Georgetown, the ‘Garden City’ of British Guiana

But where was it located?

OUR Georgetown is famous as the ‘Garden City’; a reputation that was once justified by the deliberate layout of certain streets coupled by the natural decor of trees that, with season, would cast a carpet of flowers of tantalising colours along the avenues where once picturesque canals flowed. Indeed, to the eye of the visiting European exploring this enigmatic British colony that was also called the ‘Emerald Mansion’ and the ‘Magnificent Province’. Old Georgetown was indeed a ‘Garden City’ because that visitor would be entertained along the considered pleasant areas with night streets guarded by beat duty policemen. The Garden City actually was bordered West to East by old Stabroek to Vlissengen Road, then North to South by the sea wall to Brickdam with some accommodation of Hadfield Street. The rest of old Georgetown was not the physical showcase considered to depict the national ethos. They were the congested, disgruntled wards with their unpretentious subcultures that embodied the more populous humanity that bordered the invisible ramparts of the Garden City, with its overpowering pretentions, criteria and bigotry, controlled at times behind a facade that only with time, if you were new to this world, you would gradually understand the secret doctrines that propped up a deep self-loathing with a frivolous self-esteem.

We have not moved very far in behaviour patterns, though the actors and themes have changed. My matriarchal grandfather lived in that time and wrote a poem describing the Georgetown of his day: “Show you how to make a living, on the minimum of work. And, the maximum of bluff and make beliefs, on your father’s reputation, and the fat of social ties, while the law of compensation shouts … a thief!” The world of Georgetown was tattooed with symbols of social standing created against the background of a struggle ‘to be’ according to the norms of survival, in a Colony that didn’t have much to distribute by way of economic and social wellbeing. Bear in mind that the principle battle fought for the creation of a functional city was between the African and its kindred population and the Euro-colonial merchant class.

This conflict had begun in sincerity from 1834. But this as not by any means of a colony developed doctrine; this was the age of a pseudo-academia entitled ‘Scientific Racism’, not considered pseudo in its time. This was the age of Thomas Malthus, Sir Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer, Euden Fisher and others who pronounced genocide against the poor across race, then initiated the racist ideas that Hitler would apply. I cannot expand on the macabre details of these mentioned names and their colleagues and converts in the context of this article, except to say that the philosophy was to justify social neglect on the pretext of unworthiness, practice expanded euthanasia and fix social strata into unprotesting casts.
The neglected and poor in no nation did not remain static, nor did any colonising nation embrace Scientific Racism in its totality. But the nuances were encouraged in the interest of social control and it worked in many cases, for example, that Historian Professor Nbhusi Kimani wrote in the History Gazette December 1990 that both the B.G East Indian Association and the L.C.P League of Coloured People of the 1940-50’s were dominated with narrow middle-class interests and offered no social collective approach.

The Garden City was like any garden, populated by graceful colours, amidst thorns, weeds and insects each with its own mating or predator objectives. It is imperative that we capture our Garden City in the true context of its evolution, to construct the quest ‘To be’ of its peoples and the realities surrounding its changing imagery.

Today, we are constructing ugly concrete pillboxes to replace the elegant architecture that we like to call Victorian, which no doubt has influences from the architecture of the Benin Kingdom of West Africa when the two are compared. That wooden architecture or clay bricks is far healthier to our climate than concrete is well understood. When it comes to the vanishing of the street canals, I learned an important lesson from the Michael Ayre book THE CARIBBEAN IN SEPIA: “When viewed through the eyes of the camera, old Georgetown gave the appearance of serenity and grace, an Arcadian paradise in the tropics. Missing were the whistling and croaks of the frogs and the smells. Since the canals were heavily polluted, they reeked.” With no slave labour to clean the canals, perhaps a cash-strapped Mayor in the early 1900s decided to have the canals turned into roads instead?

The wards that were not befitting the landscape of the Garden City were by no means impotent. Though the Masquerade band is not a Georgetown invention, but rather an African mystical celebration, it is truly Guyanese with prominent participants from every ethnicity. But the Centipede band, a variation of the masquerade band with violent manifestations, as they locked off areas of ‘GT’ and fought off intrusive groups, with fish hook attached to batons, barber razors, and stick fighting ‘Knock Sticks,’ with names like Freddy Bandula, Goblet Joe, Putagee Tunus ‘from out of Charlestown emerged the ballads of Bill Rogers, a national treasure. No doubt the celebration of praise to King O’kumfa (Cumfa dance pageant) held close to the then pristine Sussex Trench in the 1930s. That also included Kumfa Mary who held court during the festival and gave birth decades later to the recent celebrated ‘Little Jones Band.’

The Garden City is much more than any simple interpretation of its name. It is history and adventure, like the history of the enigmatic preacher ‘Brother Paddy’ who held his dramatic Church sessions on the Parade ground and whose exploits sound very familiar to a character in the novel Miguel Street by the late V.S. Naipaul who spent time in Guyana.

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