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| Title: Guyana: The newspaper Stabroek News. Subject(s): STABROEK News (Newspaper); PRESS & politics -- Guyana Source: Round Table, Oct 94 Issue 332, p447, 8p Author(s): Graham-Yooll, Andrew Abstract: Examines the development of the `Stabroek News' newspaper in Guyana and how it is a model for the press in a political and economic transition. History of the newspaper; Importance on the Guyanese press; History of the Guyanese press; Press under Forbes Burnham era; Profile of Guyanese writers. Full Text Word Count: 3815 AN: 9412275428 ISSN: 0035-8533 Database: Academic Search Premier GUYANA: THE NEWSPAPER STABROEK NEWS The headline in the first issue of the Stabrock News, in 1986, announced that the municipal elections had been postponed. 'No poll Dec 8' it read under a picture of President Desmond Hoyte and Prime Minister Hamilton Green, and over mugshots of opposition leaders Cheddi Jagan and Eusi Kwayana. In contrast to that negative start the paper would go on to play a leading, and quite remarkable role in broadening the debate towards future elections. The newspaper is a model, insufficiently noticed, for the press in a political and economic transition. And although Guyana is remote, an English-speaking country on the right-hand shoulder of continental Latin America, the example of Stabroek News's financial and Political struggle to survive is valid now not just for the printed media in the region. The paper can be offered as a role model for press projects in Central Europe and Asia. The small press--with its financial and staffing difficulties--anywhere has a valid reference in the Georgetown paper. On Friday, 21 November 1986, 20 000 copies of the first issue of the weekly Stabroek News (named after the old Dutch capital of Guiana, before the British renamed it Georgetown after their king), rolled off the presses of Trinidad Express Newspapers, in Port-of-Spain. The 16-page tabloid was the product of the determination of the couple then entering publishing for the first time, and of remarkable cooperation from Ken Gordon, the managing director of the Trinidad Express group. David de Caires, is 56 (in 1994), a lawyer, educated at Stonyhurst College, trained for the bar in London, with his own practice in Georgetown since 1960, and his wife, Doreen, had found no facilities for publication in Georgetown. President Desmond Hoyte, of Guyana, Had just given a politician's answer to a publisher's question about the chances for a free press in a muzzled society. Hoyte said there was no law preventing the start of a privately owned paper. De Caires went to neighbouring Trinidad to study printing possibilities. The paper was started with G$100 000 (equivalent to about US$10 000), of the De Caires's own funds. For the first nine months the weekly was produced with 'flats' made in Georgetown and flown to Port-of- Spain by either spouse, who then flew back with the entire print run. The services of a light aircraft had to be hired because British West Indies Airways (BWIA) could not assure delivery. The weekly flight into the shack that was the terminal at Timheri airport put a spark of life into the slack pace of the incoming freight area. But operating such a system left Doreen de Caires near breakdown and the small staff on the point of exhaustion. In spite of many problems, the newspaper was the early product of a wind of change blowing through Guyana. In December 1985, Desmond Hugh Hoyte had been elected president. 'It was not a fair election; though under Hoyte there was a certain liberalization. The start of Stabroek News was a good indication. We could not have existed under Forbes Burnham [Guyana's ruler from the time British colonial rule ended in 1966.],' De Caires said in an interview (see Index on Censorship, 1/1991). Hoyte, in fact, had given De Caires the go-ahead, 'but could not give us any foreign exchange facilities. We begged for money all over the place'. Bridging finance had to be raised to pay the Express for the printing. The National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington-based office, had provided some funds through the Institute of North- South issues. Accusations later said the funds were tainted by CIA connections, but De Caires declared his innocence in such an accusation. A policy statement in the first issue said that, 'A newspaper represents the interests, outlooks (and prejudices) of those who own and control it. However, the debate begins, rather than ends, with this assumption'. It was a declaration of openness and independence, in spite of the inevitable and built-in bias. It was also a warning shot at the government that the press in official hands was moribund and needed new life. History of Guyanese Press Guyana's press has a rich history from colonial times. But as from the installation of a parliamentary dictatorship which had rigged every election (December 1968, 1973, referendum in 1978, 1980, and, though less fraudulent, also in 1985) since independence in May 1966, freedom of expression had been effectively stopped in the interests of national development. There was a de facto control of opinion, as none other than the government had access to the printing plant, newsprint, the press, and the Guyana Broadcasting Corporation. The last private newspaper had been the Graphic, owned by the Thompson group. When Thompson decided to pull out of Guyana, the shares were offered for sale to the public by prospectus. At the 11th hour, Forbes Burnham introduced legislation, the Capital Issues Control Act, which imposed state permission as a requisite for the sale of company shares. Burnham refused permission, and Thompson sold to the government in 1973. Before that, and since the beginning of British rule in the colony, Georgetown had known an active privately owned, and some well-run government, press. Titles