By Percy Hintzen
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.
In a letter to the editor published a few weeks ago, an advisor at the Office of the President of Guyana invoked the scholarship of Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe to make a distinction between the “founding violence” of colonial enslavement and the benevolence of ExxonMobil: “Exxon, Hess and CNOOC delivered Guyana from an insurmountable starvation of capital…to move [the nation] from the oft stated “second poorest country in the Western hemisphere” (as if that was our fault). The writer documents the history of enslavement in Guyana to absolve ExxonMobil and its partners from the imperative and inevitable violence of oil extractivism.
Mbembe would be horrified. His fundamental argument is that the legacies of colonialism’s violence can be seen in postcolonial governance. Contemporary examples abound that expose the pernicious fallacy of the benevolence and generosity of oil capitalism. Death, despoilation, destruction, and repression hide behind the “War on Terror” in the Middle East. The decades-long campaign of genocidal violence aimed at secession has culminated in warfare between the Dinkas and Neurs in oil-rich Southern Sudan. The current crisis in Venezuela is a geographically close exemplar of the integral relationship between violence and oil extraction.
The “founding violence” of colonial conquest persists everywhere. It endured in colonial British Guiana after the abolition of enslavement and the end of indentureship. It became conjoined with the violence of bauxite extraction, then gold, backed by the violence of Canadian finance. Now, ExxonMobil stands at the apex of a “ruling group” whose violence is justified and legitimized by a narrative, soi-disant, of the company and its partners as saviors of the people from a life of savagery and abject poverty. We are fed stories of the excessive wealth enjoyed by the people of the “Oil rich Persian Gulf Nations” that hides the violent and repressive exploitation of the impoverished masses of migrant workers upon whose backs that vaunted wealth is built. Workers are brutalized and dominated by Sheiks whose absolutist rule seems not to trouble Western governments that impose, underwrite, back, and subsidize oil colonialism. And they brook no challenges to oil’s transnational order. They unleash their militaries, their campaigns of economic and political retaliation, and their “security” apparatuses to overthrow governments and punish people when oil is challenged. The contemporary histories of Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, and the Sudan, inter alia, need no elaboration. And then there are the environmental costs of fossil fuel extraction that pose existential threats to human sustenance and survival.
Inevitably, everywhere, oil capitalism engenders popular resistance and challenge. Anyone raising even the most benign criticism of oil becomes targets of the ruling alliance of oil cartels, national and foreign governments, international agencies, and domestic elite beneficiaries of global capital. The case of Nigeria is exemplary. The formidable power of Royal Dutch Shell conjoined with the absolute dictatorial authority of the Nigerian postcolonial regime to unleash a campaign of terror against the Ogoni people who dared to oppose oil extraction. Government forces, some paid directly by Shell, joined paramilitaries commissioned by the company to kill, rape, and beat thousands. Many were tortured. Hundreds more were arrested and exiled. Entire villages were destroyed. Leading activists – like Ken Saro Wiwa – were executed.
This playbook of postcolonial violence and terror has a familiar history in Guyana. It was unleashed in the 1950s against the nationalist movement. It was deployed in a campaign of terror during the 1960s to oust the then anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-Western People’s Progressive Party from power Today the violence of oil colonialism is targeting people and organizations who question and oppose oil extraction. Cynical evocations and duplicitous linking of misogynistic, racial, and class hostilities are its tactical instruments.
There is an intensifying public campaign, conducted largely in the government owned and regime-controlled Guyana Chronicle newspaper and in letters to the editor against environmental, women’s and civil rights groups and any individual who dares to raise a question about oil extraction. “Red Thread,” recognized regionally and internationally for its dogged pursuit of gender justice, has become a regular target. The organization has been discredited as a “little bourgeois group” of anti-regime agitators and activists with no connections to the grassroots. Or, one presumes, that their grassroots members are either invented, or if they do exist are little more than puppets, with no voice or agency of their own. Its members are labeled traitors to “the people of Guyana (who) are keen on how the oil and gas economy will better their lives.” Its supporters are linked to “regressive social forces” that embrace “a particular sinister kind of cultural nationalism”. They are identified as “well known anti-government operatives—pregnant with manufactured misinformation.” This falsity is presumed to expose the “fallacy” of the “most blatant, brazen, and barefaced claim that [the group and its members] are against “all forms of violence”. Supposed ties to the “racist anti-Indian dictatorship” of the former APNU/AFC coalition government are asserted to make the patently false claim that Red Thread is an arm of the Working People’s Alliance, one of the coalition’s partners. These claims, despite their patent falsity, are attempts to intimidate. They cannot be separated from reports by Red Thread, made in the media, of threats that they have begun receiving. These threats (dismissed by the misogynists as made up by Red Thread in order to get attention and funding), have led to declarations of support by an international community of writers, bloggers, and digital activists, joined by international climate justice movements, Caribbean women’s groups, members of the Guyanese diaspora, and local supporters.
