The Middle Passage (17 page)

Amid these preoccupations God is not forgotten. A religious column (of American origin, from its style and sentiment), whose premise is that whatever your job ‘you can do something to restore to the mainstream of today’s world the values you think are missing’, tells the story of a young New York bank clerk who, though it meant losing $1,800 a year, gave up his job to become a teacher.

Another story, from the days of sail, tells of the young seaman who panicked when he went up the mast during a storm. ‘Don’t look down, boy!’ the mate shouted. ‘Look up!’ The boy did so, and came down safely.

Among the passengers waiting in the veranda of the Lethem hotel there was a coloured girl from Georgetown. She said she didn’t care for politics but supposed she was for D’Aguiar. The other leaders were communist. And: ‘Look what Mr D’Aguiar has done for the country with Banks beer.’

Improbably, there was a connexion. In the Caribbean territories a brewery is invariably among the earliest industrial projects. It is a mark of progress and a promise of modernity, and the local beer is a source of much local pride: Red Stripe in Jamaica, Parbo in Surinam, Carib in Trinidad, Banks in British Guiana. Wherever in British Guiana you heard the United Force spoken of approvingly you heard about Banks beer.
*

In the boarding-house in Georgetown the drunk was still drunk, still groaning, still on his bed. I moved.

Georgetown, most exquisite city in the British Caribbean, is for the visitor the most exasperating. Try getting a cup of coffee in the morning. The thing is impossible. Yesterday you expressed a dislike for lukewarm ‘instant’ coffee, particularly when the coffee is placed on the water and not the water on the coffee; so this morning your hotel offers you half a teaspoon of last year’s coffee grounds in a pint of lukewarm water, since in your folly you said that you ‘used’ ground coffee – ‘use’, revealingly, being the Guianese word for ‘drink’ or ‘eat’. Protest is futile. The Indian waiters are sluggish from overwork and too cowed by abuse from employers and patrons to understand anything. (‘I treat my people well,’ one Indian complained angrily last night to the proprietress, ‘but servants and me not the same class, you hear.’ ‘I know, I know,’ she replied, sympathetic to his suffering.) When you came down this morning at a quarter past seven and inquired why you had not been awakened at half past six, as you had asked, the middle-aged waiter, with a look of terror, said it wasn’t half past six as yet. One sip of the coffee, and you know you can’t drink any more, in spite of the plastic doily on the yellow-checked oil-cloth.

So you start sweating through the hot white city looking for coffee. The cafés serve cold drinks only; the hotels, instant coffee. You telephone a friend, who recommends a café with an inviting name. You ask directions of several Guianese, who mislead you not out of malice or ignorance but out of pure stupidity. Eventually you arrive at Kate’s Kitchen, say. You wait for fifteen minutes; you order half a dozen times; and half a dozen times some torpid waitress, Portuguese, African or Indian, her tumescent belly suggesting constipation, writes down your simple order with illiterate deliberation, as though her pencil were a stylus and her pad made of wax. No coffee comes, though. You are not known in Kate’s Kitchen; therefore you are not served.

After half an hour you rise, sweating, for the café is hot and unventilated, and you find yourself saying passionately but precisely, ‘You Guianese are the slowest people I have ever met.’ You alone are affected by these words; the waitresses simply stare and you go out into the white light trembling with anger, solacing yourself with the words of abuse which have just leapt into your mind.

Inhospitable, reactionary and lethargic except when predatory:
these were the words. And thereafter, whenever my frustration neared breaking point, I played with them, changing an adjective, adding another, until I was able to ‘look up and out to the cause of all mankind ‘.

It is equally impossible to get a meal. About the only thing Georgetown restaurants and hotels offer is ‘chicken in the rough’, and unless you share the Guianese passion for this ‘modern’ dish with the American name, which is nothing more than a piece of roast chicken served up in a dirty basket (it is the baskets the Guianese like) you are going to remain hungry. No point either in telling the waiter that you are in a hurry. It will be fifteen minutes before you get a menu and an hour before you get your scrambled eggs. Don’t complain: the man has been hurrying. You can’t cook in your hotel room; you can’t cook in the street. What do you do? These extracts from my diary, which read like extracts from the diary of an enfeebled explorer, tell their own story:

The malarial sluggishness of the Guianese is known throughout the Caribbean and is recognized even in British Guiana. Some employers prefer to recruit islanders, who, they say, have greater gifts of initiative and self-reliance. I was told that it is dangerous to leave a Guianese in charge of a surveying station in the bush: the surveyors will return to find the hut collapsed, instruments rusted, and the Guianese mad. The islander, on the other hand, will be found in the midst of a tidy plantation, which he will leave with reluctance.

One Guianese official I spoke to blamed malaria. But malaria isn’t all. There is history as well. Slavery lasted for three hundred years and was of exceptional brutality: in this matter of slavery the Dutch record is even blacker than the French. The African, as a result, is passionate for independence, and for him independence is not so much an assertion of pride as a desire to be left alone, not to be involved. Hence the number of African prospectors in the interior of British Guiana, who never make a fortune but live happily beyond the claims of society and just within the law. Hence the existence in neighbouring Surinam of
de luie neger van Coronie
, the lazy Negroes of Coronie, who live placidly in their remote settlement, occasionally taking the odd coconut to the oil-factory for a little ready money, ask for nothing else, and are the despair of the oil-factory, planners, politicians and oil-consumers, for the unrefined oil produced by the people of Coronie is more expensive than the refined oil imported from Holland.