such as The Argosy and Daily Argosy, Berbice Gazette & British Guiana Advertiser, The Colonist, The Creole, the Daily Chronicle, Demerara Daily Chronicle, Guiana Chronicle and Demerara Gazette, Guiana Graphic, later the Guyana Graphic, and many others, go right back to the earliest years of the 19th century and post-Dutch rule, and are now essential in the study of the history ofthe Caribbean. But by the time that Forbes Burnham was well installed the only independent press was the Catholic Standard, published by Father Andrew Morrison. The paper was almost a samizdat publication, harassed by Burnham, and Hoyte, with punitive libel actions to discourage free reporting. David de Caires and his partner in the law office, Miles Fitzpatrick, helped Father Morrison to edit the paper at the Jesuit Presbytery, but were more often on call to ward off libel actions. Forbes Burnham Era Forbes Burnham felt that a free press was a nuisance, and best avoided. Paranoid about criticism, Burnham's parliamentary support imposed his will. (Even in 1989, after the 1985 elections, the government's People's National Congress (PNC) had 54--plus ten reserved for the regions and controlled by government--of the 77 seats. Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party had eight seats, and the Working People's Alliance, the party rounded by the late Dr Walter Rodney--led by Eusi Kwayana (born Sidney King) had one seat. The remaining four seats were held by two small right-wing parties.) By the time that Linden Forbes Burnham died on an operating table, while undergoing minor surgery, in August 1985, the 'Cooperative Republic of Guyana' was a joke. It had entered literature via A Handful of Dust (1934), which Evelyn Waugh wrote after a visit to British Guiana in 1930, and V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage (1962) had rubbished the country and Cheddi Jagan. The author later regretted some of his remarks during a return visit in December 1990. Forbes Burnham had sought some status as a supporter of Cuba, but the United States could not even bring itself to consider Guyana's leader a respectable bogeyman. Under a blanket of post-colonial indifference, Guyana had slowly gone to ruin over two and a half decades. The country had entered the annals of political seediness with a collective religious suicide at Jonestown, on 18 November 1978, when 914 North American cult members had drunk poison. More notable was the death of Walter Rodney, killed by a bomb, on 22 June 1980, which briefly plunged a quiet backwater into the politics of Third World violence. Almost forgotten on the international political circuit was dentist and former prime minister Jagan, one of the 'most handsome and best looking politicians' in the continent in 1953, and at that time a man on a par with the other left-wing heroes of the period, such as Ernesto Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, and even Franz Fanon. 'Demerara' sugar, or the memory of it, had been devalued out of the folk history of colonial trade by the 1970s. So Guyana really had nothing. Forbes Burnham's failed experiment in progressive despotics had turned the country into a wasteland by the mid-1980s. The political model had its utopian idealism in the early years but had rapidly fallen into the ridiculous cliches which fashion now attributes only to Struggling socialist regimes: 1986 was the 'Year of Standing up for Guyana; 1987 was the 'Year of purposeful economic adjustment'; 1988 was the 'Year of staying resolutely on course'; and the change came then, when 1989 had not name but tacitly became the 'Year of scrapping all the other years'. Hugh W.L. 'Tommy' Payne (1944), historian, one-time director of the national archives, who turned to producing cricket comics for a living, said of Burnham's rule, of his indifference to cultural development and his control on opinion, that the country had for a legacy, 'a generation of functional illiterates, people who can read but don't . . . Emigration is killing us. It is sad to say but colonial education was more efficient. It formed our political leaders, and our best writers. But they have gone, because they were educated to leave'. Guyanese Writers In contradiction to the cultural devastation caused by Burnham's misguided cooperativism is the fact that Guyana produced some of the best writers anywhere in the English-speaking post-colonial world. But these writers had nowhere to publish. Even if the government Allowed them to, and it never did forbid their publication, there was no press in which to get into print, other than the heroic literary magazine Kyk-Over-Al, founded and edited by the poet Arthur J. Seymour (1941-89), with the help of writers Ian MacDonald and Martin Carter. While a few remained in Guyana, many had left the country and claimed Guyanese roots, but long residence elsewhere had made them foreign to their origins. The poet and novelist Ian MacDonald (1933), now a columnist on Stabroek News--once a manager of the Guyana Sugar Corporation, which he had joined when it was still run by Booker's, and now a consultant to the British company since re-privatization--said that 'if you make a checklist of Guyanese writers, not only would you find the best and the biggest reputations abroad, but the number of expatriate writers is impressive'. Roy A.K. Heath (1926), John Agard (1949), Fred D'Aguiar (1960), are among the best known expatriates, who still identify with their country of birth. The list of departures is long. Wilson Harris left 30 years ago, to set up camp in England; Ian Valz, Marc Mathews, Wordsworth MacAndrew, Ian Carew, Ivan van Sertima, are among the better known names who left. The best known women writers include Beryl Gilroy. But the most successful, with her funny and moving poetry, is Grace Nichols, who has taken much of the English-reading public by storm. Best