Lady Jags, the colour of Guyana, the colour of tragedy

Mar 06, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

My eyes caught the faces of some lovely Guyanese girl all splashed over page 29 of yesterday’s edition of the Kaieteur News. I was curious because most of them looked European. And quite honestly I didn’t know what “Lady Jags” meant. So I read the caption.
Lady Jags is the name given to Guyana’s female football team presently competing in FIFA’s international competition. There is nothing unusual about these 18 faces. But if you are a sociologist or a cultural historian with some research interest in the social evolution of Guyana from the late 19th century on, then these 18 pictures paint 18 million words.
The social evolution of Guyana has few complexities. The Africans went off the plantation and into education, administration, public sector occupations and the security forces. The social leadership of this stratum could be referred to as the middle classes. The East Indians remained landed people with little concern shown for the types of skills Africans acquired.
The economic leadership of this class could be classified as rich peasantry. The urban petty bourgeoisie were the Portuguese. The non-occupational and aesthetic worlds of these ethnic communities were different with some overlapping between the Portuguese and the Africans.
Religion explained this. The Africans and Portuguese were Christian so they met each other in church. The Portuguese were in to motor-racing, lawn tennis, cycling and hockey and enjoyed western music. The rage of the Portuguese youths in the fifties and sixties were Elvis, the Beatles, Stones, and other rock groups.
Africans chose boxing, football and cricket. Their aesthetics took in Motown soul music with the Drifters, Sam Cooke, Ben E. King and Otis Redding leading the way with steel band and Trinidadian calypso not far behind. The Indians embraced their Indian movies and music, cricket and horse-racing.
That was a hundred years ago. Guyana in the 21st century has witnessed a seismic shift in class and colour with resulting upheavals in aesthetics. No other photograph expresses this monumental reorganising of the class structure of this land than page 29 of yesterday’s Kaieteur News.
If 50 years ago, you had to name ten beauty queens of Guyana, eight would either have been Portuguese or a mixture of Portuguese, mulatto and Indian. Over the last 15 years, if you had to name eight out of ten beauty queens, those numbers would all be Africans.
Thirty years ago, if there was a female football team competing on the world stage, of the 18 selected 14 probably would have been Africans, particularly those of a browner complexion. Today, Guyana’s female team is dominated by girls with Portuguese and European names.
Of the 18 faces and names on that page, three are Africans of a darker hue, one is of mixed ancestry. Two of the three East Indians appear to be mixed with European blood and the rest are Guyanese girls of Portuguese ancestry. It is unlikely that a sociologist would just casually dismiss the significance of the composition of that team.
It tells the story of the declining African world in Guyana.
Today, traditional African areas of work are being filled by other ethnic communities. I spent all my life in African dominated South Georgetown. I only moved out of Wortmanville three years ago. In my days in Wortmanville growing up, I never saw an Indian teller at any post office – be it Charlestown, Kitty or GPO. Today, there are many. I never saw an Indian traffic cop in those days. But in 2010, from my eyes, there appears to be as many Indian traffic ranks as there are Africans.
At what we call the Georgetown Public Hospital, if you saw two Indian nurses, you saw a lot. Today, the Indian nurses at that hospital are quite visible.
But how many areas have the Africans moved into that have not been traditionally his/her niche? Growing up in Georgetown, the stores were owned mostly by Portuguese and Indians (I’m not forgetting the Chinese though they were small in numbers comparatively speaking). As the Portuguese left, the Indians moved in. Where were the Africans?
The landscape of commercial Georgetown still remains the same. Almost 99.99 percent is Indian ownership. Again, I ask where are the Africans? The Indians still have their lands as they did in the late 19th century. I have a funny feeling that Forbes Burnham was right although I feel uneasy saying it. Burnham felt that once he and his party were in power, African existence was guaranteed. Today it is not easy to miss the colour of Guyana. What is the colour of tragedy?

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Lady Jags, the colour of Guyana, the colour of tragedy

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