I find myself sitting next to Mike Atherton as the England cricket team crowds on to a small plane leaving Guyana for the next Test in Barbados. He is reading the memoirs of Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from Chile.
Atherton is also impressively familiar with Guyanese literature and mentions the recent death of Martin Carter, Guyana’s best-known poet. Clearly, he is more knowledgeable about the region’s literature than I am about cricket. All I know is that England just lost and he didn’t score, but I am too polite to mention it so we talk about books and about Guyana.
Despite having been warmly greeted by the president and the joyful cacophony of steel bands, he is aware that the match could have been cancelled because of the violent political and racial turmoil that followed elections in December.
With play about to begin at Bourda, protesters were flinging stones at President Janet Jagan’s car at the state opening of parliament. A visiting Caribbean Community Secretariat (Caricom) dignitary shook his head in dismay.
I had come to report on these continuing disturbances, returning a few weeks earlier to the capital Georgetown, a sweltering city of beyond-redemption, dilapidated white wooden colonial buildings, tall palm trees, clutters of unambitious shops and wide, once handsome streets whose dry grass verges are dissected by stagnant canals.
The country was Britain’s only colony in South America. It hangs in a limbo, neither part of Latin America nor one of the Caribbean islands. Most of the population lives along a narrow strip of Atlantic coast, on reclaimed swampy land below sea-level.
The vast hinterland of rainforest and savannah is where most of the ”Amerindians”, who make up 5% of the population, live and where coastlanders rarely venture. The country is in the grip of El Nio, causing a prolonged period of scorching drought. News escapes from here about as often as light from a black hole.
”They voted tribe again,” says a despairing friend. The two main political parties are the ruling People’s Progressive Party (PPP), whose members are mainly the Indo-Guyanese descendants of indentured labourers recruited from the Indian subcontinent after slavery, and the People’s National Congress, mainly Afro-Guyanese. Although both parties deny such an agenda, the danger is that the political struggle will ignite a racial one. Indo-Guyanese slightly outnumber Afro-Guyanese.
Jagan is the widow of Cheddi, the East Indian who led the PPP for more than 40 years and was noted for his part in the independence struggles of the Fifties.
The surprising trajectory of her life has taken this Chicago-born Jewish woman from being a student nurse in the United States to being the elderly leader of an under-populated country.
Opponents still contest her right to office. The proportional representation system means that individuals are not directly voted in by the electorate but are appointed by the party. The election was a fiasco, starting with a reasonably orderly poll on December 15 and descending rapidly into a quicksand of incompetence, confusion, suspicion and allegations of corruption. Guyana has a history of rigged elections. Results were announced, then contradicted, changed or denied.
A member of the elections commission, which organised the electoral process, described ”a growing sense of siege in the city” and admitted a ”total breakdown in the system”. Daily protests by the People’s National Congress were followed by looting and violence. With an electorate of about 460 000, it took two weeks before the final count was in. Meanwhile, banks closed, shops were boarded up.
Protesters slashed at ”white dolly” effigies of Jagan (she is white) with machetes, paraded coffins and conducted obeah (similar to voodoo) rituals outside state house with knives, candles and potions. East Indian shops were raided. Several women were attacked and stripped in the ma rket place.
The swearing in of the president was rushed through secretly and hugger-mugger as the opposition applied for a court order to prevent it. A few hours later, in the middle of the official ceremony to present her with the instruments of office, the preside nt was served with a writ by a high court marshal which she nonchalantly flung over her shoulder in full view of the television cameras.
The ensuing huge demonstration was tear-gassed. Marches were banned. An even larger illegal demonstration took place. The city was paralysed. Business confidence dived. The giant Canadian electricity company SaskPower got cold feet and pulled out of the country, which teetered on the edge of total breakdown.
Finally, Caricom, the region’s common market, sent in a rescue mission of three statesmen to broker an uneasy peace between the warring parties.
The interim report on the elections by the Commonwealth observer team refrained, like a benevolent aunt, from mentioning the racism institutionalised in the history of the two main political parties.
Guyana has always had to pedal hard to remain in the same place. I remember some of the last cryptic words of Carter – ”Swamp want ‘e land back” – implying the futility of human struggle against the implacable forces of nature in these parts.
