Agricola on my mind

Oct 21, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Like thousands of other parents, I received the call from my children that they were trapped in their bus. They’d been stuck for an hour just before McDoom and could see clouds of black smoke from tyres burning at Agricola. They couldn’t turn into the opposing lane because of the median and didn’t sidle into the side streets that invited muggings and beatings. Frantic calls were made to friends in the area, but nothing could be done unless they could exit the traffic logjam.
With dusk fast approaching, I drove towards the Vreed-en-hoop stelling from where I’d play it by ear. At least I was getting closer to my children. My thoughts drifted to Agricola. As a boy, all I knew of Agricola was that Jan Carew, author of Black Midas and Wild Coast, had been born there. Boarding at Bagotstown in 1970 to attend school in Georgetown to write “A” levels, I often visited my sister who’d married in McDoom. I became casually acquainted with Agricola, stuck between the two villages.
It was a typical coastal village, but much more ethnically homogenous (African in its case) than either McDoom or Bagotstown. Most residents worked in Georgetown and church influence was strong. But by the next decade, when I returned to visit from the States, much had changed. My sister, who was a strong churchgoer (Assembly of God), knew many families from Agricola, and she talked about youths drifting into crime.
She and her family became victims of a “kick-down-the-door” attack by bandits in the mid-eighties. She recognised several of the attackers – youths from Agricola and Mc Doom. She never recovered from the sense of betrayal when members of her church refused to even reprimand the attackers. She reported that they all died violently in the next two years: God’s work, she assured me. She lives abroad now, but we still discuss what I call her lack of ‘patriotism’ in refusing to visit her native land. She says she connects to people not to the land and after the betrayal, she feels disconnected to the people.
And it is this passive (at best) complicity with what is palpably criminal behaviour that must be addressed if we are to ever build a nation in the State we inherited in 1966. What makes the complicity more than just misguided sentiment is that the criminality is frequently politically directed. Muggings are a feature of all urban landscapes, but in the early ‘60s a new criminal phenomenon appeared on the Guyana scene – “choke and rob”. The PNC encouraged urban youths to harass and intimidate supporters of the PPP government –read Indian Guyanese.
Older members of their community looked the other way because “the boys” were just engaged in politics by other means. According to David Dodd and Michael Parris, in their study, “An Urban Plantation: Socio-Cultural Aspects of Crime and Delinquency in Georgetown Guyana”, the “choke and rob” phenomenon became entrenched as it became a new, and lucrative occupation for urban youths, which fitted in perfectly with the street-corner urban culture. It became more difficult to persuade those youths that the staid world of the nine-to-five workplace was an option. A Pandora’s Box had been opened.
Another form of politically-induced criminal violence unleashed was the “kick-down-the-door” phenomenon that exploded across the land in the late seventies and reached its zenith in the eighties. In view of the directedness of the crime against Indian Guyanese, Mr Kwayana in 1985 dubbed it ‘ethnic genocide”. In numerous instances it was pointed out that members of the armed forces – present and ex – were involved.
And so we had the escalation of the ‘slow fyaah; mo’ fyaah’ strategy of the PNC from 2001, into open warfare against the PPP government – with the epicentre in Buxton but Agricola as a satellite. The Agricola massacres; the Kaieteur pressmen massacre; the ‘Gurple’ beheading are only the tip of an iceberg that completed the destruction of a community. Some have forgotten that ‘Fineman’ Rawlins, ‘Skinny’ Charles and Sean Grant, some of the most notorious names from that era, were “Agricola Boys”. I remembered my sister when I read of the massive hero’s funeral ‘Skinny’ was given in Agricola, with no criticism permitted.
And we segue to the present Agricola violence – trapping thousands of schoolchildren and workers, after the policemen accused of killing the Agricola youth were already charged with murder. The politicians told the people of Agricola that Luncheon had directed his ‘rumble’ challenge at them and not at their cohorts who had issued a ’48-hour’ ultimatum to the government. And the youths continue to be misled. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
My children’s bus managed to return to the Stabroek Stelling by 6:30 and I collected them (unscathed) at Vreed-en-hoop around 7pm. Many were not so lucky.

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