By Eusi Kwayana
[Kimani Nehusi, A People’s Political History of Guyana 1838-1964 (Hansib, 2018) 715 pages]
This is a rather late review of a significant work of Guyanese history by Dr. Kimani Nehusi which he titled A People’s Political History of Guyana and published in 2018. This delay is regretted. It is regretted especially because the reviewer has had a long acquaintance with the scholar’s efforts to identify moments of consciousness as they emerged and became perceptible among various classes of the colonized peoples of Guyana. This concern had engaged the scholar’s pursuits even while he was in undergraduate study at the University of Guyana and had begun to interview elders available to him across the society and make careful notes. A not insignificant measure taken by this scholar, and perhaps not included in this volume, was his fascination with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and activity and study coming out of neighbouring Brazil. The undergraduate student Kimani Nehusi, then using his birth name of Francis Drakes, in order to more fully appreciate the message of the “pedagogy,” joined a Portuguese language class at the Brazilian embassy in Georgetown. This was a measure of thoroughness that informed his efforts even in his undergraduate days. This reviewer was made aware of the scholar’s concerns as he responded to numerous detailed questions about Guyana’s politics as it unfolded from the middle 1940s.
In the scholar’s perception, which is borne out in part by the events that are known, the Planters on the ground in 1838 were largely of British origin and exercised total domination of affairs in the country in their sometimes adversarial but always mutually protective relationship with the British Raj, represented by a British appointed governor or his deputy, whose headquarters could be either in Barbados or the present Guyana.
It is instructive that the scholar des-cribes the emerging Portuguese ex-indentured shopkeeping and merchant class as being for a time the spearhead of perceptible domestic political activity. This is not surprising as the Portuguese indentured workers, when compared with others, were indentured workers with a difference. They began to arrive in British Guiana in 1835 before the British laws against chattel slavery had been approved in the British parliament. Moreover, they were coming from Madeira, and were coming under conditions that allowed them small cargoes of tradeable items. Above all, there was in the colony something of a Portuguese diplomatic presence, by whatever title, that had the facility of some kind of advocacy and representation.
The reform associations, identified by Nehusi, wrote a signal page in the history of political agitation, and as he implies were the element that overarched and united all the groups armed with more consciousness than clout, like the African Association and others yet to make their mark. This period was the beginning of a significant feature in Guyanese sociology in which to this day the Portuguese identity has never fully been accepted as European, but described as Portuguese.
In the second section of the work under review, the scholar understandably tries to explain the historical terrain between the Age of Enslavement, which saw both elements of the indigenous population and Africans enslaved with the status of chattel. In later times when elements of representation appeared in the bosom of the colonial system, this should not be forgotten. This period is always decisive for as we know and have experienced later class formations show the birthmarks of the social textures out of which they emerged. Doubtless in his treatment of this period, Nehusi draws upon multiple sources to recall the activities of groups of the population involved in the process. The scholar leaves us with the impression that apart from the fact that in these social classes’ formation the emerging middle stratum had been empowered by surpluses flowing from trade and kindred activities, this incipient class was most powerfully aided by the lighter skin complexions and elements composing it. Whoever was part of this particular class, the scholar singles out the centrality of gold mining, with timber and agriculture next in train. That is the order in which these industries were established and became caught up in the whirlpool of developments.
Surprisingly, A.R.F. Webber records that placer mining was introduced by two Africans from Cayenne in the late 1890s, and this became not only a factor in itself but one of the main threats to the absolute domination of the plantation economy. Nehusi affords the reader much concrete information about the foreign companies that, two centuries after Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discoverie of Guiana, were discovering El Dorado in miniature in multiple sites in Guyana’s interior. A study of this section will reinforce the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the lingering effects of underground deals concerning mining, as well as the geophysical basis of the claims of Venezuelan expansionists on Guyanese territory.
It is not out of place to mention here that the significance of gold and diamonds was felt well into the succeeding century. This reviewer has mentioned in Buxton-Friendship In Print and Memory the speech at Hopetown by Honourable Joseph Eleazer, in which the candidate claimed that mining by Guyanese in the Mazaruni river basin had by its linkages helped to stave off crisis of reduced activity in sugar and other sectors of the colonial economy. These asides should not detract from the reader’s attention to the scholar’s central point: that in networking for the extra-plantation activity, those engaged in it were developing a consciousness, not only distinct from but sharply antagonistic to, the economic, cultural and social Eurocentrism of the plantation.
