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Reply to "Wismar contextualized with the 1964 low-intensity tribal war . . . Eusi Kwayana is correct - there is no guilty "RACE""

Django posted:
 

When one look at history of British Guiana, now Guyana for 124 yrs,  [with the introduction East Indians as indentured labor in 1838] Africans and East Indians lived among each other, for that matter all ethnicity were living and bonding together with out any major troubles.In struggles against the Colonial Masters they bond together fighting for their rights.

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Don't peddle Jagan's fantasy that the problem in BG was only class.  The tensions between the two began when indentures (initially mainly Portuguese) together with African and West Indian immigrants arrived in in the colony.  Their presence enabled the planters to find alternate labor when the creole blacks went on strike in 1848. 

The African and West Indian immigrants quickly assimilated into the creole black population so it was the indentures who became suspects.  Tensions with the Portuguese are well documented as were the two anti Portuguese riots reflecting incidents when it was alleged that Portuguese acted violently against black individuals.  The indentures in turn, seeing the low regard that the colonial authorities had for Africans, also despised them in turn.

British Guiana was an extremely polarized colony where skin color, hair texture and religion were used to signal social status with Africans and Indians at the bottom, even though these were the most numerous groups.

Indians arrived in large numbers after that period and by the 1860s they were the dominant labor force in the estates.  The planters played both groups against each other so that both groups could be exploited.

By the early 20th C the BGEIA decided to attempt to make British Guiana, Indian Guiana.  Middle class blacks and coloreds, already marginalized by the colonial structure, panicked when it appeared as if yet another group was organizing to oppress them.  The BGEIA stated boldly that their goal was to make the Indians the largest group in Guyana so that it would be Indo controlled.  They boasted of their plans to make BG into a virtual Indian colony.

If you think that tensions only began in 1962 you are deeply mistaken.  People don't suddenly hate others because some politicians tell them to do so and it is also a fact that in the beginning neither Cheddi nor Burnham were racists, nor did they seek to exploit ethnic fears.  When Burnham left he took Indians with him and ensured that they had prominent roles within his faction of the PPP (which later became the PNC).  Cheddi similarly tried to hold on to blacks like Chase and Eusi.

It was the Indo KKK types, seeing that Indians were the largest bloc, who wanted to achieve the goals of the BGEIA by ensuring that a post independence Guyana would be Indo dominated with blacks relegated to the margins.  So the cries of "apaan jhat" were made to ensure that rural Indians didn't vote for the candidates which Burnham put up (the urban Indos who left the PPP with him and who probably had scant ties to rural Indians).

Calls of apaan jhat generated "kith and kin" as an outnumbered African population feared Indo domination.

The tensions existed before and became open because of ethnic panic about which race was going to replace the colonial administration.

Guyanese must cease this nonsense that "we all got on before Burnham and Cheddi".  I am old enough to know when a man like me would have only worked at Fogarty's, Bookers offices in GT, or in a bank as a watch man. Do you think that blacks liked that?  No they didn't.  And this is why they were determined to ensure that they had control when independence came.

 

FM
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