 |
Federalism: A Framework for Dealing with Ethnic Conflict in Guyana By Ravi Dev |
Carter's Letter to Guyanese Caribbean Intellectual Tradition Indians in the New World
Indians Book Publishing in the Caribbean The jJmaica Progressive League & Adult Suffrage
|
By Anand Sawant Mulloo |
March 22, 2008: This paper is meant to outline the evolution of the Indian diaspora, loaded as it is with historical, sociological and psychological complexes that render it so fascinating and so challenging as it undergoes dynamic changes under pressure from contrary local and international influences.
Policy of Assimilation.
It was under the French governor, Mahe de Labourdonnais, around
1735, that the first batch of Indian Immigrants, then called
esclaves a talents or skilled slaves, were brought from Pondicherry,
then a French station, into Mauritius, called Ile de France,
under the administration of the French East india Company, to
build the port and urban infrastructure of Port Louis. Since
they were mostly males and were mixed with the African slaves
they had no alternative but to inter-marry African women and
they gave birth to subsequent generations of Creoles- of mixed
African and Indian origins. As slaves, they did not enjoy any
individual freedom whatsoever, including cultural or religious.
And as had happened to all African slaves throughout the colonies,
they were Christianised, particularly under the powerful Roman
Catholic Church. This was to mark the future history of multi-racial
Mauritius dominated by French culture and European civilization
and which pursued the policy of assimilation, otherwise absorbing
them into French culture and wiping out their ancestral culture.
The result was that the Creoles learnt to emulate the white who
kept them at a social distance while they imbibed the white racial
prejudice against Indian and African traditions.
Since the Creole descendants were cut off completely from
their ancestral homelands, they had to live and share the same
conditions in the colony. In course of time the descendants of
Indians lost their Indian identity and became Creolised in the
process of adaptation to the new social reality under the demanding
French masters. They lost touch with their ancestral values and
began to adopt a hybrid French culture and manners while maintaining
Indian cuisine, some surviving Indian habits in their folklore.
In other words, they lost their Indianness, the Indian brand
of culture, language, civilization, pride in Indian history and
in Mother India.
Most of the Creole women who worked as domestic servants in
the French houses began to assimilate some of the French habits
and manners which were held up as European and therefore as superior,
like the drinking habit and the lavish living which would land
them into adapting the pleasure-seeking and spending habit. Naturally
enough, they discarded the more rigorous Indian customs which
they thought did not adapt to their Euro-centric, easy-going
social and cultural environment. Alongside these manners, they
absorbed the racial and colour prejudices of their masters which
denigrated the Black and Brown races as primitives. This meant
that whatever came from the West was deemed necessarily superior
and what came from Africa and India was inevitably inferior.
From the beginning, the Catholic Church has had its share of
blame in propagating the anti-Hinduism virus in its eagerness
to proselytize the Hindus and it ended up spreading a general
anti-Hindu hatred in the colony. Thus, the Creoles were made
to believe that they were heirs to European culture and were
consequently vastly superior to the pagan Hindus. From this time
onward, many of the Creoles developed the anti-Indian complex
which was based on the anti-Hindu prejudice they picked from
their priests and their white masters who played the dirty politics
of divide-and-rule. .
Now, this process of Creolisation arising from the mixture
of Black and Brown races, took place mostly in the urban areas
affecting pockets of Indians stranded from the bulk of their
rural and agrarian stock. The erosion of Indianness and the spreading
of Creolisation became a permanent feature in all the colonies-
in the Indian Ocean, or Mauritius, Reunion, Rodrigues, or in
the Caribbean countries, in Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago, Martinique,
Guadeloupe, Guyana. It has continued unabated even into our own
time with the spread of westernization, tbe US-funded evangelization
campaigns, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and other political
and international forces.
The old Indian diaspora. In contrast, a century later,
with the abolition of slavery, in 1834, the first batch of
Indentured Indian Immigrants, mainly from the hilly areas of
Bihar, was introduced into the Crown colony of Mauritius on a
trial basis. Unlike the French, British colonization adopted
a more liberal approach to religious freedom to the Indians.
They ruled the colony with the partnership of the big French
planters, just as they did in India with the partnership of kings.
Later, this was followed by successive arrivals of shiploads
of other Indian Immigrants, known as the old diaspora, sourced
from inside the villages of Bihar, Madras, Andhra and Bombay
provinces. On landing at the Immigration depot, now Apravashi
Ghats, they were distributed to different plantations where they
could live together as close-knit communities and were able to
retain their distinct cultural, linguistic, religious and civilizational
identity.
After the successful adaptation of the Indentured labourers
to the plantation labour in Mauritius, the Indenture system was
extended to the other plantation colonies of South Africa, the
Caribbean and in Fiji. Taking over from the slaves and working
under White masters who were still impregnated with the slave
masters' mentality, the Indians had to face harsh conditions
in the plantations. The colonial laws smacked of slavery and
were extremely oppressive, including abuse and violence. Wages
were kept extremely low, aggravated by the obnoxious double cut
system on every single day's of absence. They were granted poor
quality food ration of rice,. dhall, oil and salt. Undaunted,
the Indians could pull through as they were traditionally used
to simple living and hard-working, believing in the virtue of
self-sacrifice and performing good karma. The ambition of the
indentured labourers was to save the maximum possible within
the shortest possible time in order to free themselves from the
grips of the estate camps and set up life as free labourers and
small planters on their own in a village, at the expiry of the
Indenture contract. This is why they worked day and night and
got engaged in a variety of occupations to maximize their income
by growing vegetable, keeping cows, goats, poultry and doing
a variety of craft jobs for sale in the local market.
If they had been able to put up with the hardship, it was
due to the resourcefulness of Indianness which was rooted in
the preservation of their family and social structure, the strength
of their ancestral values, their close-knit community living
which ensured solid social control and maintained law and order,
kept the creeping social evils of divorces, domestic violence,
delinquency, criminality at bay. However, it was their very doggedness
to stick to the values of Indianness that rescued them from self-degradation.
This was made up of a package of ethical-moral and spiritual
values which pulled them together and invigorated their individual
and collective strength. It comprised of a rare combination of
winning qualities, including a sense of self-discipline, of personal
endurance, a fighting spirit- both physical and moral. They
were respected for their proverbial patience, their tolerance,
their honesty, their work ethics, their adherence to the values
of peace, non-violence and truth, their spirit of fraternity
and their willingness to help one another to share the social
burden and face the white oppressors.
Contrary to what had happened earlier to the Indian slaves
who had given up their Indianness too easily though under duress
as they were forced to embrace French culture and Catholicism,
the Indian villagers had no desire to emulate their white masters.
They preferred to live peacefully in the sugar estates while
cherishing the values of Indian culture, civilization and religion
which gave a meaning and purpose to their lives. Yet they kept
open the option of incorporating certain specific aspects of
European culture at their own free will without giving up on
their essential Indianness.
In the nineteenth century, the Indian Immigrants stuck doggedly
to their ancestral way of living. They wore the same simple dress,
the same headgears, lived in similar straw huts which they constructed
themselves, sat on mats, fetched grass and firewood from the
nearby wasteland or forests, drew water from the wells, washed
their clothes in the nearby river or streams, baked the roti
on the tawa, cooked the steaming rice, dhall, curry and vegetable
culled from the kitchen garden, grinding their cereals, pounding
their spices on the stone in the Indian tradition. The children
played the same traditional games and spoke the same Bhojpuri
or other Indian languages as were current in their ancestral
villages. Around their habitations, they would plant mango, banana,
pipal trees, betel and leafy vegetable creepers, some ayurvedic
plants like the tulsi, the ayapana. They would keep cows, goats
or poultry for milk and food and would sell the produce for profits.
Their mode of transportation was the simple ox-carts just as
it was in their ancestral villages and they preserved some of
their ancestral occupations as gardeners, carpenters, builders,
tinsmiths, tailors, hairdressers, cowkeepers, carters, milk sellers,
money lenders, small manufacturers and traders.
Village Soliarity. They used to meet in the village
shrine, temple, kovil, or mosque, where they would chant chowpai
from the Ramayana and draw sustenance from the exile, the trials
and tribulations of Ram and Sita, assisted by Hanumn, the monkey
God whom they visualized as flying on the hill tops and hovering
over the fields for their protection.They used to plant a Hanuman
"jhandha" in their yard overlooking their simple shrine
where they would offer daily worship. They joined together in
a spirit of solidarity in the performance of the elaborate birth,
death ceremonies, particularly the colourful Hindu weddings,
complete with the rituals, the songs, dances, open house reception,
involving the voluntary community solidairty in the organization
of the different phases of the weddings. By way of rituals and
entertertainment, they continued to celebrate the same festivals
of holy, Divali, Dasera, Taipussum, Eid in a sober manner. From
time to time, they organized drama and dance performances from
the Ramayana and held regular soul-stirring bhajan sessions to
add colour and gaity to their hum-drum lives.
More important still, they cherished the Indian ethical values
of family life, of strict monogamy, caring for their children
and for the elderly, the respect of the master and of authority
and the reverence of nature and of their deity. These ancestral
values made for peaceful living and social harmony- vital in
a multi-racial society. In other words, these simple Hindu folks
laid the foundation of independence and of democratic living
based on the principles of mutual co-operation, tolerance, understanding
and respecting the rights of others. This is no doubt, in a wider
context, a reflection on the success of India as the world's
largest democracy in contrast to the neighbouring Islamic countries,
home to fundamentalism, intolerence, authoritarianism and chronic
violence.
Gradually, the Indians began to drop some of the more oppressive
features of the Indian traditions - of dowry, early marriage,
caste rigidity while the practice of widow burning or suttee
never took place in the colonies.
It was distinctly a "them and us" cultural confrontation
between the Indians who generally bonded together under one
common cultural identity, speaking the common Bhojpuri, as against
the arrogant French-speaking oppressors, and their allies the
Coloured. Under this dormant racial antagonism, the Indians needed
the White as much as the latter needed the Indians to oil the
sugar industry and the island's economy. Functioning in a capitalist
economy, where private enterprise and risk-taking are the economic
pillars, the white Oligarchy valued the entrepreneurial spirit
of the Indians, their hard work and self-sacrifices. Indirectly,
they used the Indians as their economic levers in the process
of the centralization of the sugar industry when they parcelled
out their old sugar estates to the small Indian planters. Slowly,
from this class of small planters there arose the future independent
middle class Indians, whose descendants would emerge as professionals,
businessmen, traders and rulers of this country and ready to
spread their wings across other western countries.
