The Middle Passage (20 page)

Immediately after the ceremony Dr Jagan was besieged by people talking about land. The rest of us put on our shoes and went to an old wooden shed that adjoined the temple, and there we were fed on halwa, chipped coconut, bananas and soft drinks. We went out to the car and waited in the hot sun for Dr Jagan. The crowd around him was growing, and his attempts to step backwards to the road were frustrated. The chauffeur was sent to get him away. The chauffeur, a small man, worked his way into the crowd and disappeared. Someone else was sent. ‘Is always the biggest crooks who hold him back like that,’ Dr Jagan’s mother said. She had prepared lunch for him at home; she was impatient to take him off; and it was hot in the car. Eventually, after many minutes, Dr Jagan freed himself and came out to the road, some people still at his heels.

Dr Jagan’s mother and the family of his brother Udit live in one of the workers’ houses across the main road from the compound of the estate senior staff, which is fenced around with wire mesh and guarded at the gate by a watchman. The workers’ houses, standing on stilts, and sheltered by many fruit trees, give the impression of being choked together. Each house, however, stands on a fair amount of land: the feeling of oppression is created by the maze of narrow, dusty, improperly drained tracks between the houses, the fences on either side of the tracks, and above all the trees, rustling in the wind which carries the smell of cesspits. Yet it was easy to see why the Jagan children are always eager to come down to Port Mourant to stay with their grandmother. For a city child there would be enchantment in the flat, well-swept dirt yard, cool with water-channels and low fruit trees.

The house was a simple one, roughly built; and inside bright with fresh paint that had been applied to old, unpainted wood. In the small drawing room there was a set of morris chairs on the uneven floor; a photograph album and an untidy stack of old American pulp magazines rested on a small centre-table; the walls carried no decoration apart from some Roman Catholic calendars. There was no sink or running water; so we used pitchers to wash our hands out of the window of the dining-area. Constantly encouraged by Dr Jagan’s mother, we ate. The food was good, indeed extravagant. It completed my exhaustion. I couldn’t face the afternoon sports meeting, to which the Jagans were going, and asked whether I could rest. Udit showed me to a tiny bedroom that led off from the drawing room. The hairy wooden walls had been painted cobalt; and, below a picture of Christ, I went to sleep.

It was night when Udit awakened me. Mrs Jagan had gone back to Georgetown; Dr Jagan was in New Amsterdam. I was to spend the night in Port Mourant. Udit, a grave, kindly man, offered me a pitcher of water to refresh myself, and then took me for a long walk along the main road, bright with shops and new cafés and busy with the Sunday evening cinema crowd. We talked about the diversification of agriculture in the region; Udit told me that cocoa was being introduced. About the contrast between Udit and his brother there was nothing startling; it can be duplicated in many West Indian families who, with an imperfect understanding of the concept, comically described themselves as ‘middle class’.

After dinner Dr Jagan’s mother showed me the photograph album. It had been extensively rifled. The only photograph of interest was one Dr Jagan had sent back from America while he was a student: a studio portrait by an unimaginative photographer of a dazzlingly handsome young man looking over his shoulder, not unaware of his looks: not the face of a politician or a man who was to go to jail for plotting to burn down Georgetown. If she was proud of her son Mrs Jagan didn’t show it. She scarcely spoke of him; and when we closed the photograph album she became much more concerned about my family and about me. I smoked too much; I was damaging my health; wouldn’t I like to try to stop? And drinking: that was another bad thing: she hoped I didn’t do much of that. While we spoke, Udit’s children brought out their school books and worked at the dining table by the light of the Petromax pressure lamp. The house was wired and had bulbs; but the electricity supply was in the hands of various entrepreneurs in the settlement who ran small generating plants; and it seemed there was some trouble about the arrangements. Earlier, someone else had told me about a field clerk who was too ‘stuck up’ to extend the services of his plant.

Dr Jagan was to return to Port Mourant in the morning, to address a public meeting in the Roopmahal Cinema on the working of the land resettlement scheme. When I left for the cinema Udit’s wife asked me to get Cheddi to ‘come and take some tea’. The request had to be deferred, for Dr Jagan was already on the cinema stage, with a whole row of government officials, Negro, Portuguese and coloured, seated behind him on folding chairs. The administrators wore suits; the engineers khaki shorts and white shirts.

Questioners were being invited to speak from the stage, and over and over Dr Jagan explained to people who had applied unsuccessfully for land that applications had been carefully considered and preference given to the neediest. At last the landed started climbing up to the stage. They stood correctly, their shirt sleeves buttoned at the wrist, holding their hats behind their backs, and spoke softly, as though sensing the hostility of the landless, who made up most of the large audience. Some objected to government interference; some didn’t like being told where to pasture their cattle; some objected to the proposed limitation of holdings.

And so it went on, until the climax. This had been gigglingly prepared in the back seats by some of the landless who were perhaps also party-workers. A ‘character’, barefooted, in khaki trousers and shirt, his manner suggesting a slight drunkenness and also a comical hesitation, walked up to the stage, humorously applauded all the way. And once on the stage he delivered an impassioned and controlled oration on behalf of the landless. It was a performance of high finish, from the opening – ‘A uneducated man like me don’t know how to talk good’ – to the well-known local jokes and the devastating denunciation of selfishness and greed which was at the root of the troubles of Guiana. After he had finished there was nothing more to say. The engineer in white shorts had only to hold up maps and explain some technical details.

