By Omar Shahabudin McDoom
Dr. Omar Shahabudin McDoom teaches political science at the London School of Economics where he specializes in the study of violent conflict, ethnic politics, and sub-Saharan Africa. He has held research fellowships at Harvard and Oxford universities and is the author of the Path of Genocide in Rwanda: Security, Opportunity, and Authority in an Ethnocratic State (2020). Prior to his academic career, he worked as a Policy Officer for the World Bank, a Legal Officer for the Government of Guyana, and on electoral missions for the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. He is also an Attorney admitted in New York.
As Guyanese wait to see what will follow the resolution of the country’s extraordinary electoral stand-off, I would like to step back from the politics of the moment and offer a view as a professional political scientist on two questions that naturally arise with each election in Guyana. Why has voting along ethnic lines – both actual and perceived – marked every democratic election in the country since 1961? And why have only two parties, the PNC(R) and PPP(C), dominated the country’s politics since then? I would also like to suggest a way forward and propose a path to reducing the role of ethnicity in Guyana’s politics. The journey begins by recognizing that Guyana’s “ethnic problem” has less to do with enduring popular prejudices and more to do with problematic party practices.
The questions of ethnic and party loyalty are especially important at this moment in Guyana’s history. The discovery of oil makes the stakes of this election – and all those that may follow it – higher than any since the return to more democratic rule. Guyana is at a crossroads. The party that controls the country’s oil rents will have the capability to transform fundamentally the lives of Guyanese for the better. Yet it will also have at its disposal the means to deny its opponents power permanently as well as to share this wealth with its supporters exclusively. If the latter choice were made, Guyanese rightly worry that conflict, possibly along ethnic lines, would return the country to its darker past. But to understand how to move forward, we must first understand how we got to where we are.
An Unusual Baseline
The story begins with the country’s ethnic balance. It is unusual. Guyana’s census bureau categorizes its people into seven ethnicities, of which two, “Africans/ Blacks” and “East Indians” have always constituted the country’s largest groups by some margin. These two groups are also somewhat similar in size, although East Indians have always been numerically superior. Bi-ethnic dominance is unusual. While all countries have some degree of ethnic diversity, nation-states historically have been built around a single, core ethnic group that usually constitutes a natural majority. In comparative terms, only a small handful of democracies around the world have two more similarly-sized ethnic groups than Guyana. The list includes Guatemala, Belgium, Fiji, and Trinidad & Tobago, among others. Guyana’s ethnic balance then should be rightly recognized as distinctive.
This balance is not historical accident. Guyana’s sugar plantations, well-established by the mid-1700s in each of the major Dutch settlements along the coast, demanded a certain amount of labour. By my calculation, in 149 years between 1658 and 1807, the end of the Atlantic slave trade, nearly 121,000 African slaves, in 428 voyages, disembarked alive in Dutch and British ports located in what is now modern day Guyana. In comparison, following emancipation in 1834, nearly 239,000 Indian indentured labourers arrived in British Guiana over 79 years between 1838 and 1917. The result was that by 1960, the time of the last census before independence, Guyana was home to nearly 268,000 East Indians (47.8%) and 184,000 Africans (32.8%). By 2012, the latest census, these proportions had become 39.8% and 29.3% respectively. The rise in ethnically “mixed” people and the different rates of birth, death, and migration between Indo- and Afro-Guyanese explain the change. The point is that it was the demand for sugar that explains why a particular number of slaves and then “coolies” were required to work the plantations and why Guyana ended up with Indians and Africans constituting its two largest ethnic groups and why its indigenous peoples became a minority. Guyana’s unusual ethnic balance then has its origins in the European sweet tooth.
Yet demography is not destiny. Guyana’s distinctive ethnic balance does not, by itself, explain the persistence of either ethnic voting or two party dominance. The countries mentioned earlier with two similarly-sized groups do not all exhibit these twin behaviours. What then explains them? Each phenomenon has a different story behind it.
Why ethnic voting?
The origins of ethnic voting can be traced to two events that occurred some sixty years ago before Guyana became independent. The first is a disagreement. The split in 1955 within the party of national liberation, the PPP, pit the anti-colonial movement’s two principal political figures against each other. Both Jagan and Burnham believed they should be the party’s rightful leader. The fracture in the PPP, however, did not follow ethnic lines at first. Big names in the party initially positioned themselves without regard to race. Ashton Chase and Sydney King remained loyal to Jagan, for instance; whereas Jai Narine Singh and Dr. Lachmansingh both pledged allegiance to Burnham. The 1957 election that followed the party’s split also did not see markedly ethnic voting (though voter turnout was low). It was the last time, however, such an election would occur in Guyana. Burnham’s defeat would lead him to establish the PNC the following year.
