Since I posted Ravi;s work...let me post something similar by granger. Examine for difference in methodology, conclusions and prescriptions
Here is Granger examining ethnic violence and its origins. Each side sees itself as victims of the other!!!!
Article by David Granger!!!
Hurricane of Protest - The Impact of Civil Violence on African-Guyanese in 1964 - by David Granger
Paper presented at 18th Anniversary Conference of the Pan African Movement (Guyana Branch) Friday 27th Oct. 2006, at City Hall, Georgetown
Traumatisation
During the long era of enslavement in the Guiana colonies, Africans endured extreme forms of violence. Not only was violence inflicted by cruel physical punishment such as flogging, mutilation and torture but also by psychological deprivation through the sudden removal of spouses and children, dissolution of families, disappearance of relatives and friends and unnatural death through exhaustion, epidemic disease or execution.
No scholarly studies have been done to evaluate the impact of such trauma on those who survived. No explanation has been attempted of the adjustments which enslaved persons had to make to survive in a hostile social environment and to coexist with the very perpetrators of violence.
Psychological trauma has been defined as ‘the sudden, uncontrollable disruption of affiliative bonds’ (Marjaana Lindemen). A human being is a biological organism embedded in a social matrix from the moment of birth. Disruption of that social matrix within which affiliative bonds are forged — between parent and child, between siblings and among fellow men and women, and the eruption of hatred and violence — are bound to have serious consequences. Understanding the impact of continuous violence by one class or race against another might lead to identifying the symptoms of the pathology, to recognising its consequences and even to explaining the causes of violence nowadays.
The most serious sustained violence against African-Guyanese in the post-Emancipation period occurred in the pre-Independence period in 1964, during a campaign which its author, Dr Cheddi Jagan, called the ‘Hurricane of Protest.’ Why he chose that name became clear during the course of the year. Although there is much controversy about what happened during that horrible year, it seems certain that the consequences have had a traumatic effect on those who were involved. That violence cast a long, dark shadow over the rest of Guyanese history.
Non-Africans, however, did not have to bear the burden of the legacy of enslavement with all its humiliations, hurts and horrors. For this reason, it is the African-Guyanese community which most needs to be studied to determine whether there has been continuity between their responses to the violence of enslavement and to the violence of the terrorism they endured in the ‘hurricane of protest.’
Mobilisation
Several factors and events precipitated the violence. The proximate cause, however, was Dr Cheddi Jagan’s furious response to the UK government’s decision to amend the constitution of British Guiana to provide for elections to the Legislative Assembly by proportional representation.
This fury ignited the flammable political situation which prevailed in Guyana from the elections of August 1961 in which the main issues were representation and of discrimination. By the early 1960s, the three political parties - the People’s Progressive Party (PPP); People’s National Congress (PNC); and United Force – evidently were not only ethnically based but were also closely allied with labour unions and religious communities. On these bases, almost the entire population was aligned behind these parties and very few persons were perceived to be non-political on the national scene.
The PPP Administration of 1961 was based on the electoral support of about 42.6 per cent of the voters for which it gained 57 per cent of the seats in the Legislative Assembly. On the other hand, the PNC with 41.0 per cent and the UF with 16.3 per cent, together, gained 57.3 per cent of the votes and won only 43 per cent of the seats, a clear case of disproportionate representation.
In the second instance, some of the budgetary measures introduced in 1962, particularly the compulsory savings scheme, and legislative measures introduced in 1963, especially the Labour Relations Bill, were perceived to be discriminatory to the workers and trade unions represented by the two Opposition parties. The result was a political crisis which was resolved in October 1963 when the UK Government decided to introduce a system of proportional representation (PR) to ensure that the Legislative Assembly more accurately reflected the popular will. Although Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham and Peter d’Aguiar signed an agreement for the UK Government to determine how the crisis should be resolved, Dr Jagan renounced the decision once it was given. The ‘Hurricane of protest,’ Dr Jagan declared, was a campaign to reject the UK government’s decision and to prevent the introduction of the PR system.
