A Plea from a Creole Guyanese
Percy C. Hintzen is a native of Guyana. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley and, until recently was Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University.
The trauma of racial and political violence in the nineteen sixties is a pervasive feature inscribed into every aspect of Guyanese consciousness. Everything, it seems, is lived, understood, and interpreted through the prism of this history. Race is the mobilizing sentiment around which the period is memorialized and relived. The People’s National Congress (PNC) and the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) are its signifying metonyms.
The politics of race was the weapon employed by Britain and the United States to destroy anti-colonial working class solidarity and the threat it posed to capitalism. It was the product of colonial machinations of the early nineteen fifties when Guyana made its transformation to self-government. The fear was that a self-governing and independent country would align itself with a global socialist movement that had conjoined anti-colonial nationalism with Western European radicalism. The result was a bifurcation of the nationalist movement into the two racialized factions of the PPP and PNC that have dominated the country’s politics ever since. A crescendo of political violence in the sixties inscribed race permanently into the popular consciousness of the county. Every debate about politics and policy rekindles the racial trauma of the period, even in the face of fundamental and dramatic changes in the global order. Every contested issue in the country is interpreted, understood, and acted upon with reference to the period and to “Burnham” and “Jagan”, the founding leaders of the two racialized factions. In its wake, racial violence has become the permanent feature of every electoral campaign for national office. The sole objective of popular party-political support is to keep the other racial group out of power. Without the illusion of race the legitimacy of each of the two dominant parties to govern would be eviscerated. Both depend on international intervention to gain and maintain control of governance. This is the way in which they and we are “kept in check”.
Guyanese identity is forged out of hybridized creole historical encounters. These have been shaped in entanglements of the cultures of the marginalized and displaced indigenous first people with others from everywhere including South Asia, Africa, East Asia, Western Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, etc. Everyday interactions and relations among Guyanese belie assertions of an exclusive “racial identity” made by supporters of the two major parties. I focus on the two because they constitute the fundamental divide that haunts our consciousness. The question I would like to ask Guyanese who identify with one or the other of these fictional groups is “What makes you African?” and “What makes you Indian?” Like it or not, you are “cosmopolitan”. The diverse cultural origins out of which your identities have been forged have congealed to produce different and more meaningful ways of being “Guyanese.” These differences have little to do with “race” and more with the socio-economic statuses Guyanese occupy as a peasantry, agro-proletariat, subsistence farmers, traditional producers, or members of urbanized and semi-urbanized groups. These differences are reflected in the nature and constitution of local communities. For instance, the wards and residential neighborhoods in the Georgetown of my youth replicated hierarchies of color and class where the meaningful differences in the lives of Guyanese are, and continue to be forged. These differences are also shaped by the urban/rural divide that has always marked me as a “town man”.
The illusion of race justified colonial and postcolonial intervention necessary to sustain the critically important role played by Guyana in global capital accumulation. It has prevented development of a nationalist consensus in the face of western retaliation every time the people of the country have chosen an alternative path. Western punitive intervention against a radical PPP in the fifties and sixties has become pervasive and permanent. In the nineteen seventies, it destroyed the economy, transforming the country into the second poorest of the western hemisphere. Led by the United States and Canada, it was directed against efforts at economic transformation by the PNC regime that were inspired by the African Socialism of Tanzania and Ghana. These began with nationalization of foreign-owned corporations, a decision motivated by the anti-imperialist mobilization of the party’s support base. The regime turned defensively to an alliance with Cuba and the Soviet Union to mitigate its effects. It then proceeded to implement policies of self-sufficient domestic production and cooperative socialism. But the success of these policies was foreclosed from the inception by the politics of race. The ruling party chose to cling to power rather than accommodate calls to bridge the racial divide made by a Patriotic Coalition for Democracy, which was calling for transition to a government of national unity and consensus. That coalition enjoyed the support of most of the country’s population. At the time the ruling PNC regime, based on an informal survey, enjoyed the support of a mere twelve percent of the population. In the absence of national consensus, the PNC was forced into an “accommodation” with a newly emergent neoliberal form of western capitalism to ensure its survival. In 1992, it was replaced by the PPP whose “racial” supporters, constituting a voting majority, guaranteed victory in “fair and free” elections that signaled an about-face by the international guarantors of power who had previously and actively engaged in keeping the party out of power because of its commitment to “Marxist-Leninism”. To secure its victory, party leaders underwrote and even expanded the neoliberal “accommodation” made by the PNC, forswearing any challenge to U.S.-centered global capitalism and American imperialism. Both were central elements in the ideology and politics that motivated the formation of the PPP in the nineteen forties. The about-face secured protection of the party’s victory against violent racial retaliation by supporters of the ousted PNC. Intervention by western governments and their regional surrogates, justified on the grounds of the protection of democracy, guaranteed and secured PPP control of the apparatus of governance.