But with the dawn of the twentieth century, with the arrival
of Mahatma Gandhi ( November 1901), followed by Manilal Doctor
(1907-11), and the frequent visits of Indian religious leaders
and reformers, Indians in Mauritius began to take cognition of
their distinct Indianness. The message was invariably less on
Bhakti Yoga and increasingly more on Karma Yoga as advocated
by Lord Krishna. The new interpretation of Karma Yoga was examplified
by the lives and teachings of foremost Karma Yogis, namely Swami
Dayanand, Swami Vivekanand, Lokmanya Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale
and Mahatma Gandhi. They all taught that one should elevate oneself
by one's own efforts and one should not act for one's selfish
interests alone but for the welfare of others in a spirit of
duty and sacrifice.
Swami Dayanand (1824-83). Inspired by the lesson of
the First War of Indian Independence and the awakening of the
spirit of Indian nationalism in 1857, Swami Dayanand founded
the Arya Samaj in 1875. He initiated new intellectual and rational
traditions, different from the emotional and non-intellectual
Bhakti traditions which only induced a spirit of docility and
blind acceptance of authority. He used public debates and a critical
and rational spirit to denounce the false teachings and superstitions.
His followers, both in India and abroad, adopted his critical
and argumentative traditions. He validated his teachings by referring
to the Vedas as the source book of Hindu scriptures. He urged
the Hindus to go back to the basics as taught in the Vedas with
its focus on the search for truth and rationality against the
prevailing ignorance and superstitions. He laid stress on the
value of social reforms, of the emancipation of women, the remarriage
of widows and the granting of equal status to women in society.
Author of ten books, he stressed on the primacy of acquiring
education, the need to make personal efforts for self-improvement.
Consequently, the DAV College was founded in Lahore and a large
number of schools were founded giving way to a vigorous intellectual
movement which spread across India and abroad. A stalwart and
fearless yogi, he highlighted the importance of the full development
of the body-mind- and spirit. By rejecting untouchability and
the caste system which he associated with traditional priestly
domination, he championed the Dalit cause. He used Hindi as
the medium of unification. In other words, he contributed immensely
to the emergence of modern independent India. His message went
directly into the heart and mind of the downtrodden Hindu who
felt called upon to rise on his feet and claim his dignity, his
honour and civic rights and do his share to throw out foreign
domination. ( Satish Chandra, 6 August 2004).
Consequently, an army of dedicated Arya Samaj missionaries
and reformers, led by Pandit Cassinath Kistoe, scoured the towns
and villages of this island to propagate the Vedic message and
set up branches of the Samaj. The result was that it re-invigorated
Indian society physically, socially and mentally and inaugurated
a new era of reforms and of modernity based on the acceptance
of truth and rationality and the rejection of superstitions.
It triggered a vigorous intellectual and educational movement
and a nascent Hindu nationalism and a tremendous interest in
social emancipation that paved the way for the struggle for independence
and the democratic tradition.
The emergence of Indian nationalism, championed by Mahatma
Gandhi and represented intellectually by Rabindranath Tagore
and the western-educated Jawaharlal Nehru awakened their sense
of dignity, honour and self-respect. It fuelled their spirit
of Indian patriotism and identity destined to culminate in the
long-term struggle for political freedom from foreign rule under
the leadership of the Mauritius Labour Party, headed by Sir Seewoosagur
Ramgoolam.
Chacha Ramgoolam (1900-85) stands as a bridge between the
East and the West, the past and the present. As the son of an
Indentured Immigrant and the brother of a small planter, living
in the remote village of Belle Rive, Ramgoolam was destined
to emerge as the future leader of this country, the man who brought
it to independence and who endowed it with a solid, democratic
constitution. Having studied in London as a doctor, he fell
under the spell of the Fabian Society and the British Labour
Party where he mastered the fine art of British politics and
adopted the value of freedom, democracy and human rights. Rooted
in the village of Belle Rive in the district of Flacq, Ramgoolam
never forgot his humble rural origins as he kept in permanent
touch with the villagers throughout his exceptionally long political
career, 1935-85.
After leaving the prestigious Royal College in Curepipe, Mauritius,
for London, he must have undergone a sea change during his fifteen
years stay in the British capital, then the intellectual and
political platform of the universe. There, he saw himself caught
in the stormy struggle for Indian independence as he joined
and headed the local branch of the Indian National Congress and
mixed up with Indian nationalist students then militating for
the freedom of India under the glare of the Scotland Yard. While
retaining all the characteristics of Indianness as the the son
of an Immigrant, he remained loyal to the values of Indian culture
based on peace, non-violence, tolerance, hard-work, humility,
respect of elders, of women and of the common people. He skilfully
blended these Eastern values with the British intellectual values,
particularly its gentlemanly culture, its British dress code,
a strong love of reading and of permanent learning, its scientific
and rational thinking, its technology, its modernity, its sense
of justice and fair play, its political pragmatism, its diplomatic
finesse and its philosophy of gradual change- all of which put
him far ahead of his Mauritian contemporaries. .
Perhaps from among the vast array of contributions of SSR
to this country, we may single out his adherence to democratic
values which he securely embedded on the Mauritian soil as his
lasting legacy. Thanks to his long stay in power as the Premier,
the Chief Minister and the Prime Minister of Mauritius from 1957
to 1982, he was able to endow the country with a liberal, democratic
constitution which guarantees the two party system, majority
rule, the fundamental freedoms and liberties of the individual,
human rights, the rule of law, the guarantee of minority rights,
religious freedom, an impartial judiciary, the separation of
powers between the Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary,
an independent police, independent Public Service Commission
and other rights. These have stood the test of time and democracy
is firmly entrenched since 1968, the year of independence.
As the modernization process gathered speed under Sir Seewoosagur
Ramgoolam, the Mauritian villages were being transformed out
of recognition from the backwaters they were under the former
White oligarchy and British colonization. Suddenly, in the wake
of new prosperity and national planning, the straw huts made
way for lovely bungalows, equipped with modern amenities, including
running tap water, electricity, green lawns, good road and transport
infrastructure, telephone, children's playgrounds and sports
fields, shopping areas, schools, dispensaries, markets. But
the underlying spirit of Indianness which had constituted the
essence of the villages had remained as the undying theme except
that it had been upgraded with a touch of modernity. Similarly,
cars and buses have replaced the ox-carts. Modern fashions,
electronic devices, the bharat nattyam dances and pop music,
the internet and telecommunications manned by professionals have
replaced the earlier days of amateurism and folklore.
It must be added that Indians, particularly the professionals,
who have migrated into certain democratic Western countries feel
secure in the exercise of their rights. As a matter of fact,
many of them feel happier and more prosperous than in their own
homeland where they are victims to political manipulation, hampered
by the allocation of reserved seats enforced by law for the benefit
of certain specific minorities, so that meritocracy is often
sacrificed for mediocrity.
Indians Under Fire. Mauritius is among the rare former
British colonies which has witnessed the proper working of democracy,
the establishment of peace and social harmony, the Rule of Law
and the guranteed rights of its citizens. It contrasts sharply
with other former British colonies, including Guyana where Dr
Chady Jagan, its first prime minister, was ousted from power
to make way for Burnham who ruled with an iron fist and resorted
to dictatorship and State terrorism to impose Black minority
rule on the Asian majority. In Fiji, the rights of the Indians
have been foiled on more than two occasions when the elected
Indian Prime Minister had been ousted from power by military
coup.
In Malaysia, the situation facing the 2.3 million minority
Indians amidst 60% Moslem Malays is really precarious as the
constitution does not guarantee minority rights, and religious
freedom. The BN Coalition government, in power since independence
in 1957, rules like an autocratic regime with the semblance of
democracy as it wields absolute power over Parliament, the Executive
and the Judiciary and over the media. The Opposition and the
people do not enjoy any freedom of protest as the oppressive
Internal Security Act is clamped down on the least display of
public demonstration or opposition and the leaders are simply
arrested and jailed without being proved guilty in a court of
law. Religious freedom does not exist as the government proceeds
from time to time with the demolition of Hindu shrines and temples
in a bid to force them to embrace Islam. The civil service, the
police, the government institutions and even private business
companies are packed with Malays to the exclusion of the more
meritorious Indians and Chinese.
In Pakistan, in 1948, after Partition, 15% of the population
who were Hindus, the original inhabitants of the country, had
preferred to stay behind on their ancestral property. But under
the authoritarian Islamic Republic of Pakistan they were under
pressure to convert with the result that today only 1 % of the
population are Hindus. So, when you look around at the fate of
the minority Hindus in the Islamic or Moslem-dominated countries,
you come across the same dismal picture of anti-Hindu oppression
and the marked absence of democracy, minority rights, religious
freedom or the rule of law.
The creation of Pakistan has had negative repercussions on
the Moslem population of Mauritius, who, despite being of Indian
origins, tended to identify themselves with the anti-Indian posture
of Pakistan. As a matter of fact, in the crucial 1967 elections
the vast majority joined the PMSD in its divide-and-rule policy,
dictated by the Franco-Mauritians, to oppose independence. The
same thing happened with a section of the Tamil population of
Mauritius who joined the PMSD under the banner of Tamil United
Party under the false slogan that "Tamils are not Hindus".
The consequence was that the Indo-Mauritian majority was whittled
down and the PMSD scored 44% votes in the elections. After the
decline of the PMSD in the 1970, the rising MMM opposition was
to harvest the PMSD"s anti-Hindu electoral support.
But the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the 1970's in the
wake of Ayatoola Khomeini in Iran and its spread across the world,
aggravated by the Middle East crisis and the rise of the oil-rich
Gulf countries have had the effect of driving a wedge between
a majority of the Mauritian Moslems from their Indianness. The
geo-political and ideological situation is further complicated
by the geographical nearness of the Gulf countries, helped by
the ease of travels and of telecommunications, the annual contingent
to the Hajj pilgrimage, the effects of mass media and the inflow
of oil funds- all put together- have produced a new Arabisation
trend among the majority of the local Moslems. This can be seen
in their assumption of a new Arab identity which is rendered
visible in their wearing long beards and Islamic dress, the long
white robes, and the veils..
Despite the above anti-Indianness trend, secular India has
pursued an open, all-inclusive policy which provides security
and equal opportunities to all its citizens, Hindus, Moslems
and Christians alike. At the same time, it reflects on the liberality,
democracy, tolerance and magnanimity of the Hindus. It emphasizes
the permanent characteristic of the maturity of their character,
culture, civilization and religion. It should be remembered that
India, the world's largest democracy, is home to 140 million
Muslims who enjoy super-privileges as a minority amidst a population
made up of 80% tolerant Hindus. Obviously, during a millennium
of Moghul rule, Hindus were persecuted with the "Hindu Tax"
which forced many of them to embrace Islam to escape payment.
However, the Indian Moslems, mostly of Hindu origins, sharing
the same culture, language, entertainment and environment, enjoy
equal access to all the facilities available in India. As a result,
they are far better off than their counter-parts in authoritarian
Pakistan plagued with serial military dictatorships, instability,
chronic terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, poverty and backwardness.
