Guyana

By: Alonford James Robinson

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Guyana

Independent South American republic; formerly a Dutch and then a British colony.

Guyana is located on the northeastern coast of South America, bordered on the west by Venezuela, on the south and southwest by Brazil, on the east by Suriname, and on the north by the Atlantic Ocean. Colonized by the Dutch in the early seventeenth century, it came under British control in the late eighteenth century and was known as British Guiana from 1831 until independence in 1966.

Ethnic and racial diversity is the outstanding characteristic of the population of Guyana, which is about as large as the state of Idaho and was estimated in 2003 to have a population of 700,000. This diversity is a direct result of the colonial economy, which was based on plantation agriculture. The plantations were worked first by African slaves and later by indentured laborers from India, China, and elsewhere. By 1720, African slaves or their Creole (locally born) descendants made up the majority of the population. This remained the case until the 1910s, when immigrants from India began to outnumber Afro-Guyanans. After independence, Afro-Guyanese leaders captured power, but their rule failed to create lasting economic strength for the majority of the population.

Slavery Under the Dutch and British

In 1498, Christopher Columbus sighted the coast of present-day Guyana, which was inhabited by a number of native peoples, chiefly the Carib, the Arawak, and the Warrau. During the century that followed, Europeans showed little interest in establishing permanent settlements along that coast. During the seventeenth century, however, the Dutch established the settlements of Essequibo (1620s) and Berbice (1627), following with Demerara in 1746. Established as trading posts, these three colonies became significant producers of agricultural products, particularly coffee, cotton, and sugar. To increase the amount of farmland, the Dutch began filling in the marshy coast in the second half of the eighteenth century. African slaves provided the labor for building dams and canals that drained the water from polders, as the Dutch called tracts of reclaimed land.

During the period of Dutch rule, the supply of African slaves to Essequibo, Berbice, and Demerara was irregular. Records are incomplete, but historians estimate that between 1676 and 1795, the Dutch plantations, households, and craft establishments in the colonies received about 50,000 enslaved Africans from the Dutch West India Company, from Dutch free traders not associated with the company, and from British West Indian smugglers. The only available records of slave origins apply to the Dutch trade as a whole, not just to the three Guyana colonies. According to these records, 45 percent of the Africans carried by the Dutch West India Company between 1658 and 1738 originated in the area then known as the Slave Coast and now called the Bight of Benin, which extends from the mouth of the Volta River in Ghana to the mouth of the Niger River in western Nigeria. Another 29 percent came from the Loango coast of west Central Africa; 21 percent from the interior of what is now Ghana; and the rest from southern Nigeria and Senegal. Of the Africans transported by Dutch free traders' ships between 1730 and 1803, 49 percent came from the Windward Coast, which is coastal West Africa from modern-day Liberia to Côte d'Ivoire, and 34 percent came from Loango.

Although no details are available for Demerara or Essequibo, slave registers for Berbice in1819 reveal the ethnic backgrounds of the colony's slaves. The largest percentage were Kongo and related west Central Africans, followed by Akan (called Elminas or Kormantines in the colonies), Mina (also known as Popo), Igbo, Mandinka (Malinke), Chamba, Moko, various peoples of the Windward Coast, Temne, and Fulbe. The Dutch also enslaved a small number of Native Americans, but treaties of friendship with the Carib, Arawak, Akawaio, and Warrau groups allowed for peaceful trade and provided the Dutch with allies against Spanish attacks, slave revolts, and escaped slaves. This arrangement continued under the British.

Snack shop near the Timemri International Airport outside Georgetown, the capital of Guyana.

Henderson/Hutchinson

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Guyana changed hands many times between the 1780s and 1814. Great Britain, engaged in a war against The Netherlands, occupied the Dutch colonies in 1781 but lost them a year later to the French, who were allied with the Dutch. In 1784 the colonies were returned to Dutch control. In 1792 the Dutch combined the colonies of Essequibo and Demerara to form the United Colony of Demerara and Essequibo. The British again occupied the Dutch colonies in 1796. Great Britain gave them up temporarily in 1802, but in 1814 the London Convention gave Britain official possession of all three of the colonies, which in 1831 were united under the name British Guiana.

