A generation ago, in his ‘Open Letter to the People of Guyana’, Martin Carter denounced what he described as a “deliberate policy of degrading the people” and he identified a key component: “corruption as a way of life.” He advocated two strategies of resistance. First; a “refusal to be further degraded, as individual and as group”; second, an exposure of the “ideology of self-perpetuation” that seems to attach itself to those in power.
Centuries after some of our ancestors shed their shackles, many parts of the Caribbean remain within the shadow of the plantation economy. As we dismantle our sugar estates, and discard an industry that was, for generations, the lifeblood of our national economy, the old concepts loom large in our discussions of identity and power. One of the many disappointments of these echoes is that decades ago our leading writers and historians painstakingly chronicled the ways that colonialism had deformed our attitudes. And yet, fifty years after they highlighted its dysfunctions and pathologies, instead of trying to remedy the status quo we more often scramble to become its beneficiaries.
Plantation economies were fundamentally extractivist. The land – and its human, agricultural and mineral resources – was simply there, waiting to be mined to exhaustion. Checks and balances were not necessary, neither was a long term strategy. The society was bound by patronage rather than common goals and values, and the lack of accountability ingrained a certain arrogance in the governing elites, one that persists to this day. Our leaders like to behave as though they are above the law, masters of all they survey, and taking our cue from them, we often abdicate the duties of citizenship and forgo paying taxes or abiding by the law. Like the planters, we seek to deflect the bigger challenges and costs elsewhere, looking to ‘Mother England’, Uncle Sam, India, China, even Saudi Arabia. These self-inflicted deceptions and evasions stymie progress just as effectively as any exterior forces.
Edgar Mittelholzer’s Kaywana trilogy, published in the 1950s, is often treated as little more than a racy historical fiction. In fact it is a trenchant analysis of power and identity in a plantation society. Mittelholzer understood that plantations were very provisional structures, maintained only while they were profitable and sold, or abandoned, as soon as they began to ‘fail.’ Plantations, says one character, are “scattered units”, self-sufficient fiefdoms that only pay taxes and lip service to a larger polity. Their owners resisted assimilation into the wider society and only worked together when survival or self-interest forced them to do so. In one novel a family of plantocrats listens with bemused incredulity as they are told that progress will require the “concentration of our assets into one central fund”; they seem constitutionally incapable of transcending provincial interests, or embracing the larger challenges of a community and a citizenry.
Mittelholzer also showed how profoundly the power relations of the plantation undermine our sense of civic responsibility. Few of his characters can withstand any sort of moral scrutiny and there are almost no heroes and heroines.
A decade or so later, as the West Indies gained independence, CLR James noticed something similar. He observed: “What we have to see taking place within the next few years in every Caribbean territory is the complete rejection, abolition, destruction of the traditional bandits feeding from the governmental trough, the feeders disguised as Government and Opposition. Politically, philosophically, there is no difference between these insular oppositions. Many of them have the illusion that they are taking part in the exercise of parliamentary democracy…” Like Mittelholzer, James was alarmed by the persistence of the habits and structures of the plantation system in the newly independent nations.
Plantocracies controlled the wider society by enlisting its support through patronage. As the historian Raymond Smith points out, the plantation was not merely a unit of production, it was also a “unit of society”. Managers and overseers stood at the centre of a complex web of “favours, governance and patronage.” Initially, Smith argues, slaves rebelled to escape from the system. Later, he suggests, they rebelled “to redefine their position” within it. By co-opting potential reformers, the power-patronage nexus thus inhibited the growth of state institutions that might have resisted and reformed it.
It was the peculiar genius of our first post-independence leader to ensure that whatever our ideological coloration, this aspect of the status quo would remain intact. As a result, national institutions were deliberately enfeebled and power and patronage flowed through the ‘maximum leader’. Public office was a ‘reward’ rather than a responsibility. Since then, this tarnished idea of public service has taken root across the political spectrum. And, like a social virus, “planters’ psyche” is alive and well in the semi-public and private fiefdoms that continue to thrive outside our normal constraints and protocols.
Since 1966, few public figures have proven willing or able to excise the patronage at the heart of our political system and much of it has metastasized into corruption and cronyism. Collectively we have become accustomed to such a diminished idea of public institutions and instruments of government that we aspire to little more than recreating dysfunctional ones. Several recent missteps in local government bear ample testimony to this. We have learned to view crumbling institutions with indifference and to measure civic power and importance through the narrowest lens of self-interest. Do we appoint national leaders on the basis of their ability to rule fairly and honestly, or because we hope to profit from their power? Do we choose local officials with different expectations?
Perhaps we have reached the limits of patronage as a tool of democratic governance. Today no leader and no party can claim a monopoly on power, nor the undivided attention or support of the electorate. Decades of shambling work and botched contracts have also eroded public faith in our infrastructure and institutions to the point at which efficiency, integrity and transparency are almost redundant. Corruption and cronyism are symptoms of the same malaise as the violent crime that stalks our communities: they represent a collective retreat from the rulebook. As we endure conditions in which rampant crime remains unchecked, there is a deepening awareness that no-one is immune from the end-game. If we do nothing more than oscillate between the whims of one administration and another, we will never develop effective policies and programmes because these cannot be imposed from on high. Proper governance requires substantive consultation and negotiation, the push-and-pull of a functional rather than a nominal democracy, in order to endure.
A democracy, writes the Russian chess player and political activist Garry Kasparov, “is as strong as its people believe it to be.” Its form is not prescribed but there are certain indispensable attributes, among them that the law should apply equally to all citizens. In the Caribbean this belief is still worth defending, for although our societies grew out of a patchwork of vested and competing interests that may ultimately prove irreconcilable, there is still a balance to be struck between self-interest and the common good. Our relative anarchy may function quite tolerably if there are sufficiently strong bonds to rein it in.
Every democratic society must have a moral core, an agreed framework within which all of its citizens operate, without fear or favour. It is time, beyond time some would say, in our 50th year of independence, to finally dispatch ‘planters’ psyche’, to disentangle the web of ‘favours, governance and patronage’, to redefine our moral core, to reach a consensus that the rules apply to all Guyanese and to collectively map a route forwards. To echo Martin Carter’s final words in the ‘Open Letter’, it is time again for a long hard look at the question: “Who do we think we are?”
