Enmore’s Import

Jun 17, 2013 Editorial

For a new generation, there must be some degree of curiosity – but definitely not wonderment – as to why the Enmore Martyrs should be important to the entire country and not just sugar workers.
From one angle, the killing of the five workers who were part of a protest against a change in their working conditions, certainly seems to be more of an “industrial action” than anything else. To understand the import of the event we have to recall the state of the country called British Guiana (BG) at the time.
Sugar was the raison d’être of the colony. While there was some diversification of the economy by 1948 into bauxite and rice, the bauxite companies were Canadian and American and the rice industry almost totally in peasant hands so that the British colonial power remained inordinately influenced by the sugar industry which had remained in British hands.
Those “hands” were remarkably few at the time – three companies, two British and one local – with the conglomerate Bookers being the dominant one. The saying that BG stood for “Bookers Guyana” was not too far from the mark.
The Sugar Producers Association (SPA) wielded great power behind the Governor’s chair and their top managers were represented in almost every official organisation in the colony – including the Legislature. What was good for sugar was automatically assumed to be good for the country.
The industry controlled the best and most extensive agricultural land on the coastland, which was supported by governmental funding of the intricate drainage and irrigation system on which the rest of the coast depended for their survival.
Sugar took precedence, however, and it was not unusual for the housing areas in the front lands to be flooded so as to save sugar cane in the backlands.
The Political Action Committee (PAC) had been formed by Cheddi and Janet Jagan the year before the Enmore strike that ended in the killings of the “Enmore 5”.
The members – mostly intellectuals – in the group were all “leftists” according to the poet and member Martin Carter, who was but twenty-one at the time. As anti-colonialists and freedom fighters, they were all influenced by the example of the Russian Revolution thirty years before in 1917. And it was that critical moment in world history that gives us a clue as to the importance of the events of June 16, 1948 at Enmore.
The Russian revolution had several key stages, all in 1917, but the most crucial was when in February, on International Women’s Day, workers, fed up with the abysmal conditions they had to endure as WWI ground to a close, marched on the palace of the Tsar crying “Bread! Bread!” Soldiers were ordered to shoot them but they refused and the Tsar was forced to abdicate.
Following up on this spontaneous action, Lenin would lead the revolution of October later in the year that would catapult his party into power that was still retained in 1948.
Jagan and his band of leftists would have seen a reverberation of the Russian Revolution in the willingness of the workers at Enmore in 1948 to stand up to the sugar interests, which provided the foundation of colonial power.
Jagan’s oath at the graveside of the Martyrs’ funeral, following the largest procession seen in the colony up to then, and which shook up the Colonial powers, should be viewed within the context of his understanding that unlike others who had “fought” for sugar workers in the past, only a root and branch change that involved the entire country would really make a real difference.
We should remember that the SPA had already “bought out” the Man Power Citizen Association (MPCA) sugar union that had been formed in the wake of four sugar workers killed in a 1939 protest for better working conditions.
The remembrance of the Enmore Martyrs should therefore be an object lesson for us that “independence” for our country will always remain hollow and a farce unless the oppressed sections of the society can begin to live in dignity.

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Enmore’s Import

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