The arrival of British planters and money in the colonies fed an increase in sugar production between 1796 and 1802. An additional 50,000 slaves were imported from Africa or the Caribbean. By 1805, when Great Britain suspended the African slave trade to its recently acquired colonies (it would abolish its African slave trade entirely two years later), as much as three-fourths of the colonies' population had been born in Africa. Demerara had fifty slaves for every free person in 1789, but by 1805 the ratio had increased to seventy-five to one. Five years later, Berbice had seventy-nine slaves for every free person.

Guyana

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Among the slave communities, African ethnic welfare organizations called companies played a vital role in ensuring Africans' well-being. They provided funerals for members, as well as health and orphan care. Even after Great Britain ended the slave trade and cut off the flow of new arrivals from Africa, these organizations remained in existence. But by 1832, fewer than 35 percent of the slaves in Demerara and Essequibo had been born in Africa, and the decline in new members forced ethnic companies to cooperate with each other, a task spearheaded by the Kongo Company. During the later nineteenth century, these ethnic associations faded away, perhaps incorporated into new Christian congregations or into a new wave of societies that emerged in the 1880s to offer social and economic support to members.

Africans carried on their traditional religions, although Europeans in the colonies were hostile to these practices. African religions offered not just traditional medicines but also an independent set of institutions for enslaved Africans. Under the Dutch, each of the three colonies had Protestant clergymen of the Dutch Reformed Church, but these had little influence on slaves—in Berbice, for example, slaves used the term Christian for the Dutch, setting them apart from themselves. Beginning in 1807, however, British Protestant missionaries arrived to preach to slaves. They encountered hostility from slave owners who considered their message and the congregational church leadership a threat to the plantation system.

Free People of Color

Both African and European society in Guyana were short of women. Even if more women had been available, however, slaves could not marry under Dutch law, which barred them from concluding legal contracts. Dutch law also prohibited marriages between free people of color and Europeans. Still, unions between European men and women of color, either black or mixed-race, were common. Marriages between mixed-race women and white men became common after Britain legalized them in 1812.

Although most slaves lived on plantations, significant numbers of slaves and black or mixed-race freedpeople lived in the port towns of Georgetown, which was the colony's capital, and New Amsterdam. Many urban slaves were artisans whom their owners hired out. In spite of the fact that the colonial authorities discouraged manumission, or the legal granting of freedom to slaves, Guyana had 8,000 free people of color by 1830—twice the number of its white residents. Most of the free people of color lived in the towns. As an intermediate group between slave owners and slaves, they worked as plantation overseers, craftspeople, clerks, shopkeepers, mechanics, butchers, and housekeepers. A few junior positions in public service were also open to them.

Slave Resistance and Rebellion

Manumission freed only a small percentage of Guyana's slaves. Of those who remained enslaved, many resisted or undermined slavery through strikes, suicide, sabotage, assassination, flight, and armed revolt. Slave rebellions were small-scale affairs until 1763, when the largest slave revolt in the history of Guyana occurred in Berbice. More than 2,500 slaves, led by an Akan named Kofi (Cuffy), sought to overthrow the Dutch. He controlled most of Berbice for nearly ten months, but the Berbice Slave Rebellion finally failed, largely because of divisions within the rebel ranks. It also increased slave owners' vigilance. In the early nineteenth century, Demerara and Berbice planters and colonial authorities became convinced that efforts to reorganize ethnic welfare companies were really plans for a slave revolt. In 1814, Berbice authorities tried and executed ethnic company leaders.

After the rebellion, some escaped slaves—known as maroons—founded well-defended camps at the sources of jungle creeks or rivers. Others fled westward from Demerara and Essequibo into Spanish territory, or eastward from Berbice into Suriname. Colonial authorities mounted a series of large military expeditions to destroy the maroon settlements in Essequibo and Demerara, but maroonage persisted. Plantation slaves planning rebellion usually counted on an alliance with the maroons to help them achieve their goals. For example, organizers of a plantation slave revolt in 1823 claimed to have maroon allies. Led by a plantation carpenter named Jack Gladstone and supported by individuals associated with the London Missionary Society, the slaves seized weapons, imprisoned European plantation personnel, and demanded emancipation and other reforms that they believed the British government had decreed. The 1823 uprising, however, was doomed by confused goals, inadequate planning, and prompt retaliation by the British.

