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The Enmore Signifier

Jun 17, 2011 Editorial

Yesterday, Enmore Martyrs’ Day was commemorated. Every year, the event seems to recede ever farther in the consciousness of the average Guyanese. Who knows, maybe as with Cuffy’s martyrdom that we decided to commemorate as our “Republic Day”, in a while we may see it morph into one more “wine down” session. This may or may not be the Age of Aquarius but it certainly is the Age of Bacchanal. What then does martyrdom signify in such times?
Cynicism, that’s what. Cuffy and his cohorts were killed as they rebelled against the brutal slavery that deprived them of their humanity. Slavery in the Europeans’ pursuit of profits from sugar, in a “new” world claimed as their own, after systematically exterminating the indigenous peoples or driving them into the interior. Cuffy eventually fell to the Dutch overlords, but he was a precursor of the indomitable Toussaint L’Ouverture, who defeated the armies of Napoleon to create the first black independent republic in the Caribbean – Haiti.
The abolition of slavery in 1834 merely changed the form of the oppression, not its substance, for those that yet were forced to provide labour for the rulers. The descendants of the freed men saw their emancipation become a caricature of freedom. They might be free from the whip, but what were they free to do? They were herded by draconian laws, into the slums of the city or into the interior forests in search of El Dorado, when they refused to be broken by the importation of indentured labour.
They, at least, remembered the spirit of Cuffy’s martyrdom as they built a village movement to introduce democracy into this part of the world. They were to rise up time and again in search of dignity and the promised freedom: 1856; 1888; 1903 and 1924 are only the years when bullets took lives. The indentureds that succeeded them in the sugar fields soon found out that the heaven they had been promised to inveigle them from their homelands that had been devastated by imperial greed, was a chimera. And they too rose in rebellion against their oppression.
An uprising in 1869 at Leonora precipitated the usual British response: a commission of inquiry. The reforms could not have been profound: in 1872 another uprising in Essequibo saw the police shoot and kill five labourers. Since the purpose of the then British Guiana was explicitly to serve the interests of sugar, such revolts were blows against imperial rule.
And so we saw the pattern repeat itself with dismaying regularity: sugar workers protesting their conditions of servitude and quotidian betrayals, followed by the riot act being read and police shooting to kill. 1898; 1903; 1914; 1924; 1939 (Leonora again) and finally 1948 at Enmore: there were dozens of martyrs in the killing fields of sugar.
With each round of killing – in the towns and in the fields – our collective consciousness was raised.
It was not by fortuity that the very first trade union in the entire Commonwealth was founded right here in Guyana. It is not by happenstance that the constitution was suspended in 1953 to remove a government after only 133 days. It was not by chance we were called the most politically advanced colony in the British West Indies.
But after independence we seemed to have lost our way; and surely it is not by coincidence that we have also forgotten the martyrdom of so many brave souls that delivered that independence. But this has not been an inattentive overlooking; it is a constructed disregarding, brought about by the opportunism and cynicism of our post-independence leaders.
Rather than putting their heads down and working with their long-suffering people to develop the country and deliver the freedoms for which they had struggled so long and so hard, the first leaders pursued Marxist utopian visions that destroyed the economy and the society. Their successors have gone in the opposite direction: hard market realism fuelled by greed and avarice. Money, money everywhere, but not a cent for the poor. What to do but bacchanal?

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