Polarisation
It could be said that three separate messages were being sent to three separate publics. To the international community, it was a demand for Independence; to the local community, it was a demand for recognition of the Guiana Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU) by the British Guiana Sugar Producers Association (BGSPA); and to the UK Labour Party, it was a demand for the PR system to be withdrawn.
The Jagan Administration attempted to internationalise the controversy by soliciting the intervention of certain foreign governments such as Eric Williams’s Administration in Trinidad and Tobago; Kwame Nkrumah’s Administration in Ghana and Harold Wilson’s (Labour) Administration in the UK and by lobbying newly independent African countries to exert pressure on the United Kingdom and the United Nations. The idea was to create the impression that, by its 1963 ‘award,’ Britain was denying independence to Guyana.
Simultaneous with the initiation of the international campaign, Dr Jagan started intense local operations.
The first was a series of ‘Freedom Rallies’ in various communities which culminated in a ‘Freedom March’ of two columns – one starting at Charity on the Essequibo Coast and the second at Crabwood Creek on the Corentyne Coast. These were synchronised to meet in Georgetown on 9 February. It is in Dr Jagan’s address to that rally that the racial orientation of the ‘Hurricane’ became evident. Here are his words:
Let those who think that they can dominate Georgetown, New Amsterdam and Mackenzie know that these places are not the whole of British Guiana. Let us tell them that we also have strength. We have geographical distribution. There is no doubt that the two main crops of this country are produced by the people in the PPP. Take away rice and you will have starvation in this country…including Georgetown. Take away sugar and what will happen?…Economically and politically we are powerful. Let them note that all three elections we have won every time. Let those who preach and practice the psychology of violence and fear note these facts that since 1953 when we got into power they have tried to make normal government impossible by instigating disturbances and violence and injecting fear in the minds of the people. Those people who do these things must remember that if one side can do it the other side can also do the same. Two sides can play this game… We have been humble and cordial, but it seems that some people have taken humility and cordiality for weakness. Instead of respecting these virtues, these people have inflicted abuse and beat our comrades when they come to Georgetown. Well, comrades, I want to issue a warning to these people. We have pleaded for calmness for a long time, but it appears that these people believe that because we are humble and courteous, we are weak. They have mistaken humility, courtesy and our peaceful intention for weakness. Your demonstration today shows that we have strength also.”
The ethnic messages which Cheddi Jagan sent to his supporters were camouflaged by the presentation of ethnic images, intended to conceal the campaign’s ulterior motives.
Although it was clear that the PPP was fundamentally an Indian party, just as the PNC was African, and the UF was Portuguese and Amerindian, Africans in the PPP were given exaggerated prominence. For example, Deputy Premier Brindley Benn was dispatched to London, Cairo and elsewhere to lobby British and African support for the campaign. Vernon Nunes, Minister of Education, was sent to represent the Government at the Tanganyika Independence celebrations and to lobby African representatives there; Gladstone Wilson, Minister of Transport, was sent to the Independence celebrations in Malawi and to seek the support of Commonwealth African countries.
Similarly, it was Thelma Reece who was placed in front of the contingent of marchers from Charity, and Michael Forde was placed in front of the contingent from Crabwood Creek, during the Freedom March, although it was evident that most of the marchers were not African.
Previously, it was at the home of Eric Gilbert, in Carmichael Street, that a large cache of weapons had been found. And, on 13 June after the murder of eight members of the Abraham family, African members of the PPP were prominent among those arrested and held without trial under Emergency Regulations at Sibley Hall, Mazaruni. In all, 32 members of the PPP were detained and these included Neville Annibourne, Brindley Benn, Remus George, Joseph Gibbs, Eric Gilbert, Maurice Herbert, Desmond Shepherd and Frank Wills.
On the other hand, Africans in the PNC expected some direction and protection when their families and their communities came under attack. In a famous apocryphal exchange, Forbes Burnham is reported to have told African victims of violence on the West Demerara, “Tek lil licks but not las’ lick.”