Emancipation and After

The 1823 slave revolt in Guyana attracted much attention in Great Britain because a missionary, John Smith, who had been unjustly imprisoned for conspiring with the rebels, died of tuberculosis while in prison. This incident, along with an 1831 slave uprising in Jamaica, fueled the antislavery campaign in Britain. In 1833, the British Parliament passed a slave emancipation act to take effect the following year. The act decreed gradual emancipation within four years for domestic slaves and within six years for field slaves, during which time they were required to work for their owners as “apprentices.” In addition to this free labor, slave owners received financial compensation. The apprenticeship system produced many labor disputes, however, and the legislature ended it in 1838, at which time all slaves were fully emancipated.

With the colony's population numbering only 98,000 at the time of emancipation, employers competed for labor, and the former slaves benefited. Before long, however, planters began importing laborers from India, China, Africa, the West Indies, and Portugal (mainly the Madeira Islands) to undermine the strong bargaining position of the former slaves. More than 300,000 immigrants arrived between 1838 and 1917. Of these, 238,909 were East Indian, 41,000 were blacks from the West Indies, 13,000 were Africans released from foreign slave ships, and 73 were African Americans, part of an unsuccessful campaign to attract free people of color from Canada and the United States.

During the 1840s, two strikes challenged planters' control of labor. Early in 1842, more than 20,000 Demerara and Berbice sugar workers staged a successful strike against wage cuts and new disciplinary measures. Five years later, after British tax policies forced planters to cut wages, workers struck again, but without success. This failure speeded up the workers' flight from estate or plantation housing. Some laborers founded joint-stock companies to buy and subdivide unproductive plantations. Others purchased or rented lots on uncultivated portions of plantations. In 1839, for instance, 128 black shareholders purchased the New Orange Nassau estate, which became the self-governing village of Buxton, located on the Demerara coast. The aim was to settle close to operating sugar plantations where employment was available. These joint-stock villages, however, encountered problems because of the small, uneconomical size of their lots, subdivision into ever-smaller parcels of land under the colony's inheritance laws, title disputes, and costly drainage requirements. The colonial government used these problems as an excuse to limit the formation and independence of communal villages. Laws passed between 1852 and 1856 prohibited joint purchases of land, first by more than twenty people and then by more than ten, and declared that any property owned by ten or more people could be subdivided even of only one shareholder demanded it. In 1856 the government further undermined the villages' self-government by establishing the Central Board of Villages to raise raxes, a move that met resistance ranging from refusal to pay taxes to rioting.

Ethnic Tensions and Organized Labor

The arrival of new ethnic groups in Guyana gave rise to new tensions. The Afro-Guyanese saw themselves as the first-comers and the rightful heirs of the land. They resented immigrant competitors who lowered wages and received access to state land in exchange for remaining in Guyana. Portuguese immigrants, being Europeans, were especially resented. Between 1835 and 1880, 32,216 of them arrived in the colony. Although the Portuguese population was small, the Afro-Guyanese and others believed it was favored in the distribution of retail licenses. Resentment of Portuguese shopkeepers rose during periods of economic or environmental crisis. In 1856, 1889, 1905, and 1910, anti-Portuguese feeling led to outbreaks of violence against Portuguese property and demands that the Portuguese be expelled from the colony. Although conflicts also arose between Afro-Guyanese and East Indians (or Indo-Guyanese) during the same period, none of them resulted in large-scale group violence.

The continuing flow of immigrants led to increasing job competition and unemployment for the Afro-Guyanese. After 1860, many Afro-Guyanese became loggers, workers who bled balata gum (a crude rubber) from trees, and miners of gold and diamonds. By 1924, however, the balata market collapsed and gold sources became depleted. Other Afro-Guyanese workers had entered the newly developed bauxite mining industry during World War I (1914–1918), but opportunities there were limited. Many Afro-Guyanese remained unemployed, in contrast to East Indians, who worked in the labor-intensive growing of rice, controlled by themselves, and of sugar, controlled by British investors. Then, during the 1910s, the Indo-Guyanese became a slight majority of the total population. Blacks and mulattoes still accounted for 71 percent of the urban population, but even in the cities they felt Indo-Guyanese competition.

In late 1905, the colony's authorities used force to suppress widespread strikes and unrest among rural and urban Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese workers, including many urban woman. This labor uprising led to the emergence in 1919 of the colony's first trade union, the predominantly Afro-Guyanese British Guiana Labour Union (BGLU), founded by Afro-Guyanese labor leader Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow. Other unions formed during the late 1930s. Black labor organizations developed together with local branches of African American or West Indian institutions. These institutions included the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the African Blood Brotherhood, which mobilized blacks for the Communist Party, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), an international association founded by the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. British Guiana's branch of the UNIA had urban and rural chapters and an office of the Black Star Line shipping company in Georgetown. It participated in the BGLU, founded schools, and had AME ministers as chaplains.