Secular India accomodates all its citizens who have generally
refrained from engaging in anti-India terrorist activities. This
is despite the fact that since the time of President General
Zial-ul-Hak, Pakistan has been pursuing an aggressive proxy war
on India, exporting terrorists, training camps, instructors and
weapons into Jammu-Kashmir and deep inside India, targeting its
economic symbols and mass transportation system as well as the
Indian Parliament. Briefly, it can be said that India has managed
to keep its Moslem population happy and contented so that they
have refrained from joining the camp of Islamic terrorists in
Pakistan, Afghanistan or in the Middle East. This shows the triumph
of Indianness which is rooted in democratic principle, in freedom
of opinion, in tolerance and peaceful and non-violent living,
dating back to the Vedic and Buddhist period. The effects of
India's inclusive secularism have ensured that the Indian diaspora
are spared from the instability and insecurity sparked by imported
fundamentalist terrorism.
Finally, when we compare the figures of the percentage of
Hindus in Mauritiu over the past four decades since independence,
we are startled at the rapid decline of its demography. This
is explained by the fact of the large erosion caused by the intense
US-funded evangelization campaign which has gained every single
street and nook and corner of the island with their numerous
houses of God and Christian sects vying with one another to convert
the Hindus. Independent Mauritius finds itself plunged back into
the conditions of Ile de France under the French East India Company
when the skilled Indian slaves were forced to convert and Creolise.
History is now repeating itself, It won't be long before the
Hindu majority- as is also happening very rapidly in the Caribbean
countries- will be depleted into a minority and exposed to oppression
under an intolerant majority. This why we have to watch out and
safeguard our precious heritage of Indianness, a gift to the
world.
Editor's Note: Anand Sawant Mulloo is author of Voices
of the Indian Diaspora
Email: anandmulloo@intnet.mu
Website: www.writeranandmulloo.com
Presented at Conference on Democratization and Conflict Resolution, University of Guyana, February 4-6th 2004
"The essence of Federalism is not to be found in a particular set of institutions but in the institutionalisation of particular relationships among the participants of political life."
Modern Guyanese political history
is characterised by bouts of intense conflict between the two
major ethnic groups in Guyana Indians and Africans. There
have been several explanations proffered for the enduring conflict,
including the cleavages in the society stemming from cultural
and class differences; unequal power-resources (political, social,
economic) in those different groups; an inappropriate political
system; power-drunk leaders, racist views of other groups, political
ideologies that stress armed struggle, etc. Unfortunately, for
the majority of Guyanese the explanation comes down to bad
people especially "bad people" from the other
ethnic group, creating mayhem.
It is even more unfortunate that of recent, even some academics
have joined the chorus of blaming individuals and particular
groups for the violence. These academics do this somewhat more
sophisticatedly by imputing mindsets on these individuals and
groups, such as racism and casteism, without taking due care
to uncover and delineate structures that would have structured
such mindsets. This amounts to proposing that the only way to
eliminate the violence would be to eliminate the bad people.
This is nihilistic and such approaches must be condemned.
If nothing else studies from the social studies must grapple
with the social construction of reality and actions and
therefore hold out the possibility of social change.
After, inter alia, examining the specific instances of
ethnic violence and the several purported causes, this paper
concludes that there are no mono-causal explanations for the
enduring conflict and that additionally, one has to distinguish
between proximate and systemic factors. Even the systemic factors
operate at different levels. The political elites have defined
their goals for Guyana in terms of the achievements of the developed
Western nations especially Britain, which was the governing
colonial power for most of Guyana's history. One of the deeper
systemic factors precipitating the proximate causes stems from
the politicians' attempts to reach an end-state in Guyana that
their erstwhile models achieved only after undergoing, sequentially
over many centuries, three massive macro-societal revolutions
- centred on national identity, political participation and economic
distribution.
Attempts to conflate these three revolutions, which sought to
expand the equitable distribution of power in the model societies,
and achieve them simultaneously, have engendered severe contradictions
in Guyana leading eventually, in some instances, to ethnic
conflict. These contradictions are almost inevitable since institutional
innovations sought to be introduced in one area may require institutional
precursors in other areas. Sequencing of institutional changes
becomes critical because of this dynamic interaction. In Guyana,
the "cultural question" implicit in 'national identity"
has been put on the back burner even though culture narrowly
defined as the value system of the people provides the
contexts for the success or failure of all institutions. Institutions
cannot be imposed on societies that violate entrenched values
and if stipulated formally, will only be observed in the breach
and be ineffective or dysfunctional. Inappropriate institutions
are the prime systemic causes of political tension and violence
in Guyana.
The paper will be divided into the three broad areas of national
identity, political participation and economic distribution that
have structured our national endeavour to distribute power as
equitably as possible. Within each area, contradictions will
be identified and their institutional frameworks analysed from
the their origin in the developed countries and their application
in Guyana. Institutional changes, more in consonance with local
realities will be introduced. The concept of Federalism will
then be introduced as an overarching framework to integrate the
proposals into a internally consistent paradigm.
The paper will therefore begin with the "national question"
by analysing British society in the development of the "nation-state"
ideal that has served as the model for Guyana. It contrasts Britain
of the early twentieth century, where by and large most individuals
saw themselves as "British" following centuries of
homogenising efforts, with Guyana celebrated as the "land
of six peoples". It concludes that Guyanese society can
best be characterised as a reticulated stratified ethnically
plural society.
In Guyana, however, the politicians of the modern era felt that
the question of national identity had more or less been settled
a la Britain, the "motherland". The national
motto adopted after Independence - "One People, One Nation,
One Destiny"- assumed that everyone would assimilate into
"Creole" culture, which was defined as "Guyanese"
culture. This assumption led to two contradictions in the society.
Firstly, the cultural values of Creole culture and those retained
by later arrivals from their original cultures may sometimes
contradict institutional demands vis a vis present national
goals. Secondly, groups arriving after the abolition of slavery
contested this assumption as oppressive, and were later resentful
that they were excluded from the composition of the national
culture. This created strains between the later-arriving groups
and those that defended the status quo, which played a part in
precipitating extreme ethnic behaviour. The concept of a multicultural
state and Multiculturalism as the approach to the "national"
culture will be introduced to address these strains.
The paper will demonstrate that the various ethnic groups are
differentially incorporated into the power relations of the society.
This differential incorporation has driven the political competition
as each group struggles within the rules of the political system,
to take the reins of power, which most see as a prerequisite
for economic security, and also as an end in itself. It is not
apparent to most that there culture is also a reservoir of power.
The paper looks at the political system under-girding the Westminster
majoritarian form of democracy developed, practiced and then
promulgated by Britain in the colonies. It was based on the political
philosophy of Liberalism, with institutions developed over the
centuries for British circumstances. These were decreed as appropriate
for Guyana, even though the societies were quite different. The
Westminster system assumes that enough individuals vote for parties
based on their stance on particular issues to produce a pool
of 'swing votes". This pool increases the probability that
governments will be changed on a fairly regular basis since it
is highly unlikely that any one party will have the answers to
all new exigencies year after year.
However in severely divided plural societies such as Guyana,
voting is not done on the basis of issues, but almost invariably
on the basis of ethnicity, personified by the identity of the
leadership of the particular party. The application of the Westminster
majoritarian system in Guyana produces dilemmas for the several
competing groups, in a dynamic and self reinforcing fashion,
in that if they play by the rules of engagement, they cannot
assume office or if they do cannot exercise power effectively.
In Guyana, where the Indian majority can vote as a bloc, the
minority African/Coloured bloc can be locked out of Executive
office in perpetuity, since it cannot form a majority even in
coalition with other ethnic groups such as Amerindians. In Guyana,
this is the Ethnic Security Dilemma of the African Guyanese.
When as in Guyana, the minority approaches the size of the majority
(at its highest numerical advantage Indians were fifty-one percent
of the population as opposed to the forty-two percent of Africans/Mixed
bloc) it is very unlikely that that minority will automatically
grant legitimacy to the government of the majority ad infinitum.
They have no incentive to go along with the rules of political
competition. There will be inevitable demands for a greater share
in the decision-making processes, especially if such minorities
have resources at their disposal to challenge the rule of the
majority. Within those rules, politics is viewed as a zero-sum
game especially by the major protagonists and encourage
extreme political behaviour, including violence. In Guyana, the
African minority, given confidence through their domination of
the state institutions, especially the Police, Army and Civil
Service, have challenged the Indian majority's physical security.
If Indians play by the political rules, they can accede to office
but cannot govern because of the threats to their physical security.
A "Mexican Standoff" has been created. This is the
Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma. The Ethnic Security Dilemmas
are addressed through a menu of measures that includes structural
aspects of federalism and a Government of National Reconciliation.
Another consequence of inappropriate political arrangements that
contribute to political violence is a centralised governmental
structure that has stubbornly resisted reformation efforts. This
centralised rule came out of the colonial era where administrative
efficiency for extraction of resources was the watchword. The
contribution of the centralised governmental and administrative
style and structures that lend themselves to authoritarianism
governance, on the precipitation of ethnic violence will be examined.
The non-centralised governance approach of Federalism will address
these contradictions.
In the modern world, the goal of political life is seen as leading
to increased standards of living. The economic improvements are
expected to be equitably distributed amongst the people, which
in the Western models, had been achieved after long and intense
struggle and tinkering of institutional arrangements. Since this
was the last "revolution' achieved by the West (and is still
in motion) economic equity is very much on the minds of the local
politicians. In fact it was on the question of economic injustice
that most of the anti-colonial struggle was waged and led to
many politicians, including the major ones from Guyana, to adopt
"radical" ideologies such as Marxism, which promised
economic equity.
It is also on the economic question that many of the contradictions
of inappropriate imported institutional have surfaced. With the
increased compilation and circulation of economic statistics,
it becomes apparent very quickly when economic development is
not equitably distributed, and by what manner that has been done.
In Guyana, during the PNC regime, Indians could point to such
statistics to buttress their claims of being discriminated against.
That, more than anything, fuelled their resentment against the
PNC and led to heightened tensions from their perspective. With
the installation of the PPP/C from 1992, there has been just
as persistent cries from the African Guyanese segment that they
are not receiving an equitable share of the economic pie. While,
the figures do show that there is no correlation between ethnicity
and economic standing (with the notable exception of the Amerindians)
it has confirmed that there is ethnic dominance in various sectors.
The government's policies in these sectors are rigorously scrutinised
for possible ethnic discrimination. These charges of "racism",
'discrimination", "marginalisation" and "ethnic
cleansing" have, more than any other proximate factor, contributed
to the present increased levels of tensions. The economic tensions
are addressed by ethnic Impact Statement for all Government programs
and policies, ethnic economic participation goals, and affirmative
action for disadvantaged groups.