Race ultimately triumphed. The split eventually became ethnic in nature. The reason why is the subject of intense disagreement. Burnham sympathizers point to Jagan; Jagan loyalists blame Burnham. For Burnhamites it began with Jagan’s reluctance for Guyana to join the West Indian Federation. They believe he did not want Indo-Guyanese influence to be numerically diminished by an influx of Black West Indians. For Jaganites, it began with Burnham’s decision in 1959 to merge the PNC with a party representing the African urban middle class, the United Democratic Party. They believe the union exposed his ethnic strategy. Burnham chose an African-centred party despite the ideological tension between his own socialist orientation and the United Democratic Party’s (UDP) more conservative and pro-capitalist outlook. He put identity above ideology.
However ethnic politics first began, and wherever the fault lies, it is clear that the strikes, riots, and other violence that followed the split in the PPP and that marked the years leading up to independence in 1966 deeply inscribed the ethnic boundary between Indians and Africans. The ethnic sentiments that re-surface in the generation of Guyanese who lived through these times when they recall them attest to the legacy of this violence. It is also clear that Burnham made a miscalculation. His strategy to establish the PNC and to merge with the UDP did not pay off. In the next election in 1961, the first in which the PPP and the PNC competed together, and the first in which voting would follow markedly ethnic lines, Burnham lost again. The margin of defeat was small. But given that in 1960 Africans represented only 32.8% of the population, Indians 47.8%, and Mixed people 10%, an ethnic strategy was a gamble. While Burnham was likely influenced by the times – the Pan-African movement was at its zenith in the colonial world – the PNC simply could not win under a first-past-the-post system even if it won all the Black and Mixed votes. The geographic concentration of Africans in urban areas made a win even more unlikely as it meant the PNC could not compete for the many rural seats available. Bad math then marked the starting point of ethnic voting in Guyana.
Yet this initial miscalculation does not explain why voting continued along ethnic lines for the next 60 years. This brings me to the second pivotal event in the country’s pre-independence history. It was one that would durably embed ethnicity into Guyana’s political system.
The British government’s decision to change Guyana’s electoral system from first-past-the-post to proportional representation in 1964 was enormously consequential for the colony. Electoral systems based on proportional representation generally hold the promise of fairer representation for numerically smaller groups such as Guyana’s Afro-Guyanese. However, they also tend to discourage the formation of multi-ethnic parties. Minority groups prefer to have their own ethnic party knowing that proportionality will ensure some degree of representation for them. Crucially, in Guyana the change to proportional representation occurred right after the ethnic fault-line between Indo- and Afro-Guyanese first manifested politically. The new electoral system helped lock in the political significance of these two particular identity groups. The pro-African bias in government policy and practice that followed, reinforced it. As a result, no other social cleavage that conceivably could have been politically mobilized in the Guyanese context – working versus capitalist class, Christians vs Hindus vs Muslims, indigenous vs settlers – has ever proven to be as electorally lucrative and enduring. A competent electoral strategist would, for instance, recognize the value of mobilizing Christian identity in Guyana. Christians represent an absolute majority in the population (58% in 2012) and cut across the Indian and African boundary. Yet Guyana has never seen a Christian Democratic party emerge and endure. The reason lies in the timing of the shift to proportional representation. It locked in an ethnic rather than religious, class, or other divide.
Why then did Britain choose to change Guyana’s electoral system on the eve of independence? To put this decision into perspective, in none of its other major Caribbean colonies – Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Bahamas, Belize, St Lucia, Grenada – did Britain change first-past-the-post before independence. In fact, these countries are all still first-past-the-post systems today. Only in Guyana did Britain introduce proportional representation. The reason is well known. It was the Cold War. Cuba had recently become communist and Jagan was suspected of radical, Marxist inclinations. Britain, with strong encouragement from the US, implemented proportional representation because it would help the PNC under the more moderate socialist leadership of Burnham win more seats. The concentration of Africans in metropolitan areas such as Georgetown and Linden meant first-past-the-post disadvantaged Burnham’s party. However, it turned out that even with proportional representation, and even with intervention by the CIA, the PNC would still win fewer seats than the PPP in 1964. Despite this, in a disappointing display of partisanship, Britain invited Burnham to form the government which he did by allying with Peter D’Aguiar’s The United Force (UF) party. It was Jagan’s “red underwear” then that motivated Britain and the US to interfere in Guyana’s transition to independence and that led to the electoral system switch that helped embed ethnicity into Guyana’s politics.
Part 2 will be carried in next week’s Diaspora column.
