Is African Culture Dying in Guyana?

Aug 03, 2025 News

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By Al Creighton

Kaieteur News – I was asked to answer the question:  Is African Culture Dying in Guyana?

The answer is very short and very easy. Yes, it is. Various forms of African culture in Guyana are moribund.

What do we mean by African culture?  When most people hear the word culture they think of the arts and entertainment.  They define culture as art, music, theatre, dance, crafts and literature, and all the time in Guyana when there is “a cultural item” on a programme, it is the performing arts – someone is doing a poem, a dance or a song.  But that is a limited and inaccurate definition.

Culture is much wider than that.  It is actually the way of life of a people; how they live, how they conduct their affairs, how they organise their society.  It includes food, clothes, architecture, religion, language, traditions, customs, beliefs, spiritual faith, rituals, mythology and folklore. Of course, this also includes the arts – the performances and literature are artistic expressions of that culture.

Following from that, African culture is all the ways in which the African heritage is visible in Guyanese society – to what extent do Guyanese practice the ways of living handed down from the vestiges of the African styles of living which would have been brought over by the forced and the voluntary African immigrants.

The answer to that is that in contemporary Guyanese society these things are not very visible.  Examples of the very rich and fascinating African cultural practices in Guyana today are dying.  Most have faded, and what remains is going out of style.  Why and how is this happening?

We can go back in history and find some very compelling factors contributing to the erosion of the culture.  During slavery several things like names, language, religion, spiritual rites were consciously curtailed, suppressed and eradicated by the administration largely because they feared acts of resistance, conspiracies and uprisings among the enslaved.  After Emancipation the colonial authorities continued this and many cultural practices were criminalised.

However, many other factors have been at work in more recent times.  Among the most important is cultural change.  This is a normal thing that happens in all societies as time passes.  In any culture everything does not remain the same from one generation to the next.  People develop different ways of doing things, values change, fashion and popular preferences, as do modes of human behavior and outlook, so that the society is not the same today as it was 30 or 50 years ago as there are many forces that cause cultural change.

One of these is acculturation, in which there is a loss of cultural character and identity because of the infusion of values, modes, tastes and preferences from other economically more powerful cultures.  This can come from imitation.  A very good example of this is the cultural influences from North America upon the Caribbean.  The popular culture adopts the American way of talking, of dress, of fashion and even American values at the expense of local styles and identity.  This has contributed tremendously to the erosion of African or Guyanese folk culture, and is one of the reasons African culture is dying.  Acculturation is a negative force that weakens and waters down strong indigenous local characteristics.  It includes the mimicking of other cultures.

Guyanese culture has been undergoing changes because of modernity which tends to erase those cultural practices that reflected the African heritage, which largely resided in the folk and in the popular culture.  Industrial development and new technologies have driven the African presence into disuse.  People have found new means of entertainment and communication, and the smart phone and artificial technologies have replaced methods and outlook in which the African presence could be seen.

But one of the most decisive and irresistible sources of social change leading to the disappearance of African cultural characteristics is the Guyanese people themselves.  The attitudes of many people have caused the fading away of cultural traits of African derivation.  Many black Guyanese people suppress it; they have the knowledge of strong cultural elements that still exist but they refuse to pass it on, some pretend that they do not know and generally it is not taught to children.

There is a colonial factor known as self contempt that causes black people in the Caribbean and Guyana to be ashamed of their own local African culture and identity with the feeling that it is inferior or unprogressive.  They do not approve of it and dissuade their children from adopting or practicing it.

This leads to another factor of cultural diffusion, which is education.  The African culture in Guyana suffers from lack of retention because of lack of knowledge.  People, particularly younger people and children, do not know and are not educated in those cultural traits which exist submerged in Guyanese society but remain suppressed because of attitudes of the same black people.  If a culture is not taught to children it will fade away, and that is the fate that has befallen African Guyanese culture.

Take, for example, as simple a thing as clothes.

On the First of August – last Friday, Emancipation Day, several Guyanese were colourfully dressed in African garments which they showed off with pride.  But they only wear such clothes for one day each year – you will not see them in African clothes for the rest of the year.  Guyanese do not wear African clothes and that practice no longer exists in Guyana as a regular habit.

I can identify several forms of African culture that used to be a part of normal Guyanese culture and practice which have faded or disappeared, or which are still there, but hidden away and hardly visible.  African music – African drumming, African dance forms, traditions such as KweKwe, the traditional wake, the Kumfa (Cumfa), African feasts, Obeah and the Maskarade (Masquerade).  These are not foreign imitations, but forms that used to be in Guyanese culture.

The KweKwe (QuehQueh), for instance, is known by the songs and the dance performed on the eve of a wedding, but not known as a village tradition – a way of life promoting morality and chastity as well as values.  Most of it is forgotten.  Kumfa(Cumfa) is a suppressed religious faith, hardly known by Guyanese today.  That, and African Feasts are confused with Obeah because of the involvement in spirit possession – many Guyanese do not know the difference.  The spiritual characteristics of the traditional Wake and of the Maskarade are also largely unknown.

These are all African cultural forms that Guyanese have forgotten or are unwilling to pass on to others, and will even discourage their children from involvement or familiarity.  Once you disapprove or dissuade the children from carrying on a language or any cultural practice, you have killed it.  That is why African culture in Guyana is dying.

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• African Culture, African immigrants, Al Creighton, Dying

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