Ethnic conflict is not unique to Guyana; in fact it has become
the most prevalent form of conflict within States all across
the globe in recent years. The approaches towards ameliorating
such conflicts are all imbued with the principle that power,
in all its forms, must be shared more equitably amongst the groups,
as they identify themselves, in the various societies. There
are two broad approaches Consociationalism and Integrative
Federalism - that have been utilised to address such conflicts.
This paper does not consider the two approaches as mutually exclusive
and the writer has previously proposed elements from each (in
addition to some others) as a "menu of measures" to
address the political problems of Guyana. These measures can
be grouped within the three broad areas of national life that
are reservoirs of power, and which have been contested as being
unjustly distributed. The measures, mentioned in context above,
include multiculturalism (national culture); Government of National
Reconciliation, Federal Republic, Disciplined Forces reflecting
population of the states (political justice) and Economic participation
goals, Ethnic Impact Statement, Affirmative Action and local/state
control of economic development (economic justice).
The paper examines the concept of Federalism from three perspectives:
a) sociological/normative; b) formal/institutional and c) procedural/process/bargaining.
The perspectives are utilised to develop Federalism as a framework
for bringing together the proposed specific institutional changes
and measures, in a coherent paradigm to address Guyana's ethnic
conflict.
The paper does not see federalism as any kind of 'silver bullet"
for curing all the ailments of our political system. However
it does assert that federalism provides a macro-environment that
facilitates the lessening of ethnic conflict in Guyana while
simultaneously offering citizens a principled philosophy of action,
rooted in justice.
Part 1
ETHNIC VIOLENCE IN GUYANA
While there have been
sporadic incidents of violence between Indians and Africans from
the commencement of the former group's insertion into Guyana,
these incidents were spontaneous, isolated and based on local,
sometimes, personal issues. Organised and widespread overt acts
of hostility first appeared in the months preceding the 1961
General Elections, which was marked by a high level of tension
between Africans and Indians. Supporters of the PNC, took the
exhortation of their party to "sweep out the PPP" literally,
and used their party's symbol the broom to sweep
at passing Indians, while the latter flaunted their symbol and
dragged the broom in the streets. There were any number of minor
scuffles and confrontations countrywide, many reported in the
press. Eusi Kwayana, in his booklet, Next Witness, claims
that an African supporter of the PNC, Felix Ross of Rose Hall,
Berbice was murdered for political reasons on the night of the
elections and that this was the beginning of the "disturbances"
that was to characterise the sixties. This writer went through
the newspapers of the time and interviewed contemporaries of
Ross, but was unable to discover any corroboration of Mr. Kwayana's
claim. Local residents and the Police saw the murder, as a purely
private matter.
What is incontrovertible, however, is that while there had been
rising concerns about the ascendant Indian profile in Guyana,
the polarisation between the two major ethnic groups became entrenched
during the political mobilisation of 1961. The group boundaries
themselves became more pronounced. Some see ethnicity and ethnic
consciousness as consequences of political mobilisation but in
Guyana we see that the nexus between ethnicity and political
mobilisation is a dynamic one and the descent into ethnic violence
is quite contextual.
On what became known as Black Friday, February 16th 1962, large
sections of Georgetown's commercial section with Indian businesses,
was burnt down. In 1963, widespread countrywide violence erupted
during an eighty-day strike called by the Civil Service Union.
The violence took an ethnic orientation as Indians supported
the PPP Government and Africans supported the strikers during
civil disobedience "sit-ins" in front of Government
buildings. In 1964, the Guyana Agricultural Workers' Union
the sugar workers union supported by the PPP - called a strike,
ostensibly to gain recognition by the Sugar Producers' Association
as the official bargaining agent for sugar workers and precipitated
the most intense inter-ethnic violence in the history of Guyana
- one hundred and seventy-six individuals were killed, thousands
were injured and hundreds of homes were torched. Thousands abandoned
their homes and jobs and Guyana ethnic segregation deepened as
individuals resettled in ethnically homogenous communities. A
PNC-UF coalition replaced the PPP in December 1964.
While we now have confirmation that the U.S. and Britain backed
the destabilisation of the PPP regime because of their fears
of the PPP establishing a pro-Soviet satellite in Guyana (a not
unfounded fear, we now also know) this is a proximate cause since
we have shown that the seeds of hostility were already set in
1961 when there was no direct foreign intervention. The violence
of the sixties demonstrated that both parties had cadres who
were highly trained militarily. This tradition was evidently
carefully maintained since.
The period 1964-1992 was characterised by an authoritarian regime
of the PNC, especially after the PNC jettisoned its UF junior
partner and ensconced itself in office by routinely rigging elections.
Its illegal rule was secured by military personnel that by 1976
had reached the staggering ratio of one armed personnel to every
thirty-five civilians. During the period, private goon-squads
that supported the PNC, wrecked havoc on the civilian population
especially on Indians. By mid-1985, anti-Indian depredations
had reached such staggering proportions that one political activist,
Eusi Kwayana, wrote that "it had a flavour of genocide".
The House of Israel a PNC backed group that was armed by
the party, formed the core of what was graphically described
as "kick-down-the-door" bandits. The Working Peoples'
Alliance, which had presented the most effective opposition to
the PNC during the seventies, was also selected for violence
and murder. Walter Rodney, one of its leaders and several activists
were assassinated by Government forces.
A combination of domestic and diaspora agitation and most importantly
the fall of the Soviet empire, persuaded the U.S, to broker the
return of "free and fair" elections on October 5th
1992. After it became apparent that the PNC had lost the elections,
anti Indian violence broke out in Georgetown and was only quelled
when outgoing President Desmond Hoyte ordered troops in the streets
and gave the order to use deadly force, if necessary.
On January 12th 1998, following PNC marches in Georgetown that
protested the PPP's victory at the December 1997 elections, anti-Indian
violence on a massive scale broke out in Georgetown. This ethnically-directed
violence spread and continued sporadically in ever widening circles
around the East Coast of Demerara to 2002. In that year matters
escalated following the Republic Day (February 23rd.) prison
breakout by five notorious criminals. The bandits formed the
core of a gang of criminals operating with impunity out of the
African village of Buxton that created even greater mayhem, murder,
robberies and rapes against Indians in adjoining villages. The
gang claimed that they were protecting African interests and
the violence was once again ethnically directed against Indians.
Confronted by a special police unit, the Tactical Services Unit
the "Black Clothes", (formed by the Hoyte PNC
government) which the Government had increasingly relied on to
deal with high intensity crime sometimes with questionable
legality - this gang engaged and decimated the Unit. Following
this development several "Death Squads" appeared on
the scene and went after the bandits, apparently with both private
and official connivance. An orgy of violence followed in which
mostly young African men were executed many with criminal
records. It was asserted that drug interests were also deeply
involved.
There has been a persistent debate as to whether the violence
in Guyana is actually politically rather than ethnically
directed. As we pointed out earlier, there is a dynamic relationship
between the actors in the conflict and the rationales for their
actions. It is man who gives meaning to his actions. It is our
contention that while there are feelings of hostility or antagonism
immanent in segments within every group in Guyana, against other
groups, it is not the hostility per se, that propels the
violence but rather the drive to protect interests that are perceived
to be threatened by others.
If the violence was meant to subjugate other groups it would
have been correct to label it "racist" since the groups
are racially differentiated, but this is not the case. However
to the individuals affected by the violence the distinction,
akin to that in law between "intent" and "motive",
is irrelevant as they seek to secure justice against individuals
who invariably are from different ethnic groups. Some politicians
will seize upon this ambiguity if it can garner support in the
particular political system. The distinction, however, can be
useful for policymakers since it suggests that programs to defuse
the violence must focus on securing justice in the distribution
of resources between ethnic groups while other programs may deal
with "stereotypes" and other groups' perception of
each other.
There have been widespread accusations during the PPP regimes
that their actions were (1957-1964) and are (1992-present) racist
against Africans. Similar accusations have been made against
the PNC that they were racist (1964-1992) against Indians. If
the activities of any individual, organisation or group falls
differentially on citizens who have some distinctive characteristic
in common, it ought not to be of any surprise that they will
enquire whether they are any connections between the action and
the characteristic. With reference to the distinctions made above,
the U.S. Supreme Court has determined that if there is an adverse
impact on any specified group that that is statistically anomalous
for their percentage in the target population, then without the
need to prove intent, a rebuttable presumption of "discrimination/racism"
can be inferred. Analogously, when as in present-day Guyana crimes
statistical anomalies highlight that an overwhelmingly large
majority of the victims of crime are Indians; the overwhelming
majority of the perpetrators of the crimes are Africans and the
overwhelming majority of victims of police killings are Africans,
it is up to the authorities to rebut the reasonable presumption
in the minds of the populace that "race" is involved
as a motive in the actions. Scholars and politicians also, should
seek to demonstrate beyond mere assertion whether "correlation"
is equal to "causation".
NATIONAL CULTURE AND IDENTITY
The Proffered Paradigm:
The Unitary nation-state
The concept of the "nation-state" has become such a
ubiquitous international norm, that it is difficult for us to
realize that the modern state was only born in 1648 at the Treaty
of Westphalia and that the extension of the idea to the reality
of the "nation state" took root in the nineteen century.
From its European feudal origins where kings had to scrounge
their lords to raise armies, the State became omnipotent and
omnipresent as the monarchy centralized power: it was the formation
of strong centralized states that led to the sometimes brutal
consolidation of nations. It is important to note that in their
modern forms, the "nation- state", "nationalism",
"democracy" and "capitalism", were all born
together - part of a paradigm shift in Western Europe, centred
first in Britain and France arising out of the Enlightenment.
This shift occurred just over the last three centuries during
the rise of capitalism in its mercantilist and then free-trade
phases of that early "globalization". Each ideological
construct and institutionalisation obviously influenced each
other, in the service of capitalism. When sovereignty shifted
towards the people following the French and American democratic
revolutions, the state became a more liberal institution
insisting on dealing with citizens as individuals yet impelled
by the economic exigencies to mobilize the entire society. The
necessity for the "people" to perceive themselves as
one became even more pressing and E Pluribus Unum became
the call of the age. Territorial and ethnic boundaries were made
more or less coincident as "nationalism" became the
order of the day. Under the doctrine of cujus regio (ejus
religio) the religion of the Monarch became the religion
of the people and the culture of the dominant group around the
Monarch, the culture of the nation. The economic and political
concerns emanating from sub-regions were accepted and accommodated
by dealing with them as "counties" but the cultural
uniformity was non-negotiable.
Theorists of the nation-state have described how "nationalism"
engendered and constructed nations and not the other way around.
Actually what happens is that the elite of one of the ascendant
groups, using existing cultural strands, but privileging its
own, attempts to establish a hegemony over the rest of society
for instance, in Britain it was the English that accomplished
this task - to create what they defined as the nation-state of
Great Britain. The demands of the state are made coincident with
that of the "people" - "nationalism" - the
purported needs of the "nation" to be unified. Another
theorist agreed and defined the nation as a cultural artefact
- an "imagined political community" not created totally
out of thin air. But in leaving out the word "political"
in the title of the book he emphasized the symbolic artificiality
of national identity while allowing others who never get past
the title, to glide over the inherent contradictions between
the state and the nation.
