seignet posted:..Never hoped to enligthen you. U r a product of what ails Guyana-pure racists and racism. Since 1838, your people considered us a threat. .
I don't know if you know this but NONE of the people who you are addressing here are black. Two of predominantly Indian ancestry and the other with significant Indian ancestry. NONE being black identified.
These folks understand that there is no uniquely racist group in Guyana. Both Indians and Africans (as well as mixed) were pawns in a divide and rule game by the British. Both were threatened by the other and these attitudes still fester in Guyana. That you blame Africans only for this attitudes and don't attribute similar behavior on the Indians just goes to show the racist that you indeed are.
So let me fill you in. In 1842 former slaves went on a variety of strikes and because severe labor shortages developed the planters were forced to capitulate to their demands. They attempted the same in 1848 but by then the planters had diversified their sources of labor. They had indentures from Africa and Madeira as well as some Chinese and Indians. They also had migrant workers from Barbados. The presence of these meant that the strikes failed.
By the 1860s the main source of labor were indentures from India. The Portuguese and Chinese quickly left the cane fields and the African indentures and the Caribbean migrants assimilated into the Afro Guyanese population. The planters wanted to keep Indians separate from the rest of the population by forcing them to remain on the estates and punishing them if they strayed. This was to prevent cross ethnic alliances between the Indian and the African/mixed populations.
The planters conspired to ensure that the black villages failed by over taxing them, preventing villagers from acquiring more lands, draining estate water onto these villagers lands and not cooperating with the villagers to ensure that proper drainage and irrigation systems were in place. So the former slaves were forced to go back and seek work on the estates. The fact that many were forced to rent lands from the estates to farm increased the leverage of the planters to force these people back to estate work.
By the 1880s the Indian indentures had ceased to be the naïve and docile people they initially were and conducted the same strikes to fight for the same rights that the former slaves did 40 years before. This time their efforts were undermined by village labor and by migrants from Barbados. This use of black scabs to undermine Indian workers continued well into the late 50s and even the early 60s. In 1964 the PYO slaughtered some of these workers who were used to break the GAWU strike.
I hope that you are getting the point here. As a starving and impoverished peoples, desperate for the need to generate a livelihood and having limited bargaining power with the colonial overlords BOTH were used as a threat against each other. BOTH developed a lack of trust in the other. And as independence began to approach BOTH feared being governed by the other.
Every claim that you make against the African can be equally made against the Indian.
The biggest difference was in identity. Africans being more ethnically inclusive with fewer cultural and social boundaries to distinguish the "insider" from the "outsider". So a dougla is a black man if he wishes to be. What he will never be is an Indian. Everybody in Guyana knows who an Indian is. What people debate about is at what point does someone become an African.
And I cite Trotman who is mixed identified and the lighter skin colored Granger who self identifies as black. And then there is Benschop who is mixed one day and black the next. So Africans have a more open view of ethnicity and more easily incorporate others, leading to accusations of Indian "clannishness".
The fact is that it is easier for Afro Guyanese to identify a narrative of African racism towards Indians and then to condemn these behavior is illustrative of these attitudes. Eusi, David Hinds, Andaiye and Walter Rodney all at various times condemned African racist attitudes towards Indians. They remain very well respected among Afro Guyanese.
On the other hand Indians like Chris Ram have condemned Indian attitude racist attitudes towards Africans and have become persona non grata within large segments of the Indian population. D2 tried to explore these attitudes on TWO occasions in 2015 and was roundly condemned as an Indian hater.
On the other hand virtually every single black identified poster, including the many who have left disgusted by the anti black bigotry that festers on GNI, are quite open and willing to discuss African racism. It takes nothing away from us to admit that Burnham fostered African insecurity towards Indians to oppress the latter and to punish them for being PPP supporters.
On GNI the racism directed towards blacks by the Indo KKK is dwarfed by the insults directed towards non racist Indians by the Indo KKK. All kinds of vulgarity is directed towards them, the most recent insult being to accuse them of being black baigan lovers, filled with emasculating homoerotic imagery.
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