Most important, however, was the emergence of the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), arguably the most influential African organisation in Guyanese history. The role of its leader Eusi Kwayana (then known as Sydney King) was a major moderating influence. Having been a Minister and member of PPP, he understood Dr Jagan’s personality and was not easily fooled by the argumentation and rationalisation behind the violence. His commentary is recorded in an essay entitled Genocide in Guyana.
As early as April, realising the murderous nature of the violence on the West Demerara, Kwayana called on the PPP Administration to declare a state of emergency and to deploy the security forces to protect Africans who were outnumbered there by three to one. His ‘vigil’ outside of Government House, however, failed to persuade either the Governor, Richard Luyt or the Premier, Cheddi Jagan. Africans were left largely to fend for themselves.
Provocation
Simultaneous with the ‘Freedom March’ in February, agitation started on the sugar plantations, spearheaded by the Guiana Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU) which demanded representation for sugar workers from the British Guiana Sugar Producers Association (BGSPA) in place of the Manpower Citizens Association (MPCA), the recognised union at that time.
The strike in the sugar industry seemed to have little to do either with the demand for the grant of Independence or the introduction of the proposed proportional representation (PR) electoral system, but the motivation soon became apparent. It was made clear that the ‘Sandys Plan’ had to be stopped and party members were made to understand that in order to do so they would be called upon “to make sacrifices on a scale and to a degree never required of them before.” In its analysis of the ‘Hurricane’, the US Government concluded:
“The strategy decided upon was to create sufficient chaos so that an election would be impossible and, at the same time, to push a demand for immediate independence so that either the British would give in and grant independence, or a successful revolution could proclaim independence. The campaign was launched with a strike by a government-sponsored scab sugarcane workers’ union. The union was not recognised by either the British Guiana Trades Union Council nor by the employers; it had been created because the PPP had been entirely unsuccessful in its attempts to gain control of the legitimate union. However, this strike was really only an excuse for chaos. It led to some 200 deaths, hundreds of injured, and millions of dollars of damage to cane fields, factories, houses, stores.But the worst crime of all was that the PPP’s campaign increased and crystallised the racial conflict in British Guiana to the point that in villages of mixed population, the Africans packed up and moved to African-controlled areas for protection, and the East Indians left for Indian-controlled villages. Thus, the supreme accomplishment of Jagan and his Communists had been the destruction of an inter-racial amity constructed during a period of some 200 years.”
Organisation
The lethal character of the ‘Hurricane’ was reinforced by its organisational structure and the supply of trained recruits and weapons. In this regard, the Progressive Youth Organisation (PYO), the youth arm of the PPP, was held to be largely responsible. By the BGTUC’s account:
In 1962 alone, at least 110 members of the PYO were sent off to Communist countries for training, mainly to Cuba. More than 200 are known to have gone to Cuba altogether. Training schools have been established in British Guiana, the instructors being Cubans, in some cases, and Cuban-trained or Soviet-trained PYO members.
Training in terrorism was supported with weapons. At the height of the ‘Hurricane’, a huge cache of submachine guns and ammunition was found by the police on 27 April in Triumph Village, on the East Coast. The nature of the violence itself was frightening. At the start of the GAWU strike in February, Europeans were not targeted except for some arson on the plantations. Next, Indian workers who refused to stop working were intimidated by having the tyres of their bicycles slashed and their houses stoned. But, for most of the campaign, murderous violence was directed at Africans.
The first person to be murdered in Cheddi Jagan’s ‘Hurricane of Protest’ was Edgar Munroe, an African from Manchester Village, Corentyne; he was killed at Tain when the ‘Phantom’ gang threw a bomb into a lorry transporting workers from Manchester to Albion on 4 March 1964. Thereafter, there were relentless attacks against Africans.
Escalation
It soon became evident that the violence had nothing to do with union recognition or Independence. For example, unprovoked attacks were directed against Africans in Buxton Village which did not have a population of sugar workers who could be blamed for breaking the strike. When the ‘Hurricane’ hit Buxton, 80 per cent of its population were African and 20 per cent Indian.