The neoliberal accommodation underwrote the exercise of power by a ruling group in exclusive service and protection of the interests of an alliance of local capital dominated overwhelmingly by Asian Indian businesses, a creole elite sharing control of national governance, experts and professionals in the public and private sectors, and global capitalists represented in the bilateral presences of powerful Western governments and the multilateral agencies of international financial institutions, particularly the IMF, World Bank, the WTO, the U.S. Treasury, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. The irony of the racial derangement that serves its various interests is that the majority of those who identify either as “Indian” supporters of the PPP or “African” supporters of the PNC suffer equally from its consequences. They have been forced to resort to massive migration to escape the devastation it has wrought on the economy and society.
I believe that an alternative to party-political rule is essential to any successful attempt at meaningful transformation organized around justice, happiness, well-being, sustainability, self-determination, and human security. This effort has been perpetually stymied by the racial sentiment, hatred, and animus that has moved beyond the arena of politics to plague popular consciousness of self in the country. The crisis of the sixties in Guyana was occurring at a time when global movements were exposing the entanglement of race, capitalism, and imperialism. This was fueling anti-imperialist opposition to the Vietnam War, anti-colonialism in the colonies, and a rejection of race by a “Black Power Movement” that incorporated all members of the global majority whose provenances rested outside of Europe.
These movements were conjoined with the global spread of anti-capitalist mobilization of workers, intellectuals, and students centered in Western Europe. They became concretized in the West Indies in the wake of support for students at Sir George Williams University in Canada who had organized around the transformative agenda of “Black Power.” West Indians were at the pivotal center of the ensuing protests. Among them was Joey Jagan, the son of the South Asian Cheddi Jagan and his European-American Jewish wife, Janet Jagan, both leaders and founding members of the PPP. Expulsion of the West Indian students from Canada sparked a 1970 “Black Power Rebellion” against the ruling People’s National Movement (PNM) in Trinidad. It represented a rejection of the use of race by the ruling PNM as a cover for support of national and international capitalist interests.
The rebellion was organized by an alliance of students at the University of the West Indies, trade unions, and progressive radicals. The rank and file of the predominantly black Trinidad and Tobago Regiment and some members of its officer corps joined the rebellion. “Black Power” was correctly understood by them to be a generalized challenge to all forms of white supremacy, which they understood to be at the root of capitalism and global imperialism. The workers and protestors were not fooled by the party’s claims to legitimacy, rooted in its racial appeal. Every attempt at post-colonial anti-government rebellion in Trinidad has originated among the black working class against ‘self-styled’ “black” governments. This is inconceivable in Guyana where political violence is organized around the delusion of racial power. The rule of the sugar, bauxite, gold, and timber barons is now being replaced by that of the new barons of oil. Exxon, which was heading into bankruptcy before Guyana’s oil find, has now posted the biggest profits in the history of the company. Escape from their sovereign power and the crises that it engenders can occur only when the majority, located overwhelmingly within the lower strata of the color/class hierarchy, participate directly and make meaningful decisions in the governance of their lives.
When people ask me what I am, I reply that I am a Guyanese creole. This is how my identity was forged, and where my interactions have been, and continue to be, most intense. The identity of Guyanese, like my own, is the product of relations among persons whose origins rest in the multiplicity of places from where their ancestors were uprooted, dispossessed, and conscripted into the project of colonization. It is shaped by the polyglots and pluriverses of cultures, beliefs and values that have congealed into a creole reality. The consumption of roti and curry, channa, pepper pot, fried rice, chow mein, metagee, cook up, garlic pork, black pudding (a particularly British dish with origins in Homer’s Greece), etc., is not confined to those with provenances in places from which these foods originated. Their dishes have lost all claims to ethno-cultural authenticity by transformation into the particularity of Guyanese tastes. This is who Guyanese are—-creole cosmopolitans. I am inviting those who are wedded to the myth of race to take the time to view, discuss, and engage with a documentary titled “Race, The Power of an Illusion”. Then perhaps you might come to the following conclusion: Africa is a diverse continent. India is a diverse sub-continent. African is not a race. Neither is Indian. And, hopefully your engagement can inspire salvation for our unique and beautiful Guyana, once identified as the most hospitable country in the world with the best prospects for sustainable development. The URL is provided below. https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=race+the+power+of+an+illusion&docid=608003555320205207&mid=7A568E34B1993C30D42F7A568E34B1993C30D42F&view=detail&FORM=VIRE.
