The Middle Passage (18 page)

The Guianese scale of distance is curious. They will tell you with pride that the Essequibo, their largest river, is twenty miles across at its mouth and contains islands as large as Barbados. Yet they will speak of the settlement of Bartica, only forty easily navigable miles up the Essequibo, as bush, ‘the Interior’, though it was in this bush, along rivers the colour of burnt sugar, that the earliest plantations were established: the ‘dream of perished Dutch plantations’, in the words of the Guianese poet A. J. Seymour, ‘in these Guiana rivers to the sea.’ Very little remains of these plantations: heaps of bricks here and there – the flat red bricks one has seen individually delineated in so many Dutch paintings – which came from Holland as ballast in Dutch ships, and which, because of their association with carefully rendered sunlit church walls and interiors ordered or boorish, are so disturbing to find in the bush, where they recall only the brutalities of the slave plantations.

In West Indian towns history seems dead, irrelevant. Perhaps it is because the past is so unimaginable; perhaps it is the light; perhaps it is because so much is makeshift and new and the squalor so wholly contemporary. To feel the past you need the emptiness of these Guianese rivers. These rivers, this bush, these rocks are just as they were before the New World was discovered: just such a scene, the river banks bristling with dead, fallen trees, the bush not separate trees but something draped and festooned and heavy, something decaying, with living trunks like white pillars and branches like white veins in the lustreless green whose reflection in the black water is like tapestry-work.

It all seems to await discovery. But the emptiness is an illusion. The river banks are dotted with small settlements and camps, of Amerindians, miners, woodcutters. Trails and even roads run through the bush in improbable places. The road to Brazil begins at Bartica. Concrete at first (an experimental surfacing), it soon turns to clay and runs broad and red through the bush, with experimental grass verges stuck unconvincingly on the white sand on which the forest rests. The exposed trees look like prehistoric animals with enormous bodies and tiny heads; the sand is in parts as white as snow, suggesting a snowfall in high summer; and the claypits have the colours and brightness of crumpled rust-coloured tinfoil. Orange trees can grow in this soil, and the Honduras pine; as yet the hardwood trees cannot be made to grow again. Soon the broad red road dwindles to a track, and as a track it continues to the Potaro River, where it stops, eighty miles from Brazil. It is easy to feel in the Interior that British Guiana is a land of temporary forest clearings, experimental road surfacings, and roads that peter out or, like the cattle trail from the Rupununi, go back to bush.

One’s ideas of numbers alter. Twenty people are a crowd; a hundred make a city. To go back to Georgetown is not only to move from past to present, but to move from the empty to the grossly overcrowded. For on the coast, where malaria has been eradicated, there is a population explosion. And there is land hunger. The number of children in Georgetown is frightening. In the afternoons the streets of the Albouystown district look like a schoolyard during break. Even now there is unemployment. Land resettlement on the coast, where much land is unused, is expensive; to open up the Interior is even more expensive. And from British Guiana, with 600,000 people in 80,000 square miles, migration is increasing. One cannot help feeling that the situation is curiously Guianese.

From the
Guiana Graphic
, 18 January 1961:

The Jagans are the most energetic campaigning politicians in the West Indies. Every week-end they, or their ministerial colleagues, go to some part of the country. They were going this week-end to Berbice, Dr Jagan’s home county, which many people had told me was the most ‘progressive’ in the country, and they invited me to go with them. Dr Jagan himself was going to call for me at the hotel.

And I was late. I had gone to the restaurant across the road for a ‘quick’ snack. Forty-five minutes waiting, three minutes eating (scrambled eggs). When I came back Dr Jagan was half-sitting on a bar stool. He wore a sports shirt and looked relaxed. Then I remembered my laundry. I raced up to my room and came down with an untied parcel of dirty clothes, which I gave to the barman together with a tip. (It didn’t work. When I came back, two days later, the clothes were still below the bar, a puzzle, I was told, to subsequent barmen.)

