusual man of whom all Guyanese should be proud; Milton ended his tribute this way: “So as we travel across the major roads and bridges of Guyana, toot your horn, look up and thank Ricky for his loving work. His last major project was the building of the Berbice Harbour Bridge. Also he gave a significant portion of his life to managing and maintaining the Demerara Harbour Bridge.”
The Ricky Lowe example is only one, but there are thousands more like it. The problem is that many times we don’t know of them; we don’t know about the various resources in our story, and we must correct that. We must begin to see Guyana as a distinct entity made up of all these components (Indian, Black, Amerindian, European, Chinese, etc). We must see ourselves as part of that wider combination where we draw on the vibrancy of all those units, ultimately making ourselves stronger and more progressive and achieving more together than we ever could separately. We must see ourselves as Guyanese first, but the dilemma is how to do that in the face of rigid ethnic positions?
One possible answer is that we begin teaching in our schools, along with the civics class recently recommended by Sonny Ramphal, the additional matter of Guyana being a subject that informs us, so to speak, why Guyana is valuable and why we should nurture it and grow it as a nation. Generally our education system needs to be more proactive in continually imparting to Guyanese schoolchildren information on what is special or unique or valuable about this country and our peoples and our achievements. It should be implanted in us from youth so that, theoretically, if someone were to ask what is there in Guyana to be proud of, we would know the answers. We should grow equipped with that knowledge. Generally, we don’t have the full picture. I cannot count the number of times I heard Guyanese in the diaspora say, “Go back to Guyana? Why would I want to go back there?” We don’t know of our achievements, of what I call the “examples of excellence” among us. Freddie Kissoon commented in a recent column, “Over sixty percent of this nation is under thirty-five years of age. That, by international standards, is a pretty young nation. Over seventy percent of that figure does not know some of the great names that have contributed to the contemporary shape of Guyana.”
We should know of the giant sloth, and the ancient Amerindian mounds now being examined and excavated by George Simon; we should know of the 40-mile Lama Canal built by African slaves who dug every foot of it by hand, with shovels. Similarly, we should know of the Mora Passage created to link the Waini and Barima Rivers. We should know of the bounty of our forests and our mining potential. We should know of the singular Essequibo River, our ancient mountains, our nine Amerindian tribes, and the thousands of our fish and birdlife; the potential of our water resource; of the vibrant cultures (Indian, African, Amerindian, Asian, European) all involved in making up the unique mosaic of mankind that constitutes Guyana. Our children should grow up rightfully claiming Caribbean music and variations of Indian cuisine, and the African and European cuisine we have here, as our own. Similarly, too, in dress, we have a multiplicity of which we can say, “that is ours, because we are Guyanese”. We should be seeing Shivnarine Chanderpaul not as an Indian achiever, but as a Guyanese making good. We should be seeing Lance Gibbs as part the commonality of all, instead of stressing his African difference. We should know of Jack London, born in British Guiana, raised in England and in 1928 becoming the first black man to win a medal for Britain in the Olympics. He won silver in 100M, bronze in 400M relay. We should know of the country boy Martins, product of Hague and Vreed-en-Hoop, one of whose poems is in the Grade 10 English textbook used in schools in Ontario, Canada.
When we start to see ourselves in that wider context, which overrides the tribal one, the differences between the individual pieces may take their rightful place as one part of a wider whole rather than as the dominant part which we now try to make it in our “we pun top” ethnocentric philosophy. Historically, however, as President Granger and others have pointed out, these are deeply entrenched positions that are very resistant to change, but, also as those speakers have said, Guyana’s future depends on that change coming to pass. Without it, we will continue to be only a fraction of what we could become.