known of the writers who did not leave is the poet Martin Carter (1927), at one time in prison for his opposition to British colonial rule, later a minister in Forbes Burnham's government, and then one of the founders of Stabroek News. Ian MacDonald, author of the novel The Humming Bird Tree (1969), made into a film for the BBC in 1992, is also one who stayed. In an interview some years ago he regretted the heavy emigration: Why did they leave? Why does any writer leave a very small and limited society like this one? Because elsewhere they can get their work published, and they became part of a bigger literary world . . . It is a great sadness that young people have little idea of what is their own literature. The lack of books in schools is a national emergency. No books come in, and the teachers are leaving. If the children are taught to read, they graduate and emigrate. If they want books, they must find them abroad. Emigration in Guyana has been a cause of concern for some two decades. The results of a survey published in October 1993 pegged population at 717 458, down from the 1980 census figure of 756 000. In the mid-1980s, the dip had been even greater. In an article written in October 1989, Ian MacDonald, lamented the neglect of culture and education, which had resulted in an absence of debate, and the freezing of progress: You only have to look at the state of teaching literature in our schools, the cruel failure in providing good new literature in our schools, the cruel failure in providing good new literature in our libraries, the incredible lack of attention given to importing good books, you only have to spend a minute contemplating the meaning of such neglect, to realise that the lowest of low priorities is given officially to literature and the appreciation of literature in Guyana today. David and Doreen de Caires set up their Stabroek News in this landscape of devastation. Stabroek News In September 1987, De Caires bought a 1968 Goss Community four unit press, for which he paid US$120 000 in Miami, and printing began in the plant on Robb Street, in Lacytown, near the centre of Georgetown. The paper printed 20 000 copies weekly with a staff of about a dozen. Doreen became the general manager, and her husband was the editor. There were three journalists, a typist on an IBM typewriter, a paste-up person, and an advertising manager. Three more people were available for all office chores. Over at the government-owned Chronicle, journalism was going from bad to worse. One staffer after another resigned to emigrate or simply to find work elsewhere, until there was only one 'chief reporter' in the heroic task of covering all desks, from social events to sports results. Frank Pilgrim was appointed, briefly, as editor, in the hope that his background as Africa stringer on the (London) Observer, press officer to the late Forbes Burnham, and author of one of the Caribbean's classics in theatre comedy, 'Miriamy', would lift the reputation of the government paper. But he stayed a short time, rejecting manipulation by President Hoyte's press office, and died quietly in 1989. Press office interference was in fact one of the minor evils of the Hoyte government. Every minister with a press release he or she wanted noticed sent an aide, usually assisted by a security guard, to the paper. Chronicle staff were threatened, and roughed up, if assurance of inclusion was not given, and soon government offices were competing in heavy handedness to get their propaganda to press in the shrinking space of a declining daily. In January 1988, 14 months after its launch, Stabroek News started printing twice-weekly, a 12-page edition mid-week, and a 24-page Sunday edition. Breaking the mould, overcoming the culture of silence, was one of De Caires's first sources of concern. The couple and their staff had to re-create a sense in the public that it was normal for contrasting and rival views to be ventilated, that writers could find space in which to publish in their own country, and that public debate was in everybody's interests. 'At the outset, the newspaper experienced great difficulty in gaining access to government bureaucrats. Unaccustomed for many years to scrutiny of any kind, many civil servants went to great lengths to avoid interviews', De Caires wrote (CPU Quarterly, January 1988). 'In the early days ministers would hide from our reporters. People would not speak to us for fear of having their remarks seen in print. We just could not get a civil servant, or any functionary, to say anything to us. They were even scared of giving us the weather forecast, just in case they might be blamed for a change in the weather'. (Index on Censorship, 1/1991) Presidential elections were successively delayed and then postponed without date as Hoyte tried to fend off critics and prepare his own re-election. President Hoyte was under pressure to clean up the voters' register and straighten the ruling PNC's twisted act, under pressure from such observers as former president Jimmy Carter of the USA, and members of the Commonwealth Secretariat. De Caires realized early on that no election would be reliable or respectable unless the voting public felt that change was possible. Hoyte was not considered dishonest, and he had been responsible for a considerable clean sweep since the days of Forbes Burnham. But it was not enough. 'We do not see ourselves as an opposition paper. We try to operate fairly. We recognize that we control a scarce resource and so bend over backwards trying to be fair', De Caires said in 1990. The Sunday edition offered the government an unedited column, in which to explain itself and its policies. And the same 'unedited space' was offered tothe alliance of opposition parties. 'It is a recognition of the fact that when you have a press in a poor society you are controlling a critical resource and you have to be fair with it'. That exposure of two columns by rival parties began, in 1990, to help broaden the debate. 