PRE & POST INDEPENDENCE HUMAN FOUNDATIONS 

Unchronicled and unspoken of

THE critical misuse of time through which any nation’s elders can inflict mental and spiritual injury on the future is to allow its present youth to find its way untutored. They need to be tutored not in a didactic way that will arouse retaliation, but be informed in the practical and engaging methodology that can teach, inform and engage the mystery of the hidden memory that doesn’t need a psychic to unwind. Some of the work has been done, but then storage in books, while much exist in the memories of elders, who remain unengaged to tap into a reservoir that can clarify negative external definitions of who we are, and what we have achieved.

I recently spoke to Oscar Clarke, politician and unpretentious elder, once again and learned more things I didn’t know, regretting not having the means to record his take on the biography of his social and political times. Most of what is recorded does not exist in forms that can stimulate young minds, informing them about themselves across important timelines. This deficiency occurred post-independence. There was no nexus with the then to now in the scenarios presented to young readers, though much of the work that evolved out of the curriculum development in the 70s was excellently done, yet its content related nothing about the periods of human development that have resulted in where we were mentally, spiritually and physically. That I can analyse this, is indicative of one solemn reality, that an atmosphere of being Guyanese, post-independence, led us reluctantly from colonialism into the discovery of all that we were, and I say this on very precise grounds.
Of the political leaders that evolved pre-independence, only Burnham sufficiently understood the cultural ethos of our national strengths, weaknesses and fears, to recognise without the initiative of a ‘Stevedore Scheme’ that the children of stevedores would not own property, and mentally expand their minds into a broader sense of being. I am not a political party person, but I did meet Cheddi Jagan in 1990-1. I had lived my formative years in a provincial coastal community and witnessed the sometimes frightening core understanding of many of his constituency and I understood its majority isolated perspective. I knew nothing much about, nor have I ever met Peter d’Aguiar, but had insights through my godfather with whom I grew at Mahaica, and who was a supporter of D’Aguiar; this man and his strong colonial status quo preferences.

Forbes Burnham stared into the volatile mists of the Idol of our self-loathing survivalist sub-culture of misery and contentment, and struggled with us. He by some means understood what we didn’t know about ourselves, our abilities and potential, and devised systems to fast-start that awakening towards realisation. I can remember though still in school, when the South Ruimveldt housing scheme was being proposed, people living in congested yards with five cottages and semi-cottages with sewage problems were complaining about their disappointment with Burnham, because, as it was said: “He carrying we fuh live in de bush.” We can today talk of bridging the coast with the highway through new roads and townships and it would be normal– as normal as when the following generation came to understand South and North Ruimveldt as progressive.

One of the greatest achievements of the early post-independence era was the emptying of the ‘Big yards’ of Georgetown. Few commentators understand the damning significance of those structures to the populations entrapped in them; populations that constituted a little over a third of the city population up to independence. Work and jobs were always a challenge; then most jobs were manual and semi-skilled.Tthe weight of the stress was housing. This was a bigger headache; the reality is that conspicuous consumption was not an imposing creature on life, as it is, in the context of today, but Burnham seemed to understand that the days of ‘labour wuk’ was gradually coming to a close. Thus, he embraced the need for mass training of skills, also intercepting the culture of deploying of young men specifically into odds-and-ends jobs, to help out the home and result with them as skill-less young adults in the swift years that followed, with dysfunctional lives.

The Guyana Youth Corps, the Pioneer Cooperative groups and the Guyana National Service that followed were brazen skills-training programme initiatives that worked to fill the mass vacuum of functional skills that existed up to 1966. These programmes had expanded across all necessary areas, from the maintenance of heavy-duty equipment, artisans, to publishing, the cooperative groups taught practical, on the job business training. But the system was working with a colonial public service (which has not greatly changed). I was the secretary of KAYS (the Kuru Kuru Agro-Industrial Young Settlers coop). I was suspended for assault and more seriously, selling produce outside of the coop system — something the manager Rigby Dover told us we could do because the other co-ops were difficult paymasters. But the public servant who took over from Mr Basil Armstrong didn’t have a memo telling him so. Hence, I was suspended and never returned as, in a fit of anger, I might have told him something unpleasant. But it was the thinking that mattered; Burnham was ahead of his time when he told us that rice flour was healthier, that coconut milk and coconut oil were better; when he hosted CARIFESTA in 1972, recognised that Culture and the Arts would play an important part of national development; built a National Cultural Centre; constructed the airport and named it in respect to the indigenous people, ‘Timehri’; allowed the Burrowes School of Art, the National School of Dance and the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology to blossom and bear fruit.

In my play Legend of the Silk Cotton Tree, Burnham was the lawyer who represented ‘Kate Fullington’ (which he did in real life) the second woman to be hung in Guyana, but he was deceptively edited out of the script. He, however, declared religious freedom in Guyana, and his political opponents couldn’t even credit him with this; they concocted some empty, divisive theme why he had callously done it. Luckily, my father was old enough to remember the persecution of the Jordanites, and the elder who was imprisoned pre-WWII for predicting the fall of the British Empire and the atrocities that were encouraged against him while in prison, Burnham had known of this incident and others.

The administration that had inherited the colonial economy (the six sisters) realised that these core industries could not sustain a consistent employment demand; thus, they sought to encourage the expansion into manufacturing, the creation of Guyanese ‘Brands’ GRL, GRECO, the still incredible Tapir, Sunbell products, Mr Mod & Windsor shirts, all Guyanese initiatives that stumbled when the oil crisis hit the non-producing ‘Oil World’ 1973-79, coupled with the pressures brought on by consequent Venezuelan administrations, to inhibit our growth.

Knowing what was, takes away the complexes of any inhibitions about our ability to face the future; we are lucky today to have an administration that understands that foundation and will pursue a modified philosophy, suitable to this age, and shall resist the temerity of the barbarians at the gate.

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