Independence yes, but what else?

May 26, 2013 Features / Columnists, My Column

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I agonized about what to write this week. There was the release of two men whom the police said killed a young policeman by shooting him to death. Of course that makes for an analysis. Certainly, the decision to release the men did not come easy. Perhaps the rule of law was the influencing factor but then again, someone must ask the Director of Public Prosecutions to make her decision known.
Suffice it to say that a public outcry can do a lot for people. Both men had relatives who were prepared to proclaim their innocence.
Then I thought about independence, today being Independence Day. I was there when the Golden Arrowhead was hoisted for the first time forty-seven years ago. I was at school then and a country boy. I remembered the preparations. The entire country was abuzz with talk of independence, particularly the younger people.
I remember the days when my stepfather would come home muttering about this little boy that treated him like a child at the workplace. And I remembered him talking about the white man who, to him, was all-knowing and very powerful. It was as though he hero-worshipped the white man. Certainly, growing up hearing such things, I was confused about Guyana existing without the ever-present white man.
A few months earlier, Queen Elizabeth had come to Guyana. That was a big thing. The government built little platforms at those locations where the train carrying the queen would stop. There was a massive clean-up all over the country and the flags and buntings were strung up—all in the colours of the Union Jack.
I remember some schools in the city forming the map of Guyana on the Eve Leary cricket ground. As a Queen’s College boy, I was one of those sitting on the border. Later, I saw the photograph and I must admit that the map was a beauty to behold. Schools with green uniforms represented a county, those with blue another and some of the other schools with different coloured uniforms represented the rivers and so on.
But the sun was hot that day. I remember getting some soft drink and rock hard buns at the end of the parade. That same day the Queen travelled to La Bonne Intention and again people came out of their homes to see this white woman who was ruling them. Many could have recalled her coronation. That was another big day in Guyana. People travelled from West Demerara by train to be in the city for the event. The year was 1953. I have a vague idea of the fireworks that night while standing on Sandy Babb Street, having been taken there by my parents from La Jalousie, West Coast Demerara.
I was at school on Independence Eve. Some of my schoolmates were supposed to be the toy soldiers at the ceremony later that night. George Edwards of the Stock Exchange was one of them.  That day I went home, borrowed a bicycle from my uncle, put it on the train and travelled to Georgetown.
I was at the Queen Elizabeth Park that night; I saw the entire spectacle, right down to the hoisting of the Golden Arrowhead and the fireworks. Then there was the tramping in the streets of Georgetown.  In those days Guyana had many steel bands.
I remember leaving my bicycle at a house at the corner of Albert and Lamaha Streets to tramp behind the steel bands, changing from one band to the other. I went home very tired on the morning of Independence Day and did not care a hoot how much my uncle fretted. I was seventeen so he would have had a fight on his hand had he tried to hit me.
That was so long ago. I still remember the festive mood of Guyana and the fears of the next day. I remember Forbes Burnham talking about the British giving Guyana a wooden spoon, unlike the golden spoon that Suriname got when it became independent.
But for me independence was more than the hoisting of the flag and singing a national anthem. It is about those who struggled for it. Some of them died. It was about those who came on the promise of a better life and found out that the better life was the afterlife. They had to die to enjoy it and no one has ever come back to tell me about that life after death.
I was at the exhibition at the National Museum and I heard a lot about the role of women in Guyana’s independence. I had never heard about some of them and I must sincerely thank Vanda Radzic for adding to that part of my history.
She spoke of a slave named Bess who opted to run away and the notice the slave owner, a woman, placed in the newspaper. “She speaks very good English,” the notice read. This fate of this woman was not recorded but she cherished her freedom, her independence.  There was America who received 170 lashes while she was pregnant. Her crime was to object to her slave master’s wife beating her child. She aborted but that event brought a change. Slaves testified against their master and got him convicted.
There were women in the sugar industry—Kowsilla and Jagdai—, Janet Jagan, Jane Phillips-Gay, Viola Burnham, Winifred Gaskin, the first Black woman to work in an English newspaper in England and to challenge some of the things written about the people in her country. There were countless others, even today, who are making a fight for their independence.
Just Friday night, a woman who wanted to be independent, and was out earning a dollar, lost her home. She had earlier lost a son who being just one year old, drowned in a bucket of water.
For me, then, independence means so many things, not least of all the right to depend on no one. This independence anniversary, for me is a time for stocktaking and that would involve taking stock of how far Guyana has come since May 26, 1966.
Freddie Kissoon has an interesting view in these pages and there are many who share his view.

 

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