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Independence
I remember Independence Day 1966 very well. I was in high school and the new holiday was very welcome. I was very sceptical that we would actually call our country “Guyana”. We had been referring to it as “BG” for so long, I doubted that the new name would ever roll off my tongue so easily. While I do remember the celebrations that surrounded the event, that the “Independence Arch” would be constructed in the section of my village Uitvlugt where now only African-Guyanese lived, was a stark reminder of the ethnic cleansing that had taken place only two years before.
Whereas before there had been a sprinkling of intermixing, now there was absolutely none. Each section of the village had its own primary school and the large one on the Public Road that had been originally built a century before, was now a foreign land. There was much talk of reconciliation from the new PNC/UF coalition Government, but on the ground not much was happening. My Nana had a three-acre plot of land that his father had received in lieu of his return passage to India. We planted rice on it and it was an activity that everyone in the family had to play a part.
Rice was then cultivated very intensively and “planting rice” was not a figure of speech. We literally “planted” stalks of rice into the levelled mud and even at that early age, I knew personally what a “backbreaking” task was. So when in 1965 the PNC government broke the contract for rice with Cuba and the price fell precipitously, we all took it rather personally. Being raised by grandparents who together received the grand sum of six dollars in pension after fifty-five years each of labour on the sugar plantation, made one resent every penny lost. Governmental takeover of the Rice Marketing Board was an ominous sign.
That year, the PPP had held their Congress at Zeeburg, the neighbouring village to the west, and while I did not then or later ever join the party or the PYO, one was kept up to date with what transpired through the grapevine. There was a great deal of agitation about the state of emergency that was still in force, and was to continue until after Independence. And also about the PPP activists who were still detained.
I remember the intense discussions precipitated when the PNC held their Congress of 1965 at MacKenzie/ Wismar, the scene of the largest “incident” in the 1964 riots, when all the Indians had to be evacuated after hundreds of their houses were razed. The general conclusion was that a message was being sent. That message was reinforced when at the Independence Conference the same year it was announced that Independence was to be given on May 26, the day after the anniversary of the Wismar conflagration.
The point I am making is that “Independence” for me and most Indian-Guyanese in 1966 meant something different from other Guyanese. For me there was a great deal of apprehension about what lay ahead. As a young lad we had been weaned on the expectation that independence would bring so much. The British were the source of our deprivation and once they were gone, we would be able to live ‘life in London”. Hadn’t Jagan, gestured expansively towards the immaculate lawns and houses in the senior staff compound of the “estate” and told us all at the ‘line top” meeting, that it would be ours at Independence?
But even to a teenager, it was clear on Independence Day 1966 that the PNC had cut a deal with the British and the Americans: their loans for road building and a new airport had already been offered to the new government. Jagan had made the rounds of their capitals and returned with an empty cup. We were not going to be living in the senior staff compound anytime soon and my friends would still have to earn a shilling as “ball boys” at the lawn tennis court at the “Big Manager” house.
The language around Independence time was akin to that used about “revolutions” in other third world locales. While we did not have to wage any guerrilla warfare to oust the British, but rather cut a back room deal, one heard a great deal about the “anti-Colonial struggle” and the need to “decolonize” our minds. The leaders would have shirt-jacks rather than suits, but to a teenager who was soon to have sixteen GCE “O” and three “A” levels and could not find a job or obtain any of the scholarships being handed out, “independence” was just a word, not an experience.
I wonder what “independence” means to a youth today.
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