While the state and nation were stipulated as identical, in reality
the state could never become identical with the people living
within its territory. The state may represent the people but
the people inevitably will identify easier with their "nation"
as constructed by their personal experiences lived within a common
language, culture and traditions, than their state. This does
not mean that the state cannot be a site of identification for
the people but since the values promulgated by the state being
more abstract and "drier", these will have to be transmitted
independently. Where there are different "cultures/nations"
within a state, inevitable systemic strains are unleashed since
to create the unified nation there has to be continued application
of force, symbolic and physical, on some groups to maintain the
"imagined community". It is self evident that groups,
defined as being "different" on account of their disparate
cultures have always existed in the same country. But for most
of the history of mankind it was accepted that these groups could
define themselves by their birth in a particular territory simultaneously
as "citizens" of that territory or state (legally
jus soli) or as a particular "nationality" depending
on their "ties of blood" culture and heritage
(legally jus sanguinis). While all citizens would
have all of the rights and obligations of citizenship, each "nationality"
was governed, for instance, by the personal laws of their culture.
Cultural communities, therefore, were the bearers of rights.
As mentioned, it was only in the last three hundred years that
Europe, led by England and France, began to insist that all citizens
of a particular state only had rights as individuals and they
must also practice one culture become "one nation"
giving birth to the nation-state.
However while the concept of the "nation state" has
become a central pillar of the dominant European political paradigm
and a dogma in modern politics, it is but a contingent moment
in European history that definitionally insisted on the "societal
consensus" and the "melting pot" theory of assimilation.
Even within Britain itself, the Scots, the Welsh and most obstinately,
the Irish never fully accepted the homogenizing premises of the
nation-state. Within the bosom of this arch, empire-building
nation-state, Ireland declared it would go its own way early
in the twentieth century. The cracks have now become yawning
chasms. The irredentism of German unification and secessionism
of the Soviet, Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian republics were
simply flip sides of the rejection of the European claim that
"state" automatically equals "nation". The
actuality, of course, is that national unity is always ultimately
impossible if it means homogeneity, since such a unity will have
to be created (or more mildly, be represented) by a suppression
of differences.
The contradictions and problems of the nation-state were compounded
after those Imperialistic European states again with England
and France in the lead during their 19th century consolidation
phase, partitioned the world into empires and "spheres of
influence". Claiming huge areas, which they divided into
colonies for administrative convenience, the multitude of ethnic
groups, (which, in some cases, as in Guyana, were created) within
each enclave were suddenly told they had to become cohesive "nations".
The onus was even greater in the colonies, such as those in the
West Indies, where the local groups were practically wiped out,
ensuring there were no "natural" cultural strains as
in the European model, to evolve into any "national"
culture and the society had to be created almost sui s.
The local politicians who inherited the colonies adopted this
imperialistic homogenising arrogance and insisted on even utilizing
force, when necessary to create "nation-states". We
are reaping the whirlwind, for while in theory both the modernization
school of the West and the Marxist school of the East had prophesied
the eradication of ethnicity and the creation of unified "nation
states" (implied with the Marxists) history has proven them
wrong.
The reasons for this are complex but essentially lay at the heart
of the nature of power, the potential for its abuse, its relationship
to status, the power of the modern state and the fact that the
group that controls that power is invariably from one section.
In a cultural plural society then, power always has an ethnic
contour and will be challenged along that parameter. In ethnically
heterogeneous states, ethnicity became a dominant cleavage along
which mobilization took place even though those who led were
invariably from the dominant classes. Thus behind its egalitarian
façade, in Britain the English were always the dominant
ethnic group, and its elite, the ruling class. And in the communist
U.S.S.R. as late as 1989, nineteen out of twenty members on the
ruling politburo were ethnic Russians. In Guyana, whether the
PNC or PPP ran the government, it was seen by the group on the
outside as the "other" ethnic group dominating the
government.
The Consequences of trying to impose a "nation-state"
in Guyana:
Historical
The conflation of "state" and "nation", in
tandem with its corollary of ignoring the real nature of Guyana's
society, has been one of the major factors that have muddied
the waters of our political process. This is not been a matter
of simple semantic slackness but yet another instance of living
with the consequences (even if arguably, unintended) emanating
from the historically demonstrated wilfulness of hegemonic powers
to universalise their parochial particulars and forcing the rest
of the world to fit their different realities onto the procrustean
European beds. The greatest problem is that even those who can
obviously see that the arrangements are not working, end up dealing
with symptoms rather that (structural) causes.
The Guyanese State
From the inception of Guyana's creation as a European colony,
there were a number of consequences, flowing from the circumstances
attendant in its construction. Firstly, there would always be
the need to have a resident body to protect the interests of
the European power. Secondly, the fact that Guyana was not seen
as a "settler colony" that would be able to attract
large numbers of European immigrants, demanded that labour would
have to be imported in light of the "unsuitability"
of the local Amerindians. This implied absentee ownership whose
interests would also have to be protected. Thirdly, the resort
to slavery to fill the need for cheap labour further demanded
that control over the always potentially rebellious slaves be
high on the agenda. From their experience in Europe, all of these
needs demanded the formation of a strong state structure by the
colonists.
Even in the early days, when the Dutch West India Company was
governing the colonies of Essequibo and Demerara, and Berbice
Planters Association over Berbice, they assumed the cardinal
features of a state an arrogation of sovereignty over a
particular territory. They always created a militia to assert
that sovereignty, an executive body to formulate policy and a
bureaucracy (albeit small) to coordinate activities. After they
captured the colonies in 1803, the British merely expanded the
state organs of the Dutch as the colonies grew in size and were
eventually combined as in 1831.
Up to the abolition of slavery, it was felt that the forces at
the command of the state and on the plantations, were sufficient
to maintain order and realize the reasons for keeping a colony.
The abolition of slavery presented new challenges to that control.
All of the new relations of the society, whether between individuals
or groups or between ruler and ruled had to be cooordinated within
some macro- structure if the Colonialists were to maintain control
this could not be left to chance. Again drawing on their
historical experience, the Europeans introduced the notion of
the nation state as one device in their arsenal of control.
The Nation
The consolidation of the colonies are to be seen against
the backdrop of the development of the state in Europe. The refusal
of the British to give recognition to the various ethnic groups
in Guyana, their insistence on cultural homogeneity and their
use of the term "race" to distinguish Guyanese ("land
of six races") was not mere wilfulness. The hegemonic discursive
formation of "Guyanese culture" privileged British
culture and by definition suppressed, repressed or hegemonised
other cultures, all towards ease of control and domination of
the labouring populations. Their practices were part of the project
to maintain the unequal power relations between the governors
and the governed. The present Guyanese society is the result
of three centuries of a state induced homogenisation.
Even with the unequal power relations between the Imperialist
and the subject, however, the imposed culture on the subjects
could never be "homogenous" either in being "British"
or "Creole". The British expatriates within the colony
itself spanning the chasm between the young Scot overseers
and the Governor exhibited a wide cultural diversity and
then the subjects themselves brought their specific cultures
into their encounters. The initial encounter between the Europeans
slave owners and African slaves, one sided as it was, resulted
in a Creole culture which by the end of slavery did incorporate
significant (albeit innocuous, as it related to power) elements
of African cultures. Creole culture to a lesser or greater degree
was a European-African "hybrid".
Where, as in Guyana, the different cultural groups were chronologically
and geographically separated, the resulting hybrid cultures,
(e.g. Creole-Indian) while having some commonalities to the extent
of shared experiences with Creole or British cultures, would
definitely be anthropologically distinct to the extent that each
group brought a different set of cultural responses to the equation.
However, the British resolutely refused to cater for cultural
differences, insisted on the idealised British "high"
culture as the standard and focused on race rather than culture
as the point of difference in the population. They thus implicitly
postulated cultural homogeneity as the central founding ideological
principle in the construction of a Guyanese "national"
identity. The reality however, was that the society was resolutely
culturally plural and the contradictions created between the
reality and the "ideal" bedevil Guyana to the present.
Guyanese Society: The contradictions
There has been much discussion
in the social sciences, of the development of societies/nations
from a state of nature. One prevalent premise is that societies
developed in an organic or "natural" way and the institutions
that regulate or govern the people would have also undergone
such a natural growth and development. Flowing from this assumption
of the "organic society" view was that there would
be a consensus on values and ends, along with integrative institutions,
amongst the members, which would hold the society together
there would be, in a word, a community.
In Guyana one would have thought that, there could be no such
assertion: our society is comprised of people who were snatched
from several continents and dumped between 1621 and 1921 into
our land to join the indigenous Amerindians to labour for the
colonial enterprise. In Guyana, the various ethnic groups
Portuguese, Indians and Chinese - with the exception of the Amerindians
were brought as indentured servants by the Whites from all parts
of the world to replace the Africans after the abolition of slavery
in 1834. Separated chronologically to a great extent, they were
segregated into separate economic and geographical niches with
profound and lasting consequences for their future relationships.
While the separation may have prevented early sustained contact
and possible clashes, it further reinforced the initial cleavages
of race/ethnicity, language, religion and culture to demarcate
social boundaries, which were distinct and have proven long lasting.
At the end of indentureship in 1917, the now "free"
society was vertically stratified, with ethnicity and class generally
coinciding in a given stratum. The Whites were at the apex followed
in descending order by the Coloureds, Portuguese, Chinese, Africans,
Indians and Amerindians. It was almost the paradigmatic structural
hierarchical plural society, with the ethnic groups differentially
integrated into the power structure. It is this differential
integration that provides the dynamism for change as each group
tried to improve their position. It was not difficult to foresee
that "culture" would become a stalking horse for "power".
This fact alone of disparate peoples - should have alerted
our theorists and politicians for the need to possibly look at
our societal problems with more sensitive lenses, and grapple
with such problems utilising analytical tools different from
those invented for societies formed organically. Today there
would be few who would deny that Guyana is a multicultural society.
It is not that the society is simply culturally heterogeneous
in a superficial sense- every society in the world is that today
but that discrete groups in Guyana share enough culturally
distinctive features to enable themselves to distinguish themselves
from "others" and to act as a distinct group in a wide
range of activities. The individuals in each group tend to live
and work together, intermarry, (and of course, vote together)
and share more personal relationships with each other. They recognise,
in a word, their common "ethnicity".