Even so, Dr Jagan was surrounded after the meeting and made to go over points that had already been explained. One man had a special complaint: the authorities were making him pay an omnibus licence for his taxi, and he wanted Dr Jagan to correct this. The taxi was in the yard of the cinema: it was a van, capable of seating ten.

It was now past midday. We didn’t have time to go and take tea with Udit’s wife. Dr Jagan had to open a cassava factory in Georgetown at five; his son, waiting for us in New Amsterdam, wanted to get back in time for the matinée of a cowboy film. We started for New Amsterdam with some of the government officials, driving fast along the road, which was here asphalted and smooth. We heard a knocking. It persisted, increased; and the sound was familiar to me from an experience I had had just before leaving Trinidad. We stopped and examined the wheels. The front wheels were firm; those at the rear rocked at the push of a hand. Removing the left hub cap, we found all the nuts unscrewed, projecting evenly beyond the bolts with only a thread or so to go. It was very puzzling.

‘You’ve been seeing politics in the raw this week-end,’ Dr Jagan said to me over lunch at New Amsterdam Government House. ‘If you want to think at all, you have to go abroad.’

Dr Jagan is all things to all men. For some he is to be distrusted because he is a communist; for others he is to be distrusted because he has ceased to be a communist and is just another colonial politician attracted by power. For some he is a racial leader. For some he is failing to be a racial leader. (‘I hate Cheddi,’ a well-placed Indian said to me. ‘The more I see him the more I hate him. One morning the Indians of this country are going to wake up and find that Cheddi has sold them down the river.’) And for others, as a Negro reminded me (it was a point one tended to forget), Dr Jagan represents a radical racial change: he is not white. The colonial system being what it is, many browns and blacks, brown and black but ‘respectable’, find this hard to forgive.

The West Indian colonial situation is unique because the West Indies, in all their racial and social complexity, are so completely a creation of Empire that the withdrawal of Empire is almost without meaning. In such a situation nationalism is the only revitalizing force. I believe that, below the ebullience and bravado, a positive nationalism existed in British Guiana in 1953. This was the achievement of the Jagans and Mr Burnham and their colleagues, and it was destroyed by the suspension of the constitution in that year and – gratuitous humiliation – by the dispatch of troops. Colonial attitudes, so recently overcome, easily reasserted themselves. Under pressure, like the West Indians in London during the Notting Hill riots, the country split into its component parts; and the energy which, already gathered, ought to have gone towards an ordered and overdue social revolution was dissipated in racial rivalry, factional strife and simple fear, creating the confusion which is today more dangerous to Guiana than the alleged plot of 1953.

It is the waste, the futility which is depressing. For when one thinks of Guiana one thinks of a country whose inadequate resources are strained in every way, a country whose geography imposes on it an administration and a programme of public works out of all proportion to its revenue and population. One thinks of the sea-wall, for ever being breached and repaired; the dikes made of mud for want of money; the dirt roads and their occasional experimental surfacing; the roads that are necessary but not yet made; the decadent railways (‘Three-fourths of the passenger rolling stock,’ says a matter-of-fact little note in the government paper on the Development Programme, ‘is old and nearing the point beyond which further repairs will be impossible’); the three overworked Dakotas and two Grumman seaplanes of British Guiana Airways. And one thinks of the streets of Albouystown, as crowded with children as a schoolyard during recess.

*    *    *

The middle-aged American with the surly rustic face was leaning against one of the gallery pillars of the ramshackle British Guiana Airways building at Atkinson Field. I guessed he was American because of his clothes. The straw hat and tight khaki trousers were distinctive; so were the spectacles. He also carried a camera and was chewing. His baggage lay around him in polythene sacks; whenever he moved he took the sacks with him. The precaution seemed excessive, for there were few people about, and we were all passengers for the Interior: half a dozen diamond prospectors, Doctor Talbot and myself. Dr Talbot was an old Interior ‘hand’ who was never so happy as when he was in the bush, drawing Amerindian teeth. His two or three pieces of baggage were tied with rope; he carried an umbrella – odd with his white panama hat – and a parcel of books which were mainly about doctors.

We were going to Kamarang, in the south-west, near Mount Roraima, where the boundaries of British Guiana, Brazil and Venezuela meet. Kamarang was an Amerindian reservation which had recently been opened up. You still needed government permission to go there, though; and the prospectors were being allowed only to pass through on their way to the diamond fields.

The Dakota flew in from the Rupununi, unloaded its cargo of sacked beef, and we went aboard. The American, refusing all assistance from the loader, strung and hung his various parcels and bags about himself and made his way shakily to the aircraft. Then with slow care he unstrung and unhung his parcels, stowed them at the back of the plane, chose a seat, dusted it with a handkerchief, sat down and concentrated on fastening his safety belt, chewing all the while, his deliberateness interrupted by abrupt little pouncing actions, like a man trying to swat a fly after eyeing it for some time.

Within minutes we had cleared the coastal strip. We flew over Bartica and had a glimpse of the red road to the Potaro goldfields. We saw the innumerable forested islands which choked the Mazaruni River. And then it was forest, and forest. We ceased to look through the small oblong windows and just listened to the noise of the aircraft. The Negro prospector beside me was reading the Georgetown
Chronicle. He
caught me looking over his shoulder and passed the paper to me. The headline story on the front page was about the chaotic conditions in the Cuyuni mining area. The prospectors there were apparently without a doctor or an administrator and had to depend on the Venezuelan authorities. The story had been given to the
Chronicle
by a prospector called Agrippa, who was quoted as saying, ‘When a man gets chopped in a fight there is no doctor or police to look for him.’