Party Politics and Ethnic Divisions

Starting in 1891, a series of constitutional reforms changed political life in British Guiana. The secret ballot was introduced, and suffrage was expanded. As a result of these and other reforms, more blacks, mulattoes, Portuguese, and East Indians were elected to the Court of Policy, the colony's main legislative body, and in 1926 reformers gained control of the legislature. Two years later the British Colonial Office responded by making British Guiana a crown colony with a mostly appointed Legislative Council.

Many Afro-Guyanese believed that gaining control of the colonial state was the only way to correct historical injustice by restoring land, businesses, and jobs that had been lost to immigrants. However, the combined black and mixed-race population was outnumbered by East Indians. It was also divided along lines of class and of political theory. Civil servants and many professionals wanted the state to be run by anticommunist political parties led by blacks and mulattoes. Intellectuals, other professionals, and labor leaders wanted a worker-run state and founded the People's Progressive Party (PPP), a multiethnic socialist party, in 1950.

The PPP emerged from the Political Action Committee (PAC), founded in 1946 by Indo-Guyanese dentist Cheddi Jagan, his American wife Janet Jagan, Afro-Guyanese labor unionist Ashton Chase, and Briton Jocelyn Hubbard. These four labor union leaders brought a broad base of Afro- and Indo-Guyanese support to the PPP, which was split not by ethnicity but by political theory. The party's key institutions were dominated by the party's left or socialist faction, headed by leader Cheddi Jagan and including several prominent Afro-Guyanese party members. Its right or nationalist faction was led by chairperson Linden Forbes Burnham, an Afro-Guyanese barrister. As elites who were isolated from the masses in an economically weak country, the two PPP factions were vulnerable to foreign political and financial manipulation.

In 1953 British Guiana adopted a new constitution that allowed internal self-rule. That same year the PPP won the elections, the first held under universal suffrage. After the party had held office for 133 days, however, the British labeled its government “communist,” overthrew it, suspended the constitution, and appointed a conservative interim government. Leftists were jailed, but rightists were placed under house arrest. This difference in treatment further split the Jagan and Burnham factions, which separated in 1955.

Under a new constitution that allowed limited self-government, elections were held in 1957. The Jagan PPP and the Burnham PPP competed, and the Jagan PPP won with the support of the Indo-Guyanese majority. After the elections, Burnham founded a new party, the People's National Congress (PNC), and several Afro-Guyanese politicians broke away from the Jagan PPP to join it. The PNC was later also joined by the United Democratic Party, or UDP (the political branch of the conservative League of Coloured Peoples, or LCP).

Although each party offered candidates from more than one ethnic group, the PPP and PNC increasingly became ethnic organizations. The PPP represented the Indo-Guyanese, and the PNC represented the Afro-Guyanese. In 1964, when the PPP called a lengthy sugar workers' strike, the use of Afro-Guyanese strikebreakers against Indo-Guyanese strikers produced Guyana's worst communal violence, leaving more than a hundred people dead and capping two years of ethnic strife.

Sydney King, a former supporter of Jagan who had joined the PNC, proposed dividing Guyana into a three-part state with separate zones for blacks, East Indians, and those who could coexist. Expelled from the PNC for this suggestion, King adopted an African-style name, Eusi Kwayana, and founded the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA) in 1968. ASCRIA was dedicated to bolstering Afro-Guyanese pride and promoting Afro-Guyanese control of the government and economy. It allied with the West Evangelist Millennium Pilgrims (Jordanites), a religious sect established in 1917 by Nathaniel Jordan, a sugar worker from Kwayana's village of Buxton. Through the leadership of Kwayana, who rejoined the PNC in 1968, the Jordanites and ASCRIA gained influence in the PNC.

Politics Since Independence

The 1964 general election was the last honest election held in Guyana until 1992. It resulted in a coalition government formed by the PNC and a conservative party called the United Front (UF), with Burnham as premier. Burnham led Guyana to independence in May 1966. Within a year, however, the PNC-UF coalition disintegrated, leaving the PNC in control. Rigged elections ensured that it stayed in control for years.