Ethnicity
The term "ethnicity"
encompasses a wide range of meanings. It is derived from the
Greek term ethnikos, or ethnos, meaning "nation"
or "people". It refers to a collective group within
a society perceived by its members as having a common ancestry
and sharing an historic past or cultural tradition. Thus "ethnic
group" captures the biological and cultural nexuses of many
groups, without the invidious implications of "race"
- that biology is solely determinative of social practices. In
Guyana, "race" has been used loosely in the sense of
"ethnicity" with the pejorative bias. While ethnicity
has been regarded as either a "primordial" urge or
an instrumental manipulation by ethnic entrepreneurs, its salience
and even its resurgence in the modern era, may be explained as
a rational response of individuals responding to their circumstances
by forming ethnic groups that lower transaction costs. Ethnicity,
is always contextually defined and can be very fluid - but not
infinitely so. In all cases it is also a politicised categorization
as the ethnic group uses its distinctiveness as a mobilisational
tool for political purposes.
In his seminal work, Barth argues that the defining feature
of an ethnic group is not the particular elements of culture
or kinship that differentiate it from other groups, but the mere
fact that boundaries are perceived and persist. The membership
criteria, and the membership itself, tends to change over time
as people come and go and invent develop new traditions and ways
of life, but the group itself nevertheless endures as a way of
structuring social life . This is a very pertinent point in Guyana
where some observers have argued that because all the groups
in the society share so many cultural features in common
especially language, we cannot single out ethnicity as a salient
cleavage. Many, especially the Marxist dominant modern political
leaders of the PPP, PNC and the WPA, chose the cleavage of class
as a more salient cleavage for analysis, prognosis and prescriptions
for the society's ailments.
Class
Dr. Cheddi Jagan, founder of the first mass-based political
party in Guyana, especially insisted that the analytic category
of "class" was most "fundamental" and a much
more fruitful construct for understanding Guyana's social reality
and for formulating strategies for social mobilisation. He gave
short shrift to ethnicity at least in his analyses.
As a social construct, class had been proposed in a nineteenth-century
Europe that had dealt with questions of identity for over four
hundred years via the "nationalist" route. Especially
in Western Europe "ethnic" questions had transmuted
themselves into "national" questions by the time the
issue of economic justice surfaced during the expanding Industrial
Revolution in the late eighteenth century. A great disparity
had developed between the haves and the "have-nots' and
Karl Marx was to discern several wider societal effects from
that unequal economic relationship. Dr. Jagan and other Marxists
strained mightily to fit the Guyanese society into the Marxian
analytic categories of "bourgeoise", "proletariat",
peasantry, etc.
As the Marxists are fond of asserting, no one can deny the objective
existence of economic classes and this is true for Guyana. The
question for us is whether individuals in the society act according
to their class interest over other cleavages representing other
interests such as ethnicity. In Guyana, the reality is
that class interests are subsumed in ethnicity especially
when political choices are being made. As we pointed out earlier,
the society is stratified in a "reticulated" pattern,
that is within each ethnic bloc there are distinct classes but
these classes do not take concerted action across the ethnic
divide. In Marx's words, "classes in themselves" have
not become "classes for themselves" they have
not moved from being analytic categories to being social groups.
For the problematic of politically related violence that is presently
under consideration, it is noteworthy that in the episodes of
Guyanese modern history there has not been any broad, sustained
social action to challenge state power across class lines. Even
the economic strikes are split along ethnic lines. During the
1963 Public Servants strike, Indian workers generally did not
strike against the PPP government, while during the Burnhamite
years the public service workers generally supported the regime
against their purported "class interests". Presently,
the Indian sugar workers consistently vote the PPP into office
even as they rail against their PPP-controlled union to
stand up to the state-owned sugar company controlled by
the PPP.
The PPP and the PNC both claim to have worked to inculcate "class
consciousness" in the populace and in this way they avoided
dealing frontally with the central reality of political action
ethnicity, since the beginning of modern politics.
National Culture: The model
bequeathed
The Assimilationist State
The model imposed onto the Guyanese
population was strictly assimationalist, in that each of the
groups brought into Guyana were expected to jettison their "native"
culture and accept the superiority of British culture. While
during slavery the insistence on wiping out the original culture
of the Africans was more directly, by the beginning of indentureship
the superiority of British was achieved through what has been
described as the problematic of "hegemony". Aspects
of the original culture may have been allowed to remain but the
books, schools, and all the state and civil institutions were
directed to disseminate the moral and philosophical superiority
of all things British.
The assimationalist school totally privileges unity. It has been
the dominant model over the past three hundred years, and still
undergirds the policies of most of the states of the world, which
define themselves as "nation-states". Its premises
are that the people within a state must all share a common culture
and values so that they would feel a sense of "oneness"
to better work towards achieving the "national" goals.
The key question, of course, is who decides on what constitutes
the "national culture" into which everyone is to be
assimilated?
There have been several variants of the assimilationist school
ranging from the demand that, as with the slaves, individuals
entering such a society jettison their "old" cultures
and live and practice the new to such individuals being
told that they should intermarry with others from the "mainstream"
so that they physically disappear. The American "melting
pot" remains the most famous example of the assimilationist
school, even though there, the state through its school system
and its very explicit "citizenship" examinations, couched
the values to be assimilated in ideological, rather than cultural"
terms. It is possible that the "White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant"
(WASP) cultural ideal was so deeply imbedded in the state structure
that there was no need to emphasise them. In reality for citizens
to enjoy the full rights of citizenship, they have to conform
to the "societal" culture. The French, following Rousseau,
have been the most faithful to the model in terms of explicitly
demanding the French culture as the standard the best in
the world as a matter of fact.
The unfortunate fact is that the assimilationist project has
only worked at the price of great suffering and even then, never
very successfully. America has had to concede that instead of
being a "melting pot" it can only be a "salad
bowl" where culture is concerned. Britain has had to grant
autonomy to Scotland and Ireland in cultural as well as political
terms. In Guyana while everyone was told to assimilate into British
culture, there were always snickers from Whites when "natives"
talked about "home". Ultimately, assimilation can only
work if there is complete physical intermixing between the various
populations and this is very unlikely.
The Contradictions in the
present:
The PNC accepted the
premises of the British assimationalist school, during its long
twenty-eight year regime, accentuated the European/African hybrid
Creole culture with its "white-bias" - as the
official culture, even as it made some innocuous accommodations
to other hybrids. Many have insisted that the PNC had a multicultural
stance since they introduced two Muslim and two Hindu festivals
as national holidays. Actually, these were religious holidays
rather than "cultural" ones. Mr. Burnham advocated
a separation of Church and State, not least because it allowed
him greater autonomy of action over the State, which the Christian
Church colonial state had been privileged to such an extent that
it had great influence and authority on state matters. State
recognition of Hinduism and Islam as 'Guyanese' religions simply
served to dilute the old established Christian influence (which
had external masters) while Mr. Burnham quickly moved to control
the Hindu Maha Sabha and the Muslim Anjumaan so that they could
offer no effective counter challenge.
Burnham insisted, in his European "Enlightenment" tradition,
that religion should be a matter for the private sphere He saw
"culture", as 'secular" as opposed to "religious",
and which should be controlled as part of the public space. While
the ambiguities of such a disjuncture are legion, Burnham accepted
the homogenising premises of the European "nation-state"
ideal. He fervently opposed "multiculturalism" and
summed up his position as "One People, One Nation, One Destiny'.
The question, of course, was what would be the cultural practices
that would define the "one nation" and to which all
others would be assimilated. We can look at the record .
The symbols of a state signal its cultural orientation since
these are expected to ensure that the people can identify with
the state at an emotional level. The colours of the Guyanese
flag, chosen by the National Arts Council, were the Garveyite
pan-African colours black, green and red (which was already the
PNC's colours) along with yellow from Ethiopia"s of green,
yellow and red, which most African countries had chosen as their
pan-African colours. The National Hero was declared to be Cuffy
the African slave who had fought the Dutch in Berbice almost
seventy years before Berbice became part of a unified Guyana.
The National Anthem has no hint of an Indian raga, much less
any words from that or any other culture.
Mr. Burnham decided to modify the application of Marxist-Leninist
theory, exposing himself to ridicule from orthodox quarters,
to declare that Guyana's economic model would be the cooperative
- based on the Ujaama socialism of Tanzania. Mr. Burnham introduced
Mashramani as the grand festival for Guyana, with its Creole
Caribbean Carnival inspiration hardly masked by the asseveration
that it was about "cooperation" and taken from the
Amerindians. Even though there is a "National" Museum,
an African Museum and an Amerindian museum there in none
for Indians. This cultural imbalance, which is seen as a consequence
of the power-relations, adds to the complexity of the political
struggle.
Burnham went down the route of America, where the idea of multiculturalism
is seen as antagonistic to the integrity of the state, even though
the country is clearly acknowledged to be multicultural. The
U.S. (as Guyana) had followed the British practice of distinguishing
its citizens by race and expecting that all groups would become
"American" which they defined officially in ideological
terms such as equality, liberty, etc but privileged the British
culture and experience of the "founding fathers". Burnham
did the same with Creole culture as for instance when the PNC
mandated that "Mashramani" redolent with Creole values
and practices would be the national festival to commemorate Republic
Day. The moral and physical violence occasioned by the exclusions
of cultural minorities and the advantage of the "culture
bearers" are thereby masked but not eliminated in the assimilationist
state.
The PPP and National Culture
The PPP has declared
that it also accepts multiculturalism as the cultural orientation
of the Guyanese state. Its activities during its first 1957-1964
terms of office did show a greater sensitivity to the cultural
aspirations of previously peripheralised groups but implicitly
accepted the priority of the white-bias Creole culture. This
has been its stance since it was returned to office since 1992.
The Impact of Culture on National
Goals
If "culture"
is a people's "way of doing things", then it will be
the soil in which all institutional changes deemed needed to
achieve national goals, will either flourish or wither. In a
situation where the citizens of Guyana are attempting to emulate
the success of their erstwhile masters, they will have to re-examine
the values inculcated by Creole culture and decide whether these
values are in consonance with their desired goals. For instance,
during slavery, there was no point to slaves saving monies they
may have earned on their Sunday day-off since they could not
pass on property to their children. This encouraged an attitude
of living in the present and spending money as it came in. Modern
development economics insists that countries can only get out
of their poverty trap if they are to raise their rates of savings
but in Guyana, this value clashes with the entrenched value in
Creole culture and leads to a vicious circle of dependency.
Similarly, on the plantations even after indentureship, the Indians
were encouraged to depend on the managers of the plantations
to make all decisions on their living conditions as late as the
seventies. A spirit of dependency was inculcated by this paternalism
as it related to managing the affairs their communities. If local
democracy is to flourish in these communities, the people will
have to be weaned away from their proclivity to look at officialdom
to take care of problems of local welfare.
EQUITY IN POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
The Proffered Paradigm:
Liberal Democracy: Historical Perspective
Democracy, like most value concepts,
can only be appreciated within its historical context and development,
we must always keep in mind the historical specificity of all
institutions. The political institutions of Guyana were directly
imposed on Guyana by the European colonial powers which,
since 1803, meant Britain. In Britain, the development of the
democratic idea went hand in hand with the development of Liberalism,
and for most Britishers the two were coterminous, especially
during the phase of struggling for constitutional government.