'The single thing I'm proudest of is our letters column, sometimes as much as two pages. We get an enormous sackful of letters every week. We have cultivated this by publishing as many as possible. It is the chance for people to be heard. For such a small paper we get an enormous volume of letters', De Caires said at the time. Stabroek News was printed three times a week, mid-week and weekends. The print-run on weekdays was 19 000 and 22 000 on Sunday. By then, hard currency could be bought openly in the exchange market, and paper could be imported. Stabroek News was using six rolls a week (compared with 4500 rolls used by News International to produce the Sunday Times, The Sun, News of the World, and The Times, in London, at that time). Elections were finally held on 5 October 1992. The old dentist and Marxist leader of the People's Progressive Party took office on 9 October as president with a programme of economic development and reform that would have surprised the most rabid capitalist. Jagan, however, maintained that his ideals were still socialist. Perhaps inevitably, the paper that had campaigned for the return of democracy, and the party that had benefitted from the space offered by the paper, went on a collision course. In July 1993, Cheddi Jagan accused Stabroek News of being unpatriotic, anti-national and out to destabilize the PPP government. De Caires ignored the accusation, but on 20 August, Jagan repeated it at a press conference. The editor accused the president of over-reacting to The paper's fair criticism that not enough had been done about severe problems in the country's power supplies. The paper reminded readers that there was confusion in government statements that the ruling party remained Marxist/Leninist, yet the stated official policy was one of liberalization and privatization. De Caires told the regional news agency (CANA, 21 August), 'We fought for six years . . . In fact, alongside the PPP and other parties for the restoration of democracy in Guyana. We were at that time accused by the previous (People's National Congress) government of destabilization. I am upset at this charge of destabilization. It is quite contrary to what we have in mind. Nothing is further from our intentions. The Caribbean press took up the newspaper's cause accusing the Jagan government of being childish and ungrateful. The Jamaica Herald said in an editorial that, 'The rise to power of the Cheddi Jagan administration was to a great extent a result of the bravery of the journalists at the newspaper, the Catholic Standard, and other individuals that were prepared to stand up, and freely allowed the voice of the opposition to be heard in the country when it was muzzled by a state controlled media that was the servant of the rulers of the day.' (CANA, 24 August 1993) David de Caires knew his strength and said that the president, 'on reflection, will review his position'. The slanging match quickly quietened down. Stabroek News had found its strength in other ways as well, in addition to having played a vital role in the return of democratic rule to Guyana. The newspaper had restored to readers a sense of their own culture--which is a mixture of descendants of European colonial masters, African slaves, Asian indentured labour, and Amerindian peoples--and an awareness of their need to read freely about their own artists and creative members of the community. That literary vacuum which Ian MacDonald complained about back in October 1989 is being filled with information about the writing of Guyanese authors, with regular essays on aspects of history, and an encouragement of local theatrical activity through publicity and frequent reviews. By 1993 the paper was publishing seven days a week. The latest addition was the 'Monday Paper', which began printing on 12 July 1993. Stabroek News had marked the preceding weekend with the launch of its own investigation and publication of family testimony on the events and actions surrounding the death of historian and politician Walter Rodney, in June 1980. The campaign by the paper and the family was rewarded, on 4 January 1994, with the announcement by the attorney general that the Rodney file would be reopened. A weekly review was printed as from January 1994, when De Caires began to look around for a bigger press. The paper's staff had, by then, grown to 92. They included 19 people in the editorial department, six handling circulation, six drivers, 13 typesetters, two photographers, four proof readers and three cooks. Stabroek News's certified circulation (reported on 11 October 1993) was 17 900 copies on weekdays, with 16 018 on Mondays, and sales of 27,241 copies of Sunday Stabroek. The paper's estimated turnover, before accounts were finalized, was G$200 million in 1993 (US$1.5 million). It felt like a long time ago that David de Caires had written (CPU Quarterly, January 1988), 'Stabroek News has flourished in its year or so of life, but our dearest wish remains to be fulfilled to stand on our own feet facing an assured future '. When De Caires was awarded the Astor Award by the Commonwealth Press Union in July 1992, the citation said that, 'With little or no money, but the help of friends, he has succeeded in surviving both political and economic problems that have continually beset him'. And that makes the Stabroek News a model for almost anybody starting a small press, anywhere. By ANDREW GRAHAM-YOOLL Andrew Graham-Yooll, born in Argentina, was editor of Index on Censorship (1989-93), and of South magazine (1985-88). He was BP Press Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in 1994. In May 1994 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the Buenos Aires Herald. He has published about 15 books, in English and in Spanish. |