Exactly a week ago, Guyana reached the high point of its Golden Jubilee activities to mark its fiftieth year as a republic with the festival of Mashramani. It was created in 1970 as the national festival to celebrate the nation’s Republic Day on February 23 each year.
Fifty years is a very appropriate time to evaluate a festival that was manufactured for the occasion of republicanism, but which seeks to be an important national cultural tradition. It assumes great importance because it is the official cultural activity to celebrate nationhood, and it makes very interesting study as a cultural festival. One of the most significant factors in this study is the name of the festival and what it means.
The name Mashramani is very well known, and virtually every Guyanese will tell you what they believe it means. The origin and meaning are taught in schools. The pupils are taught that Mashramani is an Amerindian word which means a celebration after cooperative work. They are told that it comes from the Arawak and describes a tradition of celebrating and making merry after work.
However, there is a problem with this, which is that the true meaning of the word is not known, and what is being taught about it is not accurate. The fact is that mashramani is not a known Amerindian word and it does not exist in the Arawak or Lokono language. Therefore, it was never used to describe celebration after work, and a tradition called by that name is not known to exist.
Considering the magnitude of this, one might ask several questions: How come this is taught to all Guyanese? What is the source of this error? And why has it not been corrected? The truth is that it is not generally known to be an error. At the time of the adoption of Mashramani by the government in 1971, then prime minister Forbes Burnham wrote congratulating the communities of Mackenzie, Wismar and Christianburg, “for having provided the title for the national celebrations – Mashramani … The name Mashramani is particularly appropriate as it is one of the words used by the Amerindians to refer to the celebrations which follow the successful completion of a community or cooperative enterprise or project.”
At that time, that is what was known. The prime minister would have been so advised and the research had not yet revealed anything else. No one had any reason to doubt the accuracy of the information given to Mr Burnham, and it is no surprise that it went down as fact and found its way into general knowledge nationally.
But how did this information come to be disseminated in the first place? And what proof is there that it is not correct? The answers to those questions will take us into the history of the origins of Mashramani.
In the 1960s, the Jaycees of Greater Mackenzie were the producers of an annual Independence Carnival that was the official event for the celebration of Guyana’s Independence Day in that mining community. Later, the three municipalities of Mackenzie, Wismar and Christianburg, became known as the town of Linden. This carnival far outstripped anything in Georgetown and grew to become recognised as the national festival to celebrate Guyana’s independence. It was endorsed and adopted by the government and several ministers, along with multitudes of the population travelled to Linden for the event. By 1969 the new Linden Highway was opened, and it became infinitely easier to travel to the mining town which previously was only accessible by boat up the Demerara River.
When the government announced that the country would become a republic on February 23, 1970. The Jaycees decided that the Independence Carnival would be used to celebrate Republic Day, but it could not do so in its present form, and with its present name. They, therefore set about planning to transform the carnival into a festival that would better reflect an indigenous Guyanese identity. In the process of crafting this refashioned festival, they wanted an appropriate name.
Their idea was something indigenous, so that the celebration would reflect a local custom or tradition and, in that way, have some depth of meaning and context. They were therefore seeking the name of some Amerindian cultural tradition. They started a search which reached into several Amerindian communities up the Demerara and around the circumference of Region 10. The word mashramani came before them as the answer to their search, and it was said to be Arawak describing a celebration that follows the successful completion of cooperative work.
They wanted to test this information to ensure that it was genuine, so they carried out further research around the communities and by consulting authorities. None of those sources knew the word. What restored their flagging faith in the word was the discovery of an 84 year-old Lokono, a Mr Fiedtkou of Malali, who said he had never heard the word mashramani, but he knew of a custom which involved people of a community working together on a community or a family project, such as a wedding. All would come together and work until the completion of the project. There would be a spree, such as a wedding celebration at the end.
Fortified by this report, they decided to use the word. In the words of Jimmy Hamilton, president of the Jaycees at the time, “since we found nothing to confirm or deny it, we decided to run with it.”
But the first evidence of doubt that the word was authentic, therefore, came from the organisers themselves. There was no concord among them as to where the word came from or how it reached them. In one account, people wrote letters in response to their enquiries and the name was suggested in one of those letters. Another version was that they sent emissaries into the various surrounding villages and one of them brought back the word.
The second piece of evidence that the word did not exist came from the sources they consulted. Mr Fiedtkou of Malali, who was a native speaker of Arawak, said he never heard the word. The closest thing he knew that could match their enquiries was the custom he described which he called, “mustameni”.
No other source confirmed the word or the tradition it named. These included authorities such as the University of Guyana’s Amerindian Languages Project, the UG’s Amerindian Research Unit and the foremost authority, lexicographer Canon J P Bennett, whose first language was Lokono. Bennett’s first pronouncement was his Lokono Dictionary – An Arawak/English Dictionary with an English Word List. Mashramani is not listed there, and Bennett was likely the first to comment on the use of the word to describe the festival.
He is quoted in Kabethechino: A Correspondence on Arawak, edited by Janette Forte, as saying that the word is “a coinage” and does not exist in the Arawak language. He remarked that it was coined to name the festival for the celebration of Guyana’s Republic Day. Bennett went further to identify a Lokono word which means “coming together to work” or “a cooperative effort”. That word is “mashirimehi”, which is the closest Amerindian word to mashramani with a similar meaning. Bennett explained that there is no word in the indigenous language for community or collective sporting, and rather than merriment or celebration after cooperative work, in the original usage of mashirimehi “the emphasis is on work”. He further listed the meaning of the word as “voluntary work done cooperatively” or simply as “labour”. A telling repudiation of the belief that it is an Amerindian word describing celebration after cooperative work is his explanation that no word exists in the language with that meaning.
Yet another authority is the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Richard Allsopp lists mashramani, but describes it as “an adaptation”, as a variant, a coinage, or a borrowing, not as an Amerindian word. He describes it as being coined “as an appropriate indigenous label for the national day celebrations of the newly designed Cooperative Republic of Guyana”.
However, none of those sources were consulted in 1969 or 1970.
The main informants from that time who were directly involved in the formation of the Mashramani festival were Jimmy Hamilton, Walter Melville and Basil Butcher. Their accounts of how the festival was named vary. None of them could properly account for the word and Hamilton admitted they could not “confirm or deny” it. They were looking for an appropriate name and they were presented with one that very nicely fit what they were looking for; they were in a hurry to find it before February 23, 1970. Verification took months and difficult field research into riverain territories that might have not been so easy to reach. They were fairly well comforted by what they heard from Mr Fiedtkou of Malali, and so the festival was named, and the explanation of its meaning provided.
The word mashramani is therefore something of a mystery. It is at best a coinage or a variant. All the creditable sources hold what is nationally believed, accepted and taught in schools as not to be what it claims to be. Unlike the situation in 1970, or 1971 when the prime minister wrote giving endorsement of it, the sources are here today and can be verified. But there have so far been no attempts to correct it.
The festival is now a very popular established national tradition and there is no suggestion that its name should be changed. But unless further research can prove otherwise, perhaps there can be a correction to the myth of its meaning and origin.
