Three days in May, woven into our national psyche

May 11, 2014 News

COUNTRYMAN – Stories about life in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective

By Dennis Nichols
A little less than two weeks ago, I put on my imagination cap, and took a meandering journey back through time; Dates and images swirled around me, and out of the haze I saw a man who was once a slave, as he watched the berthing of a sailing ship in the Demerara River estuary. Behind him stretched a ‘smokeless wooden town,’ steeped in the legacy of European slave trade, African labour and New World enterprise. From the deck of The Whitby stepped a man, the first East Indian indentured labourer to set foot on Demerara soil. It was the month of May; the two men looked at each other, and the intertwining of their histories began – the main actors in a multicultural cast.

Dennis Nichols

My little transit fantasy aside, the month of May is undoubtedly a special month for all Guyanese. Not only is it the month with the most national holidays, (three)it is also the month that in 1838, saw the first act of a play, as yet unfinished, featuring our two major races, thrown together in a simmering cauldron of social change and experimentation. It is the month when we honour labour. And is the month where, in 1966, two real descendants of those fictional men, Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan, briefly put their differences aside and embraced, as ‘British’ Guiana’s Union Jack was ceremonially lowered and the Golden Arrowhead of Guyana raised at the Queen Elizabeth Park in the capital, Georgetown. I was there, filled with more pride than perception, but it was all good.
Now, in my idiosyncratic way of thinking, May might have been designated Guyana’s National Month or something to that effect. Of course its scope would have had to be big enough and broad enough to include every ethnic group, acknowledging the contribution each has made to our society, and more.
In May, we celebrate Labour Day, Arrival Day and Independence Day as national holidays. We also celebrate and honour the maternal instinct on Mother’s Day (Happy Mother’s Day to all), and as in earlier times some Guyanese schoolchildren are still acquainted with the May Fair and its annual festivities which included the aesthetic Plaiting-of-the-Maypole, part of a pagan folk festival of welcoming the month’s symbolic rebirth associated with the spring season. But it is the observance of the three commemorative holidays this month that is the main focus of this short ‘story’.
So here we are in the month of May again, and it could be just the time to pause and reflect on its three major celebrative aspects for us as Guyanese. For all of us, I would presume, these three elements are seen to be inextricably linked to who we are today as a nation, bringing our relatively brief history to bear on our present circumstance and future endeavour. The transportation to British Guiana and the combined labour, of African slaves and East Indian indentured ‘servants’, the sugar, rice, bauxite and other industries, the establishment and the role of trade unions, the fight for independence and subsequent victory, and the efforts to cement this nation as a sovereign entity, all of which these days represent, cannot be untwined from one another. We are, and I am, part and parcel of that history.
For example, I remember hearing my parents talk about my uncle, Dr. T.T. Nichols and the part he played in the establishment and operation of something called the League of Coloured People or LCP. I read of his efforts as a social activist, hosting the Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey when he visited Guyana, and working alongside trade unionist, Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow.

Two East Indian women, newly-arrived immigrants in British Guiana

From what I heard and read, both of them were proponents of the upliftment of Black/Coloured people in Guyana. That would have been in the nineteen twenties and thirties. My mother also told me of earlier stories relayed to her by her father (a Sergeant-Major in charge of the Immigration Depot at Anna Regina on the Essequibo Coast in the early 20th century) concerning the arrival of East Indians there. I recall her telling me her father’s stories about the huge ‘coppers’ in which rice, curry and dhal were cooked for the new immigrants, and the hustle-and-bustle to have them accommodated in the logies prepared for them after their arduous journey across the ‘Black Waters’ with the accompanying traumatic loss of identity it entailed.
I would have read about the harsh reality of their indentureship which for many was a kind of glorified slavery. According to columnist Ravi Dev, his ancestors were ‘ridiculed and scorned for being uncivilized, illiterate and heathen’, insulted by the ‘massas’ and fed poor diets that no doubt festered to produce the ‘rampant diseases that made us die like fleas’. For my part, the East Indians I knew as a child at Highdam on the East Coast of Demerara, and later in Georgetown, were simply friends, classmates and neighbours. Much later I would be exposed to other aspects of Indian lifestyle, including how some of them ‘saw’ Black people, and vice versa. It was enlightening, and often not in a negative way.
However, racially-charged episodes between Blacks and East Indians are also an undeniable part of our growth as a nation – something almost all Guyanese are aware of, and which I need not elaborate on, except for these few incidents I remember from my childhood in the early sixties – Babu, an East Indian man who sold ground provisions from his Princes Street home, whom we bought and credited stuff from, and whose wife had to be ‘rescued’ by a Black neighbour after being taunted and chased by a group of Black youths; a relative of mine telling of his own rescue on the Mahaicony River from a group of East Indian men, by an East Indian woman, who hid him under her voluminous skirt. And a friend of mine, of mixed parentage, getting lashed with a bicycle chain simply for being of whatever ethnicity he was perceived to be.
Were I to go further back in time, I would have been witness to the most savage and dehumanizing era in our history, a period when Africans were stripped of nearly everything discerned to make them human and/or equal to their European ‘masters’ except their collective spirit and will to survive; a period when some of them were counted as part of the estate ‘stock’ along with mules and oxen, chattel-traded and disposed of often whimsically, and forced to adopt alien names.
Historian Dr. Winston McGowan described it as ‘a cruel institution under which the victim suffered serious disabilities’ including ‘severe, often sadistic punishment … and sexual exploitation of females’, adding that they could escape from servitude only by one of three means – successful rebellion, legal manumission or death.

The Golden Arrowhead and fireworks at an Independence Day celebration

Add to these chapters, the history of the Amerindians – our country’s first people – the dispossession and displacement of a traditional way of life, exposure to a ‘hostile’ European culture that brought death from diseases to which they were unaccustomed, and their retreat to hinterland safe havens. Further add the input from our immigrant Portuguese and Chinese labourers, who later became merchants and entrepreneurs, and you have a pretty clear picture of a colonial society in the nineteenth and early twentieth century that was in need of a unifying theme.
Enter Cheddi and Janet Jagan, Forbes Burnham, Joseph Lachmansingh, Jocelyn Hubbard, Ashton Chase et al, and with them, the first notion of independence from Great Britain. For the past 48 years, this notion has been a reality, even as our relatively young sovereign state still experiences the ups and downs of adjusting to self-government and validating our national motto of ‘One People; One Nation; One Destiny.’
On May 26th 1966, as I said earlier, I stood and watched the exchange of flags that announced the birth of our nation. Bleary-eyed but inexplicably excited, I trembled as the sound of fireworks reverberated across the night air and burst into a thousand points of starlight just after midnight. From somewhere nearby, the voice of Terry Nelson blared out, “We welcome independence to Guyana.” At that time I doubt if I’d ever heard of Labour Day or had the vaguest notion of when and how the first East Indians came to this country; I would later learn about the pain and the pride historically associated with these events.
Separated more by time than by significance, Arrival Day, Labour Day (first observed in the 1930s) and Independence Day, are linked by so much more than the fact of their occurrence in the same month. In what they represent and in the broadest sense of how they are commemorated, they seem to possess the capacity to make Guyanese more conscious of the things that keep us connected to each other ,past and present, than those which tend to drive a wedge between us. This month with its symbolic theme of renewal and change, imaginatively captures the meaning and essence of its first, fifth and twenty-sixth day – three days in May woven into our national psyche.