They are not and the famous distinction by F.A. Hayek is apropos:
"Liberalism is concerned with the functions of government
and particularly with the limitation of all its powers. Democracy
is concerned with the question of who is to direct government.
Liberalism requires that all power, and therefore also that of
the majority, be limited. Democracy came to regard current majority
opinion as the only criterion of the legitimacy of the powers
of government." As we trace the development of democracy,
which the British insisted should be practiced by Guyanese, it
would do us well to keep in mind the distinction, occasioned
by the exigencies of the British experience.
Western theorists trace the idea of democracy to the Greek city-states
such as Athens of the sixth century B.C. At that time, to resolve
a severe conflict between the masses and the "notables",
Solon introduced rules of governance in 594 BC that was inclusive
all four sections into which he had distinguished the citizenry.
Within a century, as a consequence of an attempt by the "notables"
to seize power in 508 BC, the rules were further expanded to
form the "democracy" that we associate with Greece.
The term itself is a combination of the Greek words demos
"people", and kratos "rule"
or "power". The essence of democracy has always retained
the element implicit in its name - "rule by the people"
or "power by the people". In Greece, the citizens of
the city would all gather whenever they had to decide on critical
matters affecting their city they had a quorum of about
5000. They preferred to make their decisions consensually, but
if this were not possible, on a simple majority that is,
on a vote of one more than fifty percent of those assembled (hence
"assembly"). This "direct democracy" could
work because of the small size (between 30 40,000), and
the total homogeneity, of the voting population only Greek
men born in the city with women, slaves and other residents
excluded. Plato and Aristotle (b . 384 B.C.) , citizens of the
city state, were very sceptical about the efficacy of democracy,
especially the former, as were most thinkers up to two hundred
years ago. The democratic form of governance fell out of favour
for almost two thousand years as the continent-spanning Roman
Empire replaced Greece as the dominant power and adopted Christianity
as its official religion. Absolute monarchy became the norm and
"democracy" was thought of as "rule by the mob".
Christian insistence on faith (from St Augustine to St. Aquinas)
rather than active judgment shifted the rationale of political
action from the constitutional democratic state the "polis"
of Aristotle - to a theological framework that directed "true"
Christians not to focus on the politics of "this temporal
life". The belief that the Pope was "the Vicar"
of Christ and that Kings ruled by his prerogative in a hierarchical
structure with God at the top helped to give this period, for
very good reasons, the label "dark ages". It was not
until the egalitarian-oriented drive of the Protestant Reformation
and the Renaissance that the claim of divine support for despotic
monarchies was challenged. These imperatives obviously had to
be worked out through the feudal structures present at the time
aristocracy, clergy and commons and we should not
be surprised that these groupings and their relative status dominated
discussions of democracy. An early theorist, Niccolo Machiavelli
(1469-1527) during the turmoil in his native Florence, proposed
that the best form of governance to preserve liberty should be
"mixed" and combine monarchical, aristocratic and democratic
elements, which would tend balance the social forces and to fragment
political power.
In Britain, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) theorising in the chaos
of the English civil war contesting the absolute monarchy that
included the beheading of a king, proposed that men emerged from
a "state of nature", where there is no power or state
to enforce rules and life was "solitary, poor, nasty brutish
and short". He posited a social contract in which men give
up some of their rights to a powerful central authority (absolute
monarchy) that ensured that the peace is kept. While Hobbes emphasised
the liberty of individuals, and the need for social and political
order for that liberty to be meaningful, he posited that an all-powerful
state was necessary to achieve this. The important innovation
in this century was that sovereignty was conceded to reside in
the people (they should confer this sovereignty to a King) and
having a common citizenship did not automatically compel a single
belief. Hobbes' absolutist ideas were severely challenged, by
groups such as the Levellers in Britain. Simultaneously then,
theories of democratic and absolute rule had been formulated:
the former strand opposing absolutism - took root in Britain
while the latter prevailed in Europe . While to the older
British tradition the freedom of the individual in the sense
of a protection by law against all arbitrary coercion was the
chief value, in the Continental tradition the demand for
the self-determination of each group concerning its form of government
occupied the highest place.
John Locke (1632-1704) wrote within the context of the settlement
to England's "glorious revolution" which found the
monarchy restored, but with the acceptance that parliament was
sovereign. Locke proposed that it was hardly credible that people
who did not trust each other in a state of nature would repose
that trust voluntarily in an absolute ruler, even to guarantee
social order. Locke accepted Hobbes postulated "state of
nature" but held that "natural law" governed there
and made all men free and equal with the right of "life,
liberty and estate". To overcome the shortcoming that there
would be, at a minimum, severe confusion since everyone can interpret
the "law", he proposed that there should be a social
contract, first to create an independent society and secondly
a government. Sovereign power would remain ultimately with the
people, who could remove their deputies or government if it did
not protect their "life, liberty and property". Societies
and Governments existed to fulfil the rights of man and the latter
had a duty to fulfil their side of the bargain or the former
could rebel.
By the next century, during which slavery in the colonies was
abolished and "free"societies were established, the
tenets of what was called, the ideals of "Liberal Democracy"
was established and dominated Britain's political thought and
consequently the model held out to the natives in the colonies.
J.S. Mill (1806-1873) an employee of the East India Company,
summarized the tenets of liberal democracy. Mill was in favour
of "Representative Democracy" in which the people would
govern through their representatives who would be "qualified"
to make the decisions of state. Mill was wary of the "mob".
The state, liberals assert, exists to safeguard the rights and
liberties of citizens who are ultimately the best judge of their
own interests and the state must be made as small as is possible
in order to ensure the maximum freedom for each citizen. Liberals
also focused on the necessity for government to operate within
a constitutional framework that accepted the rule of law.
The contextual nature of the development of specific features
of democracy can also be seen in the contributions of two Frenchmen.
Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), on a visit to England became
familiar with the ideas of Locke and was impressed with the liberty
of the individual he witnessed there, unlike the situation in
centralized France. He latched on to Locke's mild suggestion
that the power of government ought to be separate and proposed
that this "separation of powers" was key to the preservation
of liberty. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) proposed a historical
Social Contract between citizens and their government in which
the community (the "general will") takes precedence
over the individual and is the source of the latter's rights
and is owed their obligations. The state, in a positive way,
is supposed to facilitate the opportunities of citizens to enjoy
his rights as defined by the general will. Rousseau was
part of the rationalist (constructivist) school of democracy
that ended up with totalitarianism.
The American extension of the democratic idea arose within the
context of their rebellion against the despotic power of the
State (Britain) and their concerns over "factions"
seizing power and oppressing the others. Their solution was to
utilize and extend the ideas of Montesquieu and divide power
vertically and vertically within a federalist structure that
betrays the fact that substantively, many of the founding fathers
were stirred by the Lockean prioritisation of "life, liberty
and property". Democracy's reintroduction in Europe in tandem
with the development of the nation-state and capitalism is not
coincidental. The economic middle class, newly-formed by the
spreading Industrial Revolution, were demanding greater political
power to go with their burgeoning economic worth. The diminution
of the powers of the monarch and the rise of the middle class
was in each instance the pragmatic accommodation to a reality
won through struggle. The struggle in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, based on the fight for equality, fuelled the growth
and spread of democracy and has inextricably linked the two concepts.
The slogan of the French Revolution of 1789 life, liberty
and fraternity has proven durable and has been a beacon for colonised
people in the modern era.
However, the elitist current of democracy, articulated by J.S.
Mill and other thinkers has remained strong into the twentieth
century. The question as to who are the "people" who
will give consent has been contested throughout the ages and
as we saw for most of the time it meant a qualified elite. The
argument was that the masses could never really govern and the
best that democracy can do is to select between competing elites.
In the Caribbean one commentator called it "Doctor Politics."
Eventually this elitist focus became one where democracy was
reduced simply as a method for choosing a government and
this appears to be the view of the PPP in Government. The innovation
of "democratic centralism" as an organisational and
procedural methodology by Lenin, which has been accepted by the
PPP as an orthodox Communist party in 1969, is the quintessence
of elitism. The question of the substance of democracy being
integrated in the societal relations was put on the back burner
that was being "utopian".
What we have seen in the survey above is that in every instance,
intense political struggles (often violent) preceded the introduction
of new democratic principles when the leaders of the contending
forces accepted new rules that accommodated the disparate contentions.
Secondly, while intuitively "the people" exercising
political power shapes democracy, it is not a straightforward,
uncomplicated idea that we can take for granted it is an
omnibus value expression. Thirdly, democracy was, and never can
be a static idea: the democratic institutions that we consider
to be the standard has only been around for a hundred years or
so and even in that time it has been considerably modified. Fourthly,
the change in democratic theory has invariably followed the actions
of citizens that changed the status quo democracy developed
through popular action. Theory, more than often, followed action,
than vice versa.
Application of the Paradigm
in Guyana
As in its country of
origin and Britain, very early on in the colonies, two questions
were posed when the issue of democracy in the context of political
participation, arose who were "the people" and
once selected, how were "the people" to rule? On the
first question, the British had conceded that middle-class men
were "the people". Theorists such as Hobbes and Locke,
who may have argued for an expansion of political participation,
certainly did not believe that the lower classes and women were
qualified to exercise the franchise.
In the colonies, therefore even after the abolition of slavery
there was certainly no assumption that the freed slaves could
vote. The British denied the freed Africans the opportunity to
control the governing structures and justified this injustice
by claiming that by the planters would outmanoeuvre the Africans.
This exclusion of ex-slaves from the organs of governance and
their struggle to rectify that historic wrong has had consequences
that still reverberate in our political arena.
There had to be a period of tutelage, the British asserted, so
that the responsibility of governance could be exercised "responsibly"
by the "natives". Thus in Guyanese history, we note
a long and painful process by the disenfranchised to win the
vote and a determined rearguard action by the British to deny
the same. As late as 1947, only about ten percent of the population
were counted as "the people"; after 1953 it became
everyone over twenty one and finally in 1968 it was changed to
include everyone over eighteen.
A second problem arose when the country incorporated what was
labelled several "nationalities" what would today
be called "culturally plural societies". J.S. Mill,
for instance, speaking from a Britain sure of its "British"
national identity could pronounce with finality that the free
institutions of democracy were 'next to impossible in a country
made up of different nationalities'. There are undoubtedly countless
issues that the institutionalisation of democracy will pose for
Guyana; but the most important one will be to deal directly with
the implications of the ethnic divisions in the society to answer
the question, who are "the people" who would govern?