Then there is the land. The fertile coastal strip has to be protected against the floods of Guiana’s many rivers, and, being below sea-level, has to be protected against the sea as well. Irrigation and drainage, valueless unless carried out on a large scale, are beyond the small farmer. The estates must therefore be large. And the evils of the latifundia follow: those clusters of workers’ houses seen from the air, in the midst of fields that go on and on, regularly intersected by ruler-straight irrigation ditches. ‘Today in British Guiana,’ Michael Swan wrote in 1958, putting the case for the estates, ‘sugar must use a hundred subtle methods to maintain a sufficient labour force Most of the evils in the sugar industry can be traced back to the fears of labour shortage.’ The indenture system, which replaced slavery and brought over hundreds of thousands of Indians to the West Indies, operated most harshly in British Guiana (if we forget the treatment of Indians in the French islands and Chinese in Cuba). For the efficient running of the latifundia the workers must be regarded as a caste apart and must continually be reminded of their condition.

And everywhere on the coast you can see reminders of the past, of affronts deliberately offered, it seems, to the labourers of the latifundia. The ‘ranges’ – long rooms cut up into a number of tiny rooms, each occupied by a family – have nearly all disappeared; one or two on the outskirts of Georgetown are pointed out as curiosities. But when you travel by the decadent railway between Parika, on the Essequibo River, and Georgetown, your eyes are caught by more than the water-lilies in the grassy ditches. On one side of the tracks you see the workers’ houses, small, similar, huddled; and on the other side you see the quarters of the senior staff: authority confronting subservience: a standing provocation, you would have thought, to any people of spirit.

It is easy to blame the planters, to blame Bookers. Sugarcane is an ugly crop and it has an ugly history. The foolishly authoritarian overseers mentioned by Michael Swan have a dishonourable ancestry. But in British Guiana it is the land which is ultimately to blame. The land required the latifundia; the latifundia created Bookers. And though Bookers must be given credit for their radical reforms of recent years, they must bear responsibility for what they have been and what, with the best will, they could not help being. Not harsh and unimaginative employers, which was unavoidable, even on the latifundia; but for being, for creating, a colonial society within a colonial society: a double confinement for the Guianese.

Slavery, the land, the latifundia, Bookers, indenture, the colonial system, malaria: all these have helped to make a society that is at once revolutionary and intensely reactionary, and have made the Guianese what he is: slow, sullen, independent though deceptively yielding, proud of his particular corner of Guiana, and sensitive to any criticism he does not utter himself. When the Guianese face goes blank and the eyes are fixed on you, you know that receptivity has ceased and that you are going to be told what the speaker believes you want to hear. It is hard to know exactly what Guianese are thinking; but if you make up your mind in advance you will find much corroboration. ‘Everybody lies in B.G.,’ a Guianese told me. It isn’t lying; it is only an expression of distrust, one of the Guianese’s conditioned reflexes; and one cannot help feeling sympathy for the Colonial Office officials who went to British Guiana in 1957 and concluded that Jaganism was a spent political force.

That the Guianese people should have been politically aroused and organized is not surprising. The latifundia and the difficulty of communications bred a feeling of community which is missing in a place like Trinidad. Whether the people are politically educated is another matter. It has been discovered in America and England that political policies can be sold like any other commodity. In British Guiana the issues are never confusing and there is no need to sell anything. Political judgements are as simple as they were for the girl who was for Mr D’Aguiar because he brewed Banks beer.

One week-end Mrs Jagan went to Wakenaam, one of the flat, damp, rice-growing Essequibo islands, to open a new overhead water-tank. I went with her. For the first time Wakenaam was going to have a pure water supply and everyone had dressed for the occasion. A photographer from the Government Information Services was there. The speeches were made and applauded, but before Mrs Jagan could set the pump in motion (item eight in the typewritten programme, which was not strictly followed), a man wearing a suit and a hat rose and complained about the new rates so noisily that the ceremony was almost ruined. He continued to complain during the celebration – soft drinks downstairs, whisky upstairs – and at one point seemed to be threatening to withdraw his support for the government.

This is the level of political judgement in British Guiana. Wherever ministers go they are met with trivial complaints; whenever, in a country area, Dr Jagan stands still he is at once surrounded by people who have favours to ask. That the government is elected does not matter; the people require it to be as paternalistic as before, if a little more benevolently; and a popular government must respond. ‘The people’ have learned their power, and the sensation is still so new that every new voter regards himself as a pressure group. In this way the people – not the politician’s abstraction, but the people who wish to beg, bribe and bully because this is the way they got things in the past – in this way the people are a threat to responsible government and a threat, finally, to their own leaders. It is part of the colonial legacy.

*    *    *

From the Georgetown
Evening Post
, 17 January 1961: