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Racism and Communism in British Guiana*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Ernst Halperin
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Extract

With an area of 83,000 square miles and a population of 600,000, British Guiana is one of the smallest countries on the South American continent. Its political importance is out of all proportion to its size or economic performance for the single reason that the People's Progressive Party (PPP), which won a clear majority in the Legislative Assembly elections of 1961, is completely dominated by a group of Communists.

British Guiana is still a colony under a governor who is a British civil servant nominated by the Colonial Office in London and who controls law and order, defense, and external affairs—the effective levers of command. The local government can thus be said to be in office but not in power, its range of action being extremely limited.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Inter-American Studies , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 1965 , pp. 95 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1965

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Footnotes

*

Author's Note: On-the-spot research for this study, including interviews with leading personalities of the various racial and political groups, was conducted by the author during a stay in British Guiana in April and May, 1964. EH

References

1 According to the South American handbook, 40th Annual Edition (London: Trade and Travels Publication, Ltd., 1964), the country's exports totaled $146,565,000 British West Indies dollars and its imports $147,023,600 British West Indies dollars in 1961, at 1.7 BWI dollars to 1 USA dollar.

2 See Smith, Raymond T., British Guiana (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 181.Google Scholar

3 Guyana Yearbook 1964 (Georgetown: Guiana Graphic Ltd., 1964), pp. 225-226.

4 In an interview on April 26 Mr. Moses Bhagwan, the chairman of the PPP Youth Movement (PYO—Progressive Youth Organization), freely admitted that young Guianese were sent to Cuba and to “all the socialist countries” for professional training, but he pointed out that young people were also being sent to Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. Mr. Bhagwan said that in Cuba the Guianese trainees received either university instruction or “organizational training in cooperatives.”

5 See Guyana Yearbook 1964, p. 15.

6 Statement to author in an interview on April 24, 1964.

7 Statement to author in an interview on April 30, 1964.

8 For the history of British Guiana see Raymond T. Smith, British Guiana.

9 Ibid, p. 44.

10 Guyana Yearbook 1964.

11 One would assume that only low-caste Hindus came to British Guiana on contracts of indenture. However, Raymond T. Smith points out (in British Guiana, p. 46) that only 31 per cent of the immigrants belonged to very low-caste and out-caste groups while no less than 13 per cent belonged to the highest groups of the “twin born” Brahmans and Ks'hattryas. Since they were all treated alike as laborers, the distinctions between them were leveled out.

12 British Guiana, p. 104.

13 In the first years of the abolition of slavery several hundred German, English, Irish, and Maltese laborers were imported. Between 1935 and 1882 some 30,000 Portuguese came from Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verde islands, but the great majority of these appear to have returned home or gone on to other South American countries on termination of their contracts.

14 See Swan, Michael, British Guiana, The Land of Six Peoples (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1957), p. 50.Google Scholar

15 Mrs. Gaskin is the chairman of the main opposition party, the People's National Congress. Later Mr. Martin Carter, British Guiana's foremost poet and a former leader of the PPP, was appointed public relations officer of the Booker group. Mr. Carter is also of Negro origin.

16 The Booker group owns 13 of British Guiana's 19 sugar plantations, 9 of the 12 sugar factories, a foundry, a shipping company, oil factories, distilleries, a taxicab enterprise, and Georgetown's largest department store. The group also has holdings in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Canada. The head offices of the group are in London (chairman of the group parent board: Sir Jock Campbell), but operations are largely decentralized.

17 This was particularly true in the period between 1928 and 1943. Before 1928 the locally born White and Colored middle-class of businessmen and professionals, through their elected representatives, had had considerable influence on the administration of the colony. The effect of the constitutional reforms of 1928 was “to remove all power from the elected representatives and invest it in the governor and the colonial office.” (Raymond T. Smith, British Guiana, p. 54). The Legislative Council instituted in that year was composed of the governor and two other officers of the Colonial Service, 8 nominated officials, 5 nominated unofficial members (composed according to Raymond T. Smith, British Guiana, p. 55, almost entirely of representatives of European commercial and planting interests), and a minority of 14 elected members. In 1947 the number of elected members was increased to give them a majority on the Legislative Council.

18 In his book British Guiana, The Land of Six Peoples, p. 125, Michael Swan describes Georgetown society as “the world where ‘high color’ and ‘low color’ are preoccupations, where parents plan for their daughters to marry men with lighter skin than their own, and the white skin is the hope and aim of all.”

19 In British Guiana, p. 41.

20 Ibid., p. 197.

21 See ibid., p. 107.

22 See British Guiana Constitutional Commission 1950-51, Report and Dispatch from Secretary of State of the Colonies, Cmd. 9274, London 1951 (Waddington Report).

23 See “Report of the British Guiana Constitutional Commission 1954, presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Parliament by command of her Majesty,” (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1954), cited hereafter as the Robertson Report.

24 Raymond T. Smith, British Guiana, p. 143.

25 Elementary education in British Guiana has always been in the hands of the churches. It was declared compulsory in 1876, but until well into the 20th century many Indian families successfully resisted application of the law. Hence the rate of illiteracy among the older Indians is high, and the Indian community was slow to develop an intelligentsia of its own. On the other hand, the Africans, being Christians, did not resist schooling in denominational schools and until recently were the better educated group. This, and not a policy of discrimination, is the reason why the Indians are seriously underrepresented in the civil service, the police, and a number of professions.

26 British Guiana, p. 112.

27 Statement to author by Mr. D'Aguiar in an interview on April 24, 1964.

28 Mrs. Janet Jagan.

29 The term was used by Marx and Engels to distinguish their own brand of socialism from that of Utopians like Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen.

30 Both quotations from the Robertson Report, pp. 80-81.

31 Michael Swan, British Guiana, p. 96.

32 Ibid., p. 135.

33 Raymond T. Smith, British Guiana, p. 167.

34 Op. cit., p. 169.

35 Op. cit., p. 205.

36 The reason for this is, of course, that the urban working class is Negro and therefore follows Mr. Forbes Burnham and his rival Social Democratic Party.

37 The Iranian Tudeh Party appears to be another instance of a Communist-controlled party with a program of nationalism and watered-down socialism.

38 See Michael Swan, British Guiana, p. 135: “It is said that he was politically educated in Chicago by his wife who was an enthusiastic worker on behalf of the Communist cause.”

39 Robertson Report, p. 36.

40 On April 30, 1964.

41 We were unable to ascertain whether the formation of the Political Affairs Committee preceded the establishment of contacts between Japan and the British Communist Party or was due to that party's influence.

42 See Henry Felling, The British Communist Party, A Historical Profile (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1958), pp. 4Iff. In accordance with this Comintern decision the British partyhad sent out emissaries to Egypt and India in 1925-27. The British party also recruited members for the Indian and other colonial Communist parties among the students from the colonies who studied in British universities.

43 See Raymond T. Smith, British Guiana, p. 169.

44 See Felling, The British Communist Party, p. 41, n.3.

45 Robertson Report, p. 82.

46 Robertson Report, p. 36.

47 Lenin, V. I., Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder (New York: International Publishers, 1950)Google Scholar, specifically Chapter IX, pp. 59-71.

48 The peculiar constitution of the Labour Party allows for the collective affiliation of entire groups, or parties-within-the-party.

49 Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, pp. 70-71.

50 Lenin, Op. cit., p. 70.

51 Henry Felling, The British Communist Party, pp. 105ff.

52 See Raymond T. Smith, British Guiana, p. 169, and Michael Swan, British Guiana, The Land of Six Peoples, p. 133.

53 Perhaps this is what Raymond T. Smith means when he says (British Guiana, p. 167), that the Jagans saw “the British Guiana situation … as part of a wider problem of colonialism and capitalist exploitation.”

54 Raymond T. Smith, British Guiana, pp. 174-175.

55 Robertson Report, p. 64.

56 Robertson Report, p. 40.

57 Roberson Report, p. 37.

58 Robertson Report, p. 74.

59 Quoted from Guyana Yearbook, 1964.

60 This is the case not only in British Guiana but also in Trinidad, a country of rather similar ethnic composition. In Trinidad as in British Guiana there is a Negro party and an Indian party. So far racial conflict has been avoided through the political skill and wisdom of the Negro majority leader, Dr. Eric Williams, and the moderation of the Indian minority leaders, but the possibility of such conflict is inherent in a system leading to the formation of large racially based parties.

61 The PPP vote was thus lower and the PNC vote higher than population figures would warrant (49 per cent of the population are Indian, and 33 per cent African). This was due to the high percentage of minors in the Indian sector of the population. The PPP also did not put up candidates in certain constituencies in which it was hopelessly outnumbered, thus further lowering its over-all percentage. It is said that in these constituencies the Indians were instructed to vote for the UF in order to weaken the PPP's main rival, the PNC. The Colored vote appears to have been shared between the PNC and the UF.

62 Raymond T. Smith, in British Guiana, p. 166, gives the following account of the origins of the MPCA: “In 1937 the first union to cater specially to the needs of East Indian sugar workers, the Manpower Citizens Association, was formed by Ayube M. Edun. The rather odd title of this trade union derives from a scheme devised by its founder for the reorganization of the British Empire … : An alternative to communism, fascism, Ghandism, and sundry other ‘isms’, it involved Britain in becoming the center of a world order based on what its inventor called Rational-Practical Idealism. In this new state there would be a number of divisions to which persons would be allotted on the basis of ‘accurate scientific statistics’. These would be the ‘Supreme Council of Intelligentsia— Intelligentsia—Transitionary Intelligentsia—Manpower Citizens (manpower of Brain and Hands)—Women-Citizens—Children of the RIP State—Disabled Citizens of Mental, Physical, Social Disabilities—Retired Citizens, and Essential Division of Functions’. As a start toward the inauguration of the British Renaissance, Mr. Edun … started the Manpower Citizens Association which had the immediate and less ambitious object of bettering the conditions of work on sugar estates.”

63 In an interview with the author on April 27, 1964 Bhagwan was unwilling to venture an opinion on the Sino-Soviet conflict. He merely declared that “the Sino-Soviet debate is inside the Communist world movement and absolutely without relevance to us.”

64 These figures are given in a dispatch from Georgetown in The New York Times of December 10, 1964.

65 Description of the PPP by its Assistant Secretary Sydney King, as quoted by the Robertson Report, p. 35. As we have seen, King himself was in favor of a narrower formula restricting party membership to those willing to accept the teachings of Marxism-Leninism.