The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA), highlighted in the most authoritative global study of Human Rights NGOs as “the leading Voice of Conscience and Justice in Guyana” has been another target of retaliation, this time directly by the government. Its 40-year record of “bearing witness and recording gross violations” soon came up against oil colonialism after it chose to “document the despoliation by extractive industries.” The official response was to discredit the organization as a “defunct Association …masquerading as an exemplary civil society organization,” as a “questionable entity,” and as a “sham organization…conducted by an individual who is highly partisan and incapable and unprepared to display any modicum of independence or objectivity.” This was followed by demands for “payment of over $38 million in penalties” for the Association’s supposed failure to apply for a certificate needed to continue as a registered company, an assertion subsequently proved to be “false and baseless”.
Even mere reporting on persons and groups that criticize oil extraction exposes one to harassment. Women journalists who have done so have been targeted and vilified publicly. When a group of predominantly 26 women argued in a letter to the media that such attacks against individuals and groups that criticize oil extraction bear “the characteristics of authoritarian countries”, the response from a “senior government official” was immediate. The group was characterized as “crying about gender discrimination” and playing “language games on race and environmentalism” and deemed to be “anti-government…inadvertent supporters of the “diabolical theatrics of aggravated racialism and state subversion.”
Many now targeted for their opposition to oil extraction, including particularly the GHRA, had been actively involved in a successful campaign against the authoritarianism, corruption, and illegitimacy of PNC governance between 1964-1992. They supported the legitimate claim of the current PPP regime to office; many were motivated by the party’s opposition to foreign capitalist exploitation and its advocacy for socialist transformation. Before its 1992 electoral victory, PPP leaders entered into negotiations with the WPA, vilified today as “anti-Indian,” “racist,” and “dictatorial”, in an unsuccessful attempt to form a coalition government. And many who criticize ExxonMobil publicly also condemned APNU/AFC’s efforts to hold on to power when it lost elections in 2020. These are well documented and well-known. They insist, as they did under PNC governance, on the right to dissent and to challenge government policy in a democracy, even while they advocate for a just society by a government that is good. Their current critique relates to the fact that the PPP, like all the political parties in the country including the WPA, has become a defender of oil colonialism, violating the principles upon which the party was founded. Today the PPP upholds a Production Sharing Agreement secretly entered into by the coalition with ExxonMobil that it loudly and rightly criticised while in opposition.
There appears to be an ongoing campaign in the government-controlled Daily Chronicle to associate Guyanese hybridity with a Mulatto Creole Class (termed MCC), whatever that means. According to a series of ill-informed, poorly argued, badly researched and frequently factually inaccurate articles in the state newspaper that often seem to be an outlet for little more than personal insults, the intent of publicly named and identified members of this fictitious “class” (including myself – to the chagrin of my mother’s Asian-Indian Punjabi ancestors) is a black overthrow of the current PPP regime. It is the group to which I have supposedly proclaimed pride of belonging. While I reject ad hominem and vituperative attacks, this is a particularly pernicious example of brazen dishonesty in the invocation of race, class, and color to identify “enemies of the state.” It is a dangerous, cynical, reprehensible, distorted and lazy misrepresentation of my own scholarship on creolization and middle-class domination. I would like to quote myself directly: “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.”
I am not sure how this identifies me or any of the people so referenced as “mulatto” —- used throughout the Caribbean to signify mixed European-African ancestry notwithstanding its pejorative origins in application to those of European ancestry who are, supposedly, polluted, biogenetically and culturally, by contact with Africans. This serves as a perfect example of the putrid purpose of sowing hatred and violence by dangerous provocateurs, best described by a late Guyanese as worshipping at the feet of “the Greek Gods of stupidity and foolishness.”