In 1970 the government launched an economic program based on socialist principles. Kwayana had devised a plan to reorganize the economy through worker- and peasant-run cooperatives and state control of many companies. The effort was a failure, however, and the transfer of 80 percent of the economy to state control saddled the country with heavy foreign debt. The state, as the major employer, attacked unions and used soldiers as strike-breakers. Unemployment, deteriorating services and infrastructure, increasing crime and corruption, and a high infant mortality rate led to declining support for the Burnham regime. As they had been doing since the 1950s, Guyanese voted with their feet: out of a population of about 700,000, some 90,000 left the country between 1970 and 1980. Earlier, Great Britain and the Caribbean had been the primary destinations. This time, most went to the United States and Canada.

Meanwhile, Kwayana and ASCRIA quit the PNC in 1971, calling the government pseudosocialist, “callous, corrupt, and drunk with power.” Over the next four years, Kwayana aligned ASCRIA with leftist Indo- and Afro-Guyanese groups, including University of Guyana faculty. In 1973 they founded the Working People's Alliance (WPA), a leftist organization with a multiethnic union base that became a full-fledged opposition party in 1979. Afro-Guyanese historian Walter Rodney was a founding member.

Unable to manage the economy and retain full black support, the PNC resorted to changing its position on key political and social issues and to bashing its opposition. In 1978 the regime turned away from socialism to some degree, adopting a partial market economy in return for international economic assistance. The government devalued the currency, froze wages, increased taxes, decreased social expenditures, and laid off state employees, protecting itself with a close-knit national security system. In response to mounting opposition and fears that the WPA planned to overthrow the regime, the state became increasingly repressive using security forces as well as cult members to disrupt labor strikes and opposition meetings and to break strikes. The Guyana Defence Force (GDF) also infiltrated the WPA, most notably in the person of Gregory Smith, a former GDF officer who was involved in the assassination of Walter Rodney in 1980. That year a new constitution conferred absolute powers on the PNC and on Burnham, in the newly created office of president.

Following Burnham's death in 1985, his prime minister and first vice president, Hugh Desmond Hoyte, became president. To reverse economic decline, Hoyte decreased the size and altered the composition of the cabinet and important state agencies. He also drew closer to the United States and Great Britain and obtained aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Giving in to international pressure, Hoyte allowed a free and internationally supervised general election on October 5, 1992. In a major political upset, a PPP-led coalition headed by Cheddi Jagan and his Afro-Guyanese running mate, Samuel A. Hinds, won the election, and Jagan became president. But Guyana's new administrators, instead of forming the unity government they had promised, practiced ethnic patronage politics by giving key public positions to Indo-Guyanese. Cheddi Jagan died in 1997 and was succeeded by his widow, Janet Jagan, who won the 1998 elections. When poor health forced her to resign in August 1999, she was replaced by her finance minister Bharrat Jagadeo. Jagadeo's administration was reelected in March 2001.

Future of Guyana's Ethnic Mix

In 1966 Guyana entered independence with a weak economy, the trappings of electoral democracy, and unresolved ethnic competition. Between 1966 and 1992, Afro-Guyanese middle-class professionals monopolized state power to forge the economic security that slavery, immigration, and European colonial policy had denied them. However, their regime benefited primarily an elite group and its allies while keeping 70 percent of Guyanese below the poverty line. Few constructive practices have emerged from these experiences. The key political parties today are those that have dominated Guyanese political life since independence, the PPP and the PNC, although many other parties exist. According to estimates, Indo-Guyanese made up 50 percent of the population in 2003. Afro-Guyanese accounted for 36 percent, while Native American, Chinese, and white Guyanese were much smaller segments of the population. Electoral politics along ethnic lines therefore favors the Indo-Guyanese, who for historical reasons have more economic assets than the Afro-Guyanese. Since 1992, economic growth has occurred largely in the Indo-Guyanese-dominated rice and sugar industries and in services where Afro-Guyanese do not predominate. But if Guyana's political culture is to shift from counterproductive ethnic patronage and competition to power-sharing and cooperation, its government must foster affirmative action in hiring and housing, self-help projects, small-business development, access to credit and land, and multicultural education and communication. Without such efforts, Guyana is unlikely to become the “Five Peoples: One Nation” proclaimed in its school textbooks.

See also Apprenticeship in the British Caribbean; Maroonage in the Americas; Role of Slaves in Abolition and Emancipation in Latin America and the Caribbean; Slave Rebellions in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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