I go to interview Jagan. The office of the president consists of a series of neatly painted, barrack-like wooden buildings behind a high wire fence. The president rises to greet me. She is a white-haired, unpretentious, informal woman who still retains her American accent. There is a pleasantly brisk matter-of-factness about her. She could be the headmistress of a select girls’ school.
I ask her how she feels about the white dollies brandished in the protests. ”I find any sort of racism offensive,” she replies wearily and goes on to tell me that after 54 years of political activity in Guyana, she now feels more Guyanese than American.
Someone once told me they thought she was a barracuda. Why, I asked. Because you cannot be in politics that long and not be a barracuda, came the reply.
I ask her why her swearing in as president was so rushed. She explains that they got wind of the opposition attempts to thwart it and feared the consequences of a rudderless state. It seemed likely that the PPP already had enough votes to ensure victory.
I ask what made her throw the court order over her shoulder. ”Oh, the famous incident.” She pulls a wry face and then admits with disarming candour: ”I didn’t even think a second. I just tossed it over my shoulder. I think it fell on my daughter-in-law’s head.”
Somewhat defensively, she goes on to recall the many occasions in the past when her party was fraudulently manipulated out of office. Unfortunately, such gestures in a country like Guyana revive the ghosts of empire and the image of the white plantation owner’s wife acting with supercilious disregard of the law.
I press her on why so many of the boards of Guyanese public companies and government organisations are stacked with Indo-Guyanese officials. She sighs and concedes that something will have to be done about this.
As I am due to head off into the interior I ask her about the vexed question of Amerindian land rights, denied by successive governments since independence. She insists that land rights will be granted by her government. I express doubt. She insists again.
I fly into the interior to spend time with family in the savannahs on the Brazilian border. Georgetown life is aeons away. Here politics does not have the same racial dimension as on the coast. But this time politics has split some villages. One Macusi farmer likens the political divisions in previously unruffled Amerindian settlements to a virus ”that makes everybody sick”.
Change is coming here whether people like it or not. Increasing numbers of coastlanders, Brazilians or outsiders with reforming zeal have disturbed the traditional way of life. But right now a red dust settles everywhere. Everything is parched. Drought h as gripped the place. Creeks are low, fish scarce. Savannah fires, often set by the Amerindians themselves, rage unchecked. The cassava crop, staple diet of Amerindians, is threatened.
In these parts, there has been a sound philosophy for centuries of not doing anything which is not strictly necessary. It is a philo- sophy unsuited to commerce and the production of excess for profit. Produce just enough for your needs and no more. My mission begins to lose its journalistic urgency. Perhaps I won’t bother to write this piece at all.
In some ways, the interior is a time-warp where pre-Columbian cultures weave into the electronic age. One evening we eat a meal of farine and fried deer liver with several Macusi and Wapisiana men seated around the table, faces gleaming in the light of t he table-lamp. One man, a horse breeder in the south savannahs, tells how he once shot a huge deer and became sick for four days because he had sh ot by mistake the mother of deer, the first deer, the ancestor of all deer. It’s a belief to be found among many indigenous peoples in South America.
The same man informs me that he is hoping to get to Georgetown and have his photograph taken next to Mick Jagger when he arrives for the Test match.
But Guyana has frequently turned out to be the graveyard of dreams. Sir Walter Raleigh’s fantastical description of the place in the 16th century was the first example of how far image can depart from reality. Those early claims that Guyana was the site of Eldorado attracted many who discovered it was the Land of Mud. There is a bigger gap here between expectations and fact than in most places. ”You Guyanese are always full of expectant euphoria,” someone once said to me. The trick is to be realistic without murder ing hope.
Perhaps Guyana will cease to be one of the poorest countries in the world. At night the Southern Cross hangs at one end of the sky and the Big Dipper at the other. The country’s future hangs tantalisingly between remaining with the poor of the southern hemisphere and dreams of the rich north.
Pauline Melville’s novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale won the Whitbread first novel prize this year. Her collection of short stories, The Migration of Ghosts, will be published in April by Bloomsbury.
ENDS