Part One examined reasons for racial problems in multiethnic societies with a colonial experience, and whether such problems emanate from genetic makeup. Part Two focused on a theoretical framework to explain how ethnic conflict happens, and  Part Three addressed the elements of this framework, starting with the issue of ethnic dominance, vis-à-vis class status.
Today’s Perspectives will examine the issue of ethnic security as another element in this framework, beginning with the use of the historical route to understand how the issue of ethnic security emerged on the Guyanese radar.

THROUGHOUT the colonial epoch, the political systems and social relations in the multiethnic societies of Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago (T&T), and Suriname, countries with fairly similar demographics, were the product of constant power play between the dominant White group and the local ethnic groups; providing the people in the post-Independence era with a political legacy of a persisting power struggle characteristic of an evolving multiethnic society.

White colonialists exerted control through structuring British Guiana (now Guyana) along ethnic lines, vis-à-vis demarcating differences between Indians, Africans, and other groups. Departure of these colonialists, nevertheless, created a power vacuum for which the local citizens, who were mainly Indians and Africans, competed.

‘White colonialists exerted control through structuring British Guiana (now Guyana) along ethnic lines, vis-à-vis demarcating differences between Indians, Africans, and other groups. Departure of these colonialists, nevertheless, created a power vacuum for which the local citizens, who were mainly Indians and Africans, competed’

All the same, in the Colonial age, imposition of the beliefs, values, norms, and rules of the divisive ethnic structure regulated the competition and struggle to occupy and claim this power vacuum. For instance, the disruptive ethnic structure between Africans and Indians, among its other evil ruminations and productions, restricted the marketing of African products to sustain African dependence; it used African taxes to subsidize Indian immigration, in order to maintain a cheap labour rate; and it sustained a ‘total institution’ structure for Indians on the sugar plantations that resulted in minimal interactions between Indians and Africans. The form and content of this divisive ethnic structure, indeed, were fertile ingredients for birthing ethnic security problems.

During the European conquest, both, Africans, Indians, and other ethnic groups projected extreme deference to Whites, complied with cultural imperialism vis-à-vis the dominance of European beliefs, values, rules, laws, and sanctions. Such undue deference had its price, for it enabled the ethnic groups to view their own cultural make-up as inferior to White culture.

In the Colonial period, Whites controlled the legal-political stage, a prerequisite to sustain their imperialist exploitation as the dominant group. Whites neutralized and mediated relations among the subordinate locals (used in this way throughout the paper). And these locals, intentionally or not, interacted and perceived this colonial society as if it were a nation.  Gerth and Mills (1977:176) reported that Weber saw the nation as “…a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own.”

Africans, Indians, and other groups held the same notion of nation as a community of sentiment as that of the Whites; that is, many locals supported the values of cultural imperialism. They participated and complied with this framework quite foreign to their own value system. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that there were Africans and Indians who rejected this White value system. Effectively, the Whites’ dominant values formed part of their concept of a ‘nation’, toward which many in the subordinate groups displayed compliance and deference to White beliefs and values; in fact, many of them unhappily complied.

Whites unilaterally set themselves up as a nation, and created a state to provide for the legitimate use of force, in order to uphold their nationhood and power interests. Even though locals subscribed to this White nation, the White colonial culture excluded them from being part of this nation. Their cultural make-up was not an element in the Whites’ concept of nation. Hence, the local ethnics were not a stable component of the state, as the White group used the state as an instrument of dominance against them.

Indeed, in the colonial epoch, the locals were ‘outsiders’ in a society that they helped to build. At any rate, the departure of Whites from Guyana destroyed the mediating White force among the subordinate ethnic groups; nevertheless, we should know that it was a mediation that culminated in Whites as the sole beneficiary. The White colonialists’ exit meant that there was no nation to which the locals could then subscribe, or even accept. Paradoxically, the colonial exit provided for the local citizens a legacy of a persisting colonial nation and a colonial culture; ensuring that many of this country’s local citizens would persist in showing obeisance to the White value system.

For these reasons, the issue of ethnic security among Indians, Africans, and other ethnic groups evolved long before the dissipation and demise of the White colonial central authority; nonetheless, problems of ethnic security became pronounced circa the time of the colonialists’ exit.

The White central authority was the neutral mediating force among Africans, Indians, and other ethnic groups during imperialist rule that kept the lid on the repercussions of ethnic security problems. Nevertheless, the colonialists’ exit created a political power vacuum for which Guyana’s local groups had to compete.

Incidentally, ethnic security problems also could ensue where there is a perception, rightly or wrongly, among some locals that one group captured the crown of the central political authority and now has become the de facto dominant ruling group against them. Nonetheless, in both situations, people begin to express apprehensions of each other, as no neutralizing colonial authority is now in force to provide protection among them (Tang 2005). But what if the perception is inaccurate? Part 5 will address the issue of ethnic security vis-à-vis ethnic conflict in the modern period.

*Misir, Prem (ed.). 2006. Ethnic Cleavage and Closure in the Caribbean Diaspora: Essays on Race, Ethnicity and Class. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press. (With revisions.)