Reflections on growing up in a racial landscape

Oct 21, 2018 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

‘Race’ has practically become a four-letter word for some Guyanese – although it’s simply a categorization of humans into groups, based on anatomical similarities and on cultural, genetic, geographical religious affiliation etc… It is perceived as a root cause of social division and antagonism, and in our ‘Land of six peoples’ this concept has often taken on strange and ominous connotations that tend to make a mockery of our ‘One People; One Nation; One Destiny’ motto. This piece barely scratches the surface of ‘Race’ in our beloved El Dorado.
How serious is it? As a young child in Highdam, East Coast Demerara, in the mid-to-late fifties, my friends and I were certainly childishly aware of racial groupings, their characteristics and epithets. But there was little or no malice associated with this awareness although the village and surrounding area comprised a motley collection of Blacks, East Indians and Mixed (really mixed) people. We children were too busy having fun. And adults seemed to get along just fine.
I remember, once only, being scolded by my mother for referring to a teenaged neighbour of ours with a crude rhyme I’d heard somewhere before, “Putagee bumba f**t cucumba…” I also remember East Indian schoolchildren being teased with “Coolie Water Rice…” You know the rest. Black people were taunted with something like ‘Black Man Sala, pound Masala; who ah yuh dadee…?” Yet there was, or at least seemed to be, genuine camaraderie among villagers.
Well, maybe it was just us, children. Learning our three R’s, playing Cricket in the schoolyard, Skipping Rope, Ring Games, Marbles, shooting rubber, riding coconut tree branches, or traversing the dusty red road between Strangroen and De Kinderen (the school’s catchment area) didn’t leave much time for animosity, yet somehow, it left a great deal for friendship and affection. My first post-toddler ‘girlfriends’ were of all ethnicities, including Dougla girls. And so we lived.
My family left Highdam for Georgetown in 1958, and by the early sixties, things had changed. I remember in my child’s mind, the racial upheaval of that time. I remember the violence – the beatings and murders, the bombings, riots and fires, the foreign soldiers and local police with their tear gas canisters, the squatters and demonstrators, and above all, the fear and disharmony generated from, I was told, within the main political parties.
I remember the confusion and the angst of my parents, and I’m sure, among PPP and PNC supporters in the 1961 elections, when it was announced that one party had won, only to be later reversed in favour of the other. I remember seeing cars with huge (PPP) cups strapped atop, driving down Camp Street dragging (PNC) brooms behind them, symbolizing victory for one and defeat for the other. I remember hearing the term Apaan Jhat for the first time; and everything seemed pervaded by race.
As I grew up, I heard and ‘learnt’, that Black people were physically stronger, more aggressive, yet lazier than East Indians who in turn were more cunning, clannish, and stoop-to-conquer ambitious. I was privy, as a sort of insider, to both sets of sentiments since, for some inexplicable reason, I wasn’t considered really Black, and I had many Indian friends along with a few almost-Indian relatives. But I saw myself as Black, and thoughtlessly reacted as I imagined an Afro-Guyanese child might, to criticisms and prejudices directed toward ‘my people’.
I was also confused by the racial ambivalence I felt in my teenage years. With ancestors from West Africa, Egypt and Scotland, I tended to relate well to mixed races, but at the same time felt a growing awareness of, and need to assert, my Black African-ness. This was heightened by vicarious exposure to the burgeoning American Black Power movement, and so, by the time I got married in the mid-seventies I’d already planned on giving my children West African names.
Preconceived notions about Blacks and East Indians in the ‘60s, lost some traction for me, after the ‘70s, as discretion and wisdom replaced reactive thinking and feeling. Sports, particularly cricket, helped a great deal in this regard. Like most Guyanese, I knew and felt a sure sense of oneness and nationalistic pride with the exploits of Kanhai and Butcher, Lloyd and Kallicharran, Hooper and Chanderpaul. Cricket, like death, levels the playing field, and puts race in its place.
But some old notions die hard. Prejudice reared its sinister head in 1995 when my eldest son drowned at Anna Regina, Essequibo Coast. My wife and I actually gave heed to the insinuations of some persons in the predominantly East Indian enclave where we lived, who felt that he had been ‘sold’ to appease the wrath of some Hindu deity. Suddenly, what I felt was a certain accident, took on troubling and racist undertones. But resignedly, we left the matter in God’s hands.
Interestingly, a few years ago I read a book written by a colonial magistrate from England in the 19th century. (I can’t recall the name of the book nor the author) But a sizeable part of it dealt with the vicissitudes of life in then British Guiana.The author was particularly keen on recalling incidents in which the criminal acts carried out by perpetrators seem, in hindsight, to have a distinct correlation to many of the very assumptions and prejudices we express today about our races.
Then, like now, it was mostly Blacks and East Indians who were charged with offences ranging from simple larceny to premeditated murder at its most brutal. In this context, most Afro-Guyanese were indeed portrayed as quarrelsome and aggressive, while many Indo-Guyanese were depicted as scheming and cruel. But behaviour traits tend to overlap, and it would be imprudent to imagine that other ethnicities – Portuguese, Chinese, Amerindian and European, were all model citizens. Lawlessness is part of human nature.
Presumptions and prejudices don’t go away easily. These phenomena are ingrained in the minds and hearts of multitudes of individuals worldwide, from Guyana to Guam, to Greenland. But things will change. That’s my opinion and my optimism; looking through slightly rose-tinted glasses, I see my own version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World emerging from the ashes of racial intolerance and bigotry. And the champions of this paradigm shift are, CHILDREN!

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