Buxton was chosen as a target because it was traditionally seen as the heart of the African heartland, the base of Eusi Kwayana who was Jagan’s most articulate critic, and a leader of ASCRIA. Cheddi Jagan’s decision to attack Buxton with the intention of embroiling both a prominent African village and a prominent African leader was to have grave consequences up to the present day. On 21 May, the ‘Phantom’ gang shot dead George and Clothilde Sealey, elderly African villagers, aback Buxton. According to Kwayana’s account, “The bodies bore signs of mutilation. The woman appeared to have been raped. Immediately, the news spread and Indians began fleeing from Buxton.” The Sealeys were buried on 25 May.
Soon after, an African boy of Buxton, Joseph Porter, was killed at Enmore after being attacked by a crowd of over a hundred East Indians. According to Kwayana’s contemporary account, “To make sure of Porter’s death his head was bashed in with an axe. It was then that the Buxtonians seemed to have decided on reprisals in like kind and the first Indian deaths in Buxton took place. A few weeks after, the Indian snipers staged a repeat performance by killing three Buxton farmers including a boy.” Africans at Mackenzie became so inflamed by the Sealeys’ murder that they turned on the Indian residents of Wismar on 25 May, killing two. Women were raped, property was destroyed and much of the population was evacuated by the Government.
The ‘Phantom’ gangs then took their violence to Perth, Mahaicony. Eustace Waldron, son of the pastor of the Pilgrim Holiness Church, and Joseph Nedd were machine-gunned on 23 June. How could these attacks on innocent Africans be explained by the demand for union recognition or the struggle for independence?
Organisation
The ‘Hurricane’, it seemed, was clearly a crime against humanity. Murder and other inhumane acts were systematically committed against a civilian population, on political and racial grounds, without decisive efforts by its own government to protect that population and prevent those acts. The daily newspapers of that year comprise a chilling chronicle of the ‘Hurricane’:
5 March: Edgar Munroe of Manchester killed by bomb.
22 March: Granville Browne of Leonora chopped to death.
24 April: Eustace Benjamin of Stewartville beaten to death and Norman Gardener of Uitvlugt had his throat slashed.
12 May: Jocelyn John of Uitvlugt shot dead.
23 May: George and Clothilde Sealey of Buxton-Friendship mutilated and murdered.
25 May: Edward Daziel of Vergenoegen shot dead.
26 May: Alfred Seales of Stewartville beaten to death.
1 June: Cyrus Britton of No 12 Village, West Coast Berbice, chopped to death.
15 June: Edward Grannum of Leonora and Joseph Porter of Buxton beaten to death.
22 June: Alvin Nunes of Golden Grove shot dead.
24 June: Eustace Waldron and Joseph Nedd of Perth Village shot dead.
26 June: Charles Miggins of Leonora shot dead.
28 June: Arthur Greene of Hague shot dead.
30 June: Cecil Wilkinson, 12 years, hacked to death.
4 July: Leonard Cummings, 14 years, Edgar Abrams, and Alphonso David shot dead aback Buxton.
7 July: Launch blown up at Hurudaia killing 43.
10 July: George Halley, Sydney Halley, Royston Bourne and Kenneth Gibbons of Strath Campbell shot dead and ‘disappeared.’ Reginald Blake, Beryl Weslie, Joseph Campbell, Allan Griffith and Burchell Thompson of Perth ‘disappeared’ since 27 June.
15 July: Frank Perry killed in Enmore.
22 July: Cecil Adams killed in Triumph.
27 July: Edgar Stanford of Mara Point shot dead.
25 August: Vivian McKenzie and William Woodroof shot dead on the Abary River.
How could relatives and friends of these victims cope with the awful news? How could children cope with the loss of loved ones and parents? How could a nation be constructed on a heap of corpses?
Dissociation
Cheddi Jagan’s ‘Hurricane of Protest’ was the worst security catastrophe in the history of this country. The official police record of the number of persons killed is stated as 176, but this is a gross underestimation. The actual number of Africans killed is unknown principally because many simply ‘disappeared’ without a trace.
A generation has passed dissembling, deceiving and disguising the truth. But even the truth will take us only so far. Recrimination is not a plan for what must happen next. Decisions need to be made about how the trauma caused by the violence could be cured; how the damage caused by our poisoned ethnic relations could be corrected; and how the task of nation-building could be resumed.