The Jagans live in an unpretentious one-floored wooden house standing, in the Guianese way, on tall stilts. It is open and unprotected.
*
There is a pet monkey downstairs, and there is nothing upstairs to distinguish the house from many other Guianese houses, apart from the packed bookcases and the magazine rack (the
New Yorker
among the magazines).

The trip to Berbice was a family affair. The two Jagan children, a boy and a girl, were going to spend the weekend with Dr Jagan’s mother. They treated me with indifference; and considering what has been said and written about them, the boy in particular, I was not surprised. Presently Mrs Jagan arrived. She quickly made ready – they were to eat in the car – and spent a little time choosing a book. She chose
The Vagabond
by Colette (in Wakenaam she had been reading Doris Lessing). It was a squeeze in the car, but there were two more children to come: the children of Dr Jagan’s brother, Sirpaul. We picked them up at a wooden house in another street. ‘It’s like a picnic,’ Dr Jagan said. And, with oranges and bananas being passed around to children, it was.

I learned that one of Dr Jagan’s brothers was my namesake, and we talked about names. Mrs Jagan said that when Sirpaul was in New York he found himself being treated with exaggerated deference by the hotel staff. The bill explained why: it was addressed to Sir Paul and Lady Jagan.

We were not out of Georgetown yet. A Negro on a bicycle shouted, ‘The coolies don’t care if Jagan bury them!’

It was the casualness, rather than the abuse, which seemed strange: a small car packed with Jagans, and one of the territory’s major political issues finding such simple utterance. One somehow expected something more formal.

‘It’s a thing you learn in England,’ Dr Jagan said. ‘To be polite to your opponents.’

We went on talking about names. Mrs Jagan said that another of Dr Jagan’s brothers had changed his name from Chunilal to Derek; all but one of the sisters had taken English names.

Exactly one hundred years ago Trollope complained about the British Guiana coastal road – it was the only thing he disliked in British Guiana – and the road hasn’t improved since then. The surface is of burnt earth, whose durability is only fractionally higher than that of unburnt earth, and the road is a succession of potholes so distributed that they cannot be avoided, however much a car weaves about. The short smooth ‘experimental’ stretches provide a brief but shattering contrast and complete one’s sense of frustration. Yet taxis and buses regularly use this road, bumping along in a slow, determined straight line when there is traffic, and weaving about like crazy ants as soon as the road is clear. Low-grade bauxite, in which British Guiana abounds, would make a more lasting surface; but burnt earth is a peasant industry and burnt earth has to be used.

We passed many Negro settlements. The name of one, Buxton, hints at their story. Thomas Buxton was, with Wilberforce, one of the campaigners for the abolition of slavery; and these Negro villages were established after emancipation, on abandoned plantations co-operatively bought by former slaves who wished to work for no master. The first of these plantations was bought in 1839. It cost $10,000. Six thousand dollars was immediately subscribed in cash by eighty-three Negroes, and the money triumphantly transported in wheel-barrows; the remaining four thousand was paid off in three weeks. The village movement continued in spite of opposition from planters and government. The planters were losing their labour force. The government feared the collapse of the economy and, in order to create ‘a free but landless labourer’, limited grants of Crown land and imposed penalties on those who squatted on unoccupied land, which was plentiful in British Guiana.
*

As it was, Indian immigration solved the labour problem. And the former slaves were defeated by the land, by the problems of drainage and irrigation which only the large estates could tackle. We passed through one sad grey village, just like the villages Trollope had seen: grey, weatherbeaten wooden houses standing on stilts on islands of trampled grey mud in a grey swamp. Dr Jagan told me there was no sea-wall in this area, and the inhabitants didn’t want one: they were not agriculturists now, but fishermen.