On the second question, how are "the people" to rule,
as explained above, the classical Greeks tried "direct democracy",
where, facilitated by their small numbers, every citizen could
vote on every issue in one gathering. If more than fifty percent
of the citizens voted for one particular position, then that
became the position of "the people". Majoritarian politics
was born. This direct method of voting had to be abandoned in
favour of "representative democracy" due to the larger
number of citizens and their wider geographical dispersion, in
the countries that resuscitated the democratic form of governance
twenty-two centuries later. The representatives were supposed
to re-present those who elected them. However, even though the
circumstances were different, the majoritarian principle was
retained, and it was accepted because the British people saw
themselves more or less as one.
A further innovation was introduced by the British, to accommodate
local sensitivities and ensure that the residents of "counties"
could be ensured of their own representatives. This was the procedural
basis of the "Westminster" system of democracy where
several candidates compete within a constituency for a seat to
Parliament and one off them could win with a plurality of the
votes cast. The innovation introduced the possibility that a
party could win a majority of seats nationally through plurality
victories and secure control of the government without obtaining
a majority of the total votes. Applied to Guyana, the constituency
system up to 1961 served to over-represent the PPP whose supporters
were more geographically dispersed that the PNC's.
The Contradictions of the
paradigm in Guyana
The Ethnic Security Dilemmas
Another problem presented
by procedural majoritarian democracy is that even if the party
winning the elections were to obtain an absolute majority, why
would the minority go along with the majority? The answer by
the Liberal theorists was that the minority knew that it always
had the opportunity of becoming the majority on any given issue
it just had to persuade enough fellow citizens that their
stand on that issue was the right one. This answer, however,
only addressed an ideal situation postulated by Liberal democracy,
where individuals voted rationally according to his or her interest.
From the inception it was recognized that there could be what
Madison called "factions" i.e. groups of citizens who
would always voted as a bloc because of having entrenched common
interests and not viewing themselves strongly as "one"
with the majority. This proclivity acted to create or reinforce
the divisions in the society. Nowadays, in one sense, we can
refer to societies with entrenched "factions" as "plural
societies". In Guyana, the factions are "ethnic"
groups.
If one such faction forms a majority, then this poses a grave
danger to democracy in that society - a "tyranny of the
majority". In this situation, a minority would never have
the opportunity of becoming the majority and would have to go
along with that majority ad infinitum. Thus, in plural
societies with one ethnic group forming an entrenched majority,
"majoritarianism", a procedure for implementing democracy,
becomes an obstacle to the substance of democracy that
all citizens feel that their opinions will be taken into account
when decisions that affect them are made. This is the reality
in Guyana today, where Indians constitute nearly fifty percent
of the population and do vote as a bloc, and the Africans are
over forty percent and also vote as a bloc.
The operation of the majoritarian procedural principle of democracy
in Guyana precipitates "Ethnic Security Dilemmas" in
the several groups given that if they each play within the stipulated
political rules none can actually the authority that they may
acquire once ensconced in office. In a phrase made famous by
Dr. Cheddi Jagan, the group would be in "office" but
not in "power". Most recently, the World Bank, in its
report, "Development Policy Review" described the Ethnic
Security Dilemmas in Guyana rather succinctly:
"Despite the fact that the ruling party (PPP) enjoys
majority control of the legislative and executive branches, the
political system has been characterizes by deadlock. This is
in part due to the fact that the Afro Guyanese, who are the main
supporters of the opposition PNC, are dominant in the public
sector generally, and in the police and defence forces in particular.
By virtue of its control of the capital city Georgetown, the
Opposition also frequently paralyses the city to further its
political agenda."
Both the PPP and the PNC have
acknowledged the reality of the Ethnic Security Dilemmas
the PPP explicitly and the PNC, implicitly through the rigging
of elections between 1964-1992 and sustained protests after 1992.
The Ethnic Security Dilemmas are inevitable consequences of the
Guyanese demographic factors playing out in the Westminster-based
procedural model of democracy. Africans could never capture the
Executive and Legislature if they played by the rules of the
game and the Indians could be checkmated from governing by the
African-dominated incumbents of the state apparatus. This frustration
fostered a dysfunctional political system where the protagonists
have great incentives go outside the rules of the game to secure
power. The frustration, in turn, has led to some politicians
viewing violence as a political option and over the last fifty
years political competition has been characterised by regular
bouts of open ethnic conflict between the two major ethnic groups,
especially around election times.
This reality forms one of the dilemmas of democracy in Guyana
under the present Westminster majoritarian rules: how do we control
the ethnic factions to preclude a real or perceived tyranny of
the majority? It does not matter that the majority may be wise
or just, the potential permanent exclusion of the minority from
executive office vitiates claims of "democracy". In
Guyana, from the beginning of modern politics in 1947, voting
became increasingly influenced by ethnicity. With the Indian
segment becoming a majority by the 1960's it was not a coincidence
that elections became ethnic censuses. The African section, with
its numbers approaching the Indians, had to deal with the possibility
of being forever excluded from the Executive. This is the African
Ethnic Security Dilemma in Guyana.
Democracy also presumes that the State will be managed for all
the people of the country. Those who manage the affairs of the
State have to ensure that they are servants of the people. Hegel
called them the "universal class". If the staffing
of the institutions of the state are in the control of any one
"faction" then this presents another dilemma for democracy.
Typically, the faction that is the majority also controls the
state and in fact this is what produces the actual "tyranny
of the majority". However, if there are circumstances in
which a minority has control of the state institutions, especially
if these include the Armed Forces and the Civil Service and the
Judiciary, then the will of the majority can also be denied,
since the minority would calculate that they have the wherewithal
to challenge the majority violently.
This is the situation in Guyana where the minority African section
has a vast overrepresentation in the key state institutions mentioned,
especially in the Armed Forces, and has used this incumbency
to neutralise the numerical advantage of the Indians. Even though
the latter are a majority under the Westminster system and can
form the Executive after "free-and-fair" elections,
that Executive cannot guarantee stability, especially for their
supporters. Before taking any policy decision, the Indian-supported
PPP Executive has to always take into consideration, whether
the opposition will initiate violence, under cover of their control
of State institutions. At the same time their Indian supporters
are under an omnipresent fear of being physically wiped out by
their African political opponents, whenever the question of national
power is contested. This is the Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma.
Amerindians have remained the most powerless group in Guyana
since their first encounter with Columbus in 1498, even though
everyone acknowledges that they are the original inhabitants
of Guyana, and that their land was forcibly taken away from them.
They were denied contact with the rest of the world, resulting
in one of the starkest instances of underdevelopment and internal
colonialism in the world. Being a small minority nationwide,
if Amerindians go along with the present political rules, they
can never have the experience of Governance of their own affairs.
Their acceptance of their minority status within the majoritarian
political system has destroyed their self-esteem and self sufficiency
will continue to force them to accept the debilitating paternalism
that all Guyanese governments have practiced on them. This is
the Amerindian Ethnic Security Dilemma.
CENTRALISED AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENT
The Paradigm
The Centralised State
The modern state evolved to accommodate
the accumulation of power in the absolute monarchy. It was a
very centralised state. The initial colonization of the "new
world" was established during that same period bracketed
by the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain (1492), Elizabeth
I of England (16..) and Louis IV of France (1780) who could famously
(and without irony) "I am the State". In addition to
inevitable imitation of the centralized model in the "home"
government, the local state was further centralised to facilitate
the regimentation thought needed to exploit the local resources.
The colonial state could be called an "integral" state
one where the controllers of the state and civil society
are the same the state had no autonomy. While analogous
to the struggle by the middle class against the centralised state
in Britain, in the struggle by colonials to obtain a more equitable
distribution of power, the centralised institutions of the local
state were much more extensive, entrenched and recalcitrant.
The Governor could arbitrarily change the rules to buttress colonial
rule at any time he determined they were threatened. Additionally,
the middle and ruling classes of England by and large did not
equate their struggle with the aspirations of the colonials but
posited that the latter needed to be governed firmly for their
own good.
The British had an obsession with the necessity for "sovereignty"
to reside in one single locus in their case their Parliament,
which arose from the historic evolution of their institutions
of state and later accommodated by "theory". The British
reinforced this postulated necessity by a theoretical and official
aversion towards concepts as "Federalism" that would
devolve power or the functions of the Government outwards to
the regions.
The Application to Guyana:
Historical
From the beginning of Guyana's
history c1621, its governance structures were very centralised
and authoritarian - from the Dutch West India Company and the
Berbice Association of Planters respectively, to the Dutch Government.
The latter handed over its colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and
Berbice to Britain in 1803 but on the condition that their legal
and constitutional systems remain intact. These three colonies
were united as one colony British Guiana - in 1831, just
three years before the abolition of slavery. But the unification
generated severe protest, especially in Berbice, to force by
1838, an agreement to administer them as three counties, based
on their historic boundaries. This administrative arrangement
remained in place until 1980.
The British retained the Dutch governing structures but fused
them into a "Combined Court", which consisted of a
Court of Policy and a College of Financial Representatives. While
the Governor had full power and authority, with the advise and
consent of the Court of Policy to make laws for the` colony and
was subject only to the articles of his Royal instructions, he
was checkmated in financial matters by the Planters. This feature
of governance would represent a source of tension between the
Crown and the Planters whenever their interests happened to diverge.
In 1891, the Constitution was amended by the Crown to reduce
the powers of the planters by expanding the franchise of the
locals primarily Coloureds. In 1928, the Constitution was
once again amended, this time to checkmate the burgeoning power
of the local African/Coloured elite. The new Executive Council
gave the Governor great discretionary leeway since even the two
elected members within it were both nominated by the Governor.
The interests of the Home country were never to be challenged.
The best that the elected officials could hope for was to "influence"
the Governor. This insistence and institutionalisation of total
control from the top has remained as a dominant feature of the
local political culture and has even been strengthened by the
successors of the colonial mantle. It remains one of the major
obstacles to a democratic Guyana.
It is a tribute to British certitude (or arrogance) in the rightness
of their institutions (and ways) that once they combined the
three colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice in 1831 into
the unitary state of British Guiana, they never tinkered with
the arrangement. After all if they ruled Scotland, Wales and
Ireland in a unitary framework after their conquests, as "Britain",
why not a mere colony: the only imperative was to facilitate
their ease of control. The administrative centre was Georgetown
and all decisions were made there. Even birth certificates, passports,
etc. necessitated a trip to Georgetown.
The development plans of the British were focused on the needs
of the sugar, bauxite and other expatriate interests: the one
indigenous large-scale industry -rice - was established on marginal
swamp lands by the Indian indentured labourers. Whatever spending
was undertaken were focused on Georgetown and Demerara; the outer
regions of Essequibo, Berbice and the Rupununi and the interior
were progressively underdeveloped. In the modern era all the
light industries, the airport, the major hospitals, all Government
Ministries, Hotels, etc were built in Georgetown and Demerara.
The outlying areas were treated as internal colonies to be used
for the extraction of primary products gold, manganese,
bauxite, su