“Celegacy” Sugar

Aug 28, 2008 Editorial

For Carifesta X, a new word was coined – “celegacy”. A combination of the words “celebrate” and “legacy”, it was proposed that it was most appropriate to signify what Carifesta was all about: a celebration of the rich legacy that has been passed on to us from our forebears.

In the midst of all the planned “celebrations” comes a strike in our sugar industry that has brought the entire operations from Skeldon in the east to Uitvlugt in the west to a complete stop.

While we are sure that it was not planned that way by the striking workers, is their action not also part of our Caribbean legacy that we ought to celebrate?

The Caribbean exists as it does because of sugar. As Martin Carter so aptly reminded us, we all come from the “nigger yards” that housed our ancestors.

Dragged from all the continents of the world and dumped unceremoniously into Guyana and the archipelago of the West Indies to produce the crop dubbed “bitter sugar” by our historian/politician Eric Williams, our culture was inexorably molded and shaped by our experience in that “total institution”.

The “jump up and wine-down” culture that so many of us celebrate as ‘we own’ at our carnivals and “Mashramanis” etc. is a legacy from the end of crop celebration we were encouraged to indulge in to let off steam after the months of round-the-clock labour that was demanded once the sugar crop was being reaped.

In Barbados, they still call their festivities “crop over”. Given the old clothes and some food and liquor by the “massas”, we made merry in the lull before the next storm.

But there was another legacy that was honed in the eye of those storms – the storms of being literally driven to toil like animals in the blazing tropical sun to produce more and more sugar to fill the coffers of the plantation owners while our forebears died like flies.

It was a legacy of opposition to oppression and it is this legacy that the present striking workers in the sugar belt of Guyana are reminding us about. And we ought to give them solidarity.

The slaves resisted from the very beginning as many threw themselves overboard from their slave-ships rather than live in the degradation of slavery.

On the plantations, even with the ever present and utilized brutalities of the whip and the rack, the slaves found a legion of ways to resist the exploiters.

Malingering, self-inflicted injuries, feigning ignorance of what was required were only the tip of the resistance iceberg that culminated in the omnipresent reality of violent rebellions.

The indentured labourers that succeeded the slaves on the newly named, but still brutal, “estates” resorted to numerous strikes against the system even in the face of bullets from the planters and the state.

Today we may have our own people manning both the state and the estates – but the reality of degrading labour is still the legacy of sugar.

Imagine that last year the workers, after a struggle, received 8.5 percent wage increase when inflation for the year was 14 percent.

It meant that the workers were taking home less real dollars than the previous year and the corporation still had the gumption to offer some 4 percent increase this year when the inflation rate at midyear was already 5.8 percent. And they are surprised that the workers have rejected their offer.

In a separate move, the Government of Guyana, which is the owner of the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), is about to commence an independent review of the entire operations of the corporation.
It is not a move that is unrelated to the cause of the strike.

While management has kept up an unrelenting pressure to reduce the labour costs in the industry – and have brought it down to below fifty-percent of overall production costs as opposed to sixty percent under the “white-man” – the production levels in the industry have remained in the doldrums.

What is needed is a complete revamping of the management structure of GuySuCo; instituting controls over rampant internal corruption and designing new incentives for the workers.

In the meantime let us, as part of Carifesta X, deliver some strike relief to the sugar workers. It is part of our legacy.