Before that happens, however, questions still need to be answered. African-Guyanese must reconsider how their attitudes to violent death, from the time of enslavement, have been influenced by their experiences during the ‘Hurricane’. The facts are that no commission of inquiry was ever conducted into the atrocities meant, as a result, that no accurate calculation was made of the lives lost. Except for the Hurudaia martyrs, no commemoration seems to be held for the innocent victims of the atrocities and no compensation has been given, especially to the bereaved children.
In the African-Guyanese community, bonds of kinship and friendship were ruptured; homes and farms were lost through ethnic-cleansing; children became homeless, jobless orphans and the tranquility of rural life was shattered. It would have been impossible for those who were exposed to these events not to have suffered in some way. Perhaps that can best be explained by the work of the French psychologist and neurologist, Pierre Janet, who studied the effects of psychological trauma on mental health. Janet described the condition of ‘dissociation’ as:
…a process whereby feelings and memories relating to frightening experiences are split off from conscious awareness and voluntary control to show up later as ‘pathological automatisms.’ The splitting off occurs because the traumatic experience engenders in the victim such intense emotions that these cannot be stored into existing schemas of the brain, but have to be split up and their component parts organised on a non-linguistic level in the form of somatic sensations, behaviour re-enactments, nightmares and flashbacks.
Perhaps, some of the violence so evident in recent years is a nightmarish flashback to the violence of 1964. It is evident that the legacy of the deadly depredations of the ‘Hurricane’ might have shown up in the murderous elimination of young people by the homicidal’ Phantom’ gangs’ of the new millennium.
The challenge today is to understand the nature of the trauma and the pathology of dissociation that Africans have suffered. With that understanding, the essential social matrix of families can be reconstructed and a fresh attempt made to rebuild communities in a country not of ‘we’ and ‘them’ but one in which children of all races could grow up without violence.
Selected bibliography
Books and monographs
British Guiana Trades Union Council, The Communist Martyr Makers. The Account of the Struggle for Free Trade Unionism in British Guiana in 1964. Georgetown, n.d.
Craig, Susan (ed.) Contemporary Caribbean. A Sociological Reader Vol. 11, Port of Spain, 1982.
Despres, Leo A. Cultural Pluralism and Nationalist politics in British Guiana. Chicago: Rand, McNally & Company, 1967.
Feierabend, Ivo K., et al (eds.), Anger, Violence and Politics. Theories and Research. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1972.
Glasgow, Roy Arthur: Guyana. Race and Politics among Africans and East Indians. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970.
Government of Guyana, Report of the Wismar, Christianburg and Mackenzie Commission, 1965.
Green, Hamilton: From Pain to Peace. Guyana, 1953-1964. Georgetown: Tropical Airways Inc., 1987.
Greene, J E. Race vs Politics in Guyana: Political Cleavages and Political Mobilisation in the 1968 General Election. Mona: ISER, 1974.
Jagan, Cheddi: The West on Trial. The Fight for Guyana’s Freedom. Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1972.
King, Sydney (Eusi Kwayana). Next Witness. An Appeal to World Opinion. Orig. pub. 1962. Reprint. Georgetown: Free Press, 1999.
___________________________. Genocide in Guyana. Mimeo. College of Social Sciences, University of Puerto Rico, 1965.
Mars, Perry. ‘The Significance of the Disturbances, 1962-1964’, History Gazette No. 70, July 1994.
Premdas, Ralph R. Ethnic Conflict and Development. The Case of Guyana. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1995.
Simms, Peter. Trouble in Guyana. People, Personalities, Politics. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1966.
Thakur, Andra P. Guyana. The Politics of Race and Class: 1953 –1964. Edmonton: University of Alberta, 1973.
Newspapers and newsmagazines
Daily Chronicle, 1964.
Evening Post, 1964.
Guiana Times, Vol. 13, No 1, 1964.
Guyana Year Book, 1965.
Mirror, 1964.
New Nation, 1964.