New Amsterdam, British Guiana’s second town, stands on the Berbice River. Dr Jagan had been told that the ferry left at five minutes past two. We got to the river in good time, and there we learned that the ferry left at 1.25 and 3.45. ‘The inefficiency of people in this country,’ Dr Jagan said. However, a launch of the Blairmont Estate was due to make the crossing soon; and to get the necessary permits we drove to the estate office, a low white building, the ditches around the well-kept lawn cool with the broad flushed discs of the Victoria Regia lily, which the explorer Schomburgk discovered on this very Berbice River. Mrs Jagan told me with a girlish giggle that they tried to keep their relations with the estates as correct as they could; and I felt, though she didn’t say so, that this asking of a favour, and the promptness with which it was granted, was an embarrassment.

As soon as we got to the other bank a man came up to Dr Jagan and gave him two dollars for the party, and we were met by an elderly Negro, a party-worker. New Amsterdam was a stronghold of the opposition, and we learned that Mr Burnham himself, the leader of the opposition, was in town (he had probably caught the 1.25 ferry) and was to make a speech that evening. Mrs Jagan said that sometimes on these campaigning tours government and opposition had to share the same government rest house. There was no danger of that here, however. We were staying at Government House.

Government House in New Amsterdam is the old Davson estate house, white and grand and elegant, two-storeyed, standing on tall pillars, the broad veranda wire-netted, the floors shining, the rooms high and large, and everywhere the rich smell of old wood, the unmistakable smell of the tropical estate house. Something remained of the Davsons. In the drawing room, on walls otherwise unfurnished, there were two framed photographs of Dovedale; and in the room I was given there was a coloured print, bluish and faint and misty, of Eton. In the veranda, shadowed by wide eaves and protected from insects by wirenetting which nevertheless permitted one to see the garden and the tennis court, the party-worker and I talked. He sat on the wicker chair as one who entered the house now by right; but his hat was on his knees, and his talk was mostly of the Davsons. He spoke of them with more than affection, with relish; while Dr Jagan slept in one of the rooms upstairs, and the hot afternoon stillness was emphasized by the muffled booming of a loudspeaker announcing Mr Burnham’s speech that evening.

The loudspeaker went on and on. The party-worker turned to politics, reluctantly I fancied, for the party’s prospects in New Amsterdam were not bright. It was the old issue of race: New Amsterdam was predominantly Negro and the Negroes were afraid of Indian dominance. He himself didn’t see what dominance had to do with it. In B.G. it was open to anyone to ‘progress’ – in the West Indies to be progressive is to be determined and able to acquire – and there were Negroes who were as ‘progressive’ as the Indians. He just wished there were more progressive Negroes; and there could be, for though the Indian owned more, the Negro earned more.

I had heard this before in Georgetown, and from supporters of the other side. In their uncertainty, their fear of being twice overtaken, not as individuals but as a community, first by the Portuguese (between whom and the Negroes there were riots in 1856 and 1889) and now by the Indians, in their feeling that time was against them, many Guianese Negroes were in this mood of self-analysis. At Christmas there had been a campaign urging the Negroes to save, to buy only what was absolutely necessary. The campaign had failed, and the stores had complained of racialism.

In Georgetown a Negro woman of energy, charm and sensibility had spoken to me for an hour, with urgency and something like despair, about the shortcomings of the Guianese Negro. She wished the Negro to behave with dignity. It nauseated her to see Negro women jumping up in street bands at Carnival time: no Indian or Portuguese or white or Chinese woman did that. (But they do in Trinidad, where it is a sign of modernity and emancipation.) The Negro wasted his money on drink, which was for him a symbol of wealth and whiteness. (This is, of course, an over-simplification, though it should be said that Dr Jagan recognizes alcoholism as one of the country’s problems.) She wished the Negro could have the thrift and determination of the Indian; many respected coloured families had wasted their substance and were completely in the hands of Indian money-lenders. Above all, the Negro lacked the family feeling of the Indian; this was the root of his vulnerability. Three hundred years of slavery had taught him only that he was an individual and that life was short.