In the next section, the scholar covers Popular Front dispositions that had activists of the middle classes speaking for the working people. As the reader shall soon see, those who too faithfully represented the needs and outlook of the working people were denied recognition. It should be noted that a very active sector of what Walter Rodney termed “the masses in action,” comprised the audiences at public meetings and the petition signers who were initially the founders of the villages descended from the plantation experiences in the 1840s.
I wish to speak to an aspect of Nehusi’s study that may strike readers at home and abroad as particularly valuable. In dealing with the politics of “honours” conferred from above, the scholar follows in the footsteps of Harold Lutchman who perhaps was the first author to give voice to what the great mass of onlookers and supporters had felt about their use by the state and acceptance by representatives. In later decades of the 1950s before Lutchman had written, one platform speaker of the PPP, Boysie Ramkarran, had cleverly described these honours as MOCK orders, comprising as they did of the familiar MBE, OBE, CBE and KBE (Member, Order, Companion and Knight of the British empire, respectively). Obviously, there was much popular ambivalence to these honours, since the mainstream of indoctrination in Caribbean society of that period was the effort to popularize the British Empire. The effort had its obvious long-term objectives and in addition to those it had specific utility during and between the two world wars (1914-1945).
Nehusi’s contribution to the understanding of the instrumentality of these forms of weaponry against the anti-colonial movement is in the area of its subjective influence. Perhaps he, as a person of rural origins in the Essequibo County, was best placed to understand the significance of what defined rare individuals as “successful.” It is he who makes the judgment that many individuals, whose activity had marked them as potential change makers, not only accepted these “honours” when offered, but saw them as recognition coming from above of their own personal achievement and distinction. They were truly flattered by the conferment of these honours as valid recognition of their own exceptional quality. This false realization in itself could detach allegiance from the classes they had been serving and transfer this loyalty to the class intelligent enough to appreciate their merit and powerful enough to reward it. These sentiments were part of the internal dialogues of the colonized and were very likely present almost everywhere that empire occurred.
Before closing this review with some further comments on Guyana’s historical scholarship, Nehusi’s description of his own work may help the reader evaluate the depth of what is offered.
Thus it was that in this rescued land, to the drama of nature was added… the drama of humanity’s various encounters between and among differing manifestations of itself, for the new breed of dominant humanity had brought its own plague of contradictions to this environment. These expressed themselves in the evolving new society as the interplay of class, race, colour, gender, and personality… (p. 39)
Added to Guyana’s natural environment and the potential of ecological disasters old and new, Nehusi advises that the hierarchies of oppression often expressed through maximum personalities were their own epidemic, spread initially by those who pursued domination through colonialism but also what was to come after. Fellow scholar Matthew Quest views Nehusi as also advising that while peace is a worthy goal, it can also be formulated as a thin aspiration that denies that the country is institutionally troubled. Quest suggests we will not have peace without exposing and clarifying the legacy of racial insecurity that impedes power sharing. While there is no especially guilty race, there is unhealthy rivalry. Nehusi wishes to clarify, as is clear below, the hindrances to tranquility and the basis of these burdens.
If peace is the absence of naked violence, peace here would always be troubled, always threatened by the possibility of open conflict rooted in the terrible consequences of a social system marked and marred by organised inequality that was founded upon difference as the recurrent occasion for enforced inequality of access to self-knowledge, power, authority, money, social value, influence and other material and non-material resources that are critical for greater human emancipation and development. The resulting rivalry, competition, mutual suspicions, hostility and—less often—collaboration, were rooted in the demeaning structural inequalities erected upon these differences, in people’s consciousness of these inequalities, and in people’s will to resist the oppression which held this unnatural system in place. For wherever there is oppression people will resist, since that is also a measure of our common humanity… (p.39)
The reviewer, as it happened, has been one source of oral history for the scholar’s project for the 1940s through 1964. In pursuit of objectivity, I will not comment further on these events depicted here except for one notable memory.
Dr. Rita Hinden – a member of the Waddington Commission that visited Guyana in the early 1950s – made this significant finding in her remarks during a hearing: “race is a patent difference.” Although she made this declaration in Guyana, she may have discovered its truth in her experience at the centre of imperialism in England. Some Guyanese historians have emphasized the patent difference imposed by race while others, more inclined to class alignments, have emphasized the fact that race can also be used to obscure and conceal patent similarities between communities of different races, moving when permitted towards class solidarity and a national sense.
To clarify these nuances, I wish to place Nehusi’s book anecdotally in the context of representative works of Guyanese historical scholarship with which I am familiar. Generally speaking, historians choose their terrain in the complex geography of history and select the topics they feel urged to explore. Writers of Guyana’s history have similarly specialized in their focus of treatment of the evidence available. Why did Nehusi choose his focus, “a people’s political history” but with an interpretive approach that is original but, as I will show, not without ancestors?
Norman Cameron, a descendant of enslaved peoples, produced an insightful encyclopaedic record of the African experience in Guyana and other selected locations, with the single theme to what he apologetically called The Evolution of the Negro. In at least three volumes, A.R.F. Webber, published in 1931 a closely written chronicle to mark the centenary of the union of the three colonies (now counties): Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice. Webber was the only author of my acquaintance that commented that Europeans were very anxious to credit Indians with sustaining the sugar industry, and at the same time omitting credit to Africans with providing the country for decades after the 1830s, with supplies of food from their agriculture.
Clementi, the colonial official, had written much earlier a so-called Constitutional History of Guiana, of what amounted to the foreign presence in Guyana. A work later updated and outdone by Dr. M. Shahabuddeen in the 1970s. Significant among others were the writers, like Peter Ruhomon and Dwarka Nath, who left us informative histories of the Indian presence in Guyana. Sister Noel Menezes wrote interestingly about the Portuguese presence and also what she called Scenes from the life of Amerindians. Nehusi offers scenes from the life of his native land that some may not wish to view – a perceptive prehistory of contemporary anxieties.
Ignoring several valuable tracts, we must add to these Harold Lutchman’s From Colonialism to Cooperative Republic, which was perhaps the first work on Guyana treating history as a behavioral discipline – this emphasis on behaviour must be highlighted for where Nehusi’s work enters the field. Then came Walter Rodney’s A History of the Guyanese Working People. This study best illustrated not only what its title claims, but the dynamics of society as the effects of the 1838 emancipation petered out.
Soon after this, Guyanese became aware of books and publications by Clem Seecharan, a Guyanese writing from London, who published India in the Shaping of the Indo-Guyanese Imagination and Tiger in the Stars; the first stressed a mental element in the practical activity in the self-concept of a people, and the second explored in part how the most significant element of indentured laborers were drawn into the general struggle for labour emancipation. O.T. Quamina’s Mineworkers of Guyana deals with a new type of working class that arose at a certain time that existed in isolation, though it was joined politically through the trade union movement with the rest of society.
Guyanese people, though we pursue a unified national community, have existed at times in isolation, and there have been silences on the culture, behaviour, and the inner consciousness of each sector that wish to come together. What we are – mind you not one singular race and ethnicity — when we are in plural spaces is not how we express ourselves in our own places. Rivalry and mutual suspicions are a product of not what we say to each other cross-culturally, but what we say about each other among our own ethnic sectors. There is not just resentment but genuine admiration. In any event, what we say in our own ethnic places, spaces, and associations about the contributions of our counterparts to the national community is what counts. Nehusi gives us insight into the prehistory of contemporary ethnic associations in Guyana.
Kimani Nehusi’s People’s Political History of Guyana arose out of his doctoral dissertation of 1985-1988 and then went through continuous revisions before being completed in 2013. I would say at the risk of error, which I would readily admit, that Nehusi, Seecharan, and Lutchman have shown a common concern, not only with historical events and developments and modes of coping with domination, but also with the thought processes of actors or groups of actors.
The Rev. Doctor Dale Bisnauth is well known for his history of religions in the Caribbean. At a forum in Georgetown, Bisnauth, Rodney’s elder, and Rodney engaged over the question of ethnic conflict in Guyana. Bisnauth’s position was that in view of the European design, the conflicts which had taken place over a decade earlier were inevitable. Rodney’s thesis was that, from all the evidence, the working people of various origins were influenced by the liberation struggles of each and all, evolving as a class. He held this view while citing the singular example he found of physical conflict between Indian and African working people, and while citing also the case of Rose Hall, Corentyne, in which the mechanism of Parate execution for the collection of rates imposed by Planter dominated institutions, was the cause of much African property in homesteads passing into the hands of Indians then favoured for plantation employment over Africans, in what Wazir Mohamed has labelled “penal indenture.”
At the forum referred, Dr. Bisnauth publicly withdrew his argument about the inevitability of conflict. Nehusi’s study takes in more of the social complexities of actual life in light of the Bisnauth-Rodney dialogue. This book not surprisingly has sparked new interests in new places among a new generation of readers, and at a time of much national despondency.
