7. Organising for the Caribbean

Anne Braithwaite

Recent years have seen several former British colonies that attained independence in Britain’s post-war winds of change mark golden jubilees. Those 50th anniversary tailwinds swirled from India and Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Jordan, Israel and Myanmar in the 1990s to Libya and Sudan, Ghana and Malaysia, Cyprus and Nigeria in the early 2000s. The current decade sees several more African and Caribbean countries marking golden jubilees, including Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanzania, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Barbados and Botswana, to name just a few. I had thus been on the lookout for accessible reviews of the 50-year post-imperial period that explored the complex and unresolved development-deficit questions.

Unfortunately, there is a dearth of public access to the vibrant intellectual discourse about and rigorous analyses of decolonisation, political economy and development studies. Such access is necessary for encouraging research and informing policy thinking. The conference from which this volume has emerged – which bore the same name as this book – was therefore a most welcome opportunity. The focus on the Caribbean is especially salient as the question of decolonisation in the Caribbean demands a much more serious consideration by scholars. Indeed, it is imperative that further discussion takes place between academics and the broader Caribbean population who lived, and continue to live, with the effects of colonisation and decolonisation. This chapter outlines the memories of one post-Windrush migrant who sought to organise for positive change in Guyana, and in the process gained valuable insights into [de]colonisation, Caribbean history and our place in Britain. Here I reflect on how those experiences have shaped my political thinking and the organising lessons learnt along the way.

Seeking to understand

If colonisation is the process by which a central system of power establishes control over indigenous peoples of an area, then dominates and plunders those peoples and the surrounding resources, I was glad that Guyana had gained independence. And of course I would be returning there, in about five years, having completed my education and established myself. But this was merely a vague notion on my arrival in the UK in 1972. My curiosity about the politics of decolonisation was aroused through attempts at understanding, from a distance, the intrigues of a newly independent Guyana (1966), the home I had just left, aged 20, full of anticipation for life in London. For the first time I needed to talk about Guyana, not only to family and friends, but to others who knew mostly nothing about it. And what I knew was not that easy to articulate. But what did I really know? The major shocks of events in Guyana induced a steep learning curve.

Discussions with UK-resident family and friends, mainly students, eased the rapid adjustment necessary to face the cultural booby traps of London life and the disappointment of my first London winter. It was a real struggle trying to reconcile ‘mother-country’ myths with the lived realities of striving to carve out a productive adult life. At the heart of my quest was a desire to understand Guyana’s position in the world, but mainly my place in it here – and there. My delight in the vibrant Caribbean social scene and the spectacular rise to dominance of the West Indies cricket team was tempered by the subtle assertions of everyday racism and the disturbing developments in Guyana.

Newly independent Guyana was now home to the seat of the Caribbean Community secretariat (CARICOM), formed in 1973. I had worked a wonderful stint with the inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA), which Guyana had successfully hosted in 1972. In the wake of the US 1960s civil rights and Black Power era, I shared the abundant optimism of most African-Guyanese, led by Forbes Burnham’s ruling People’s National Congress (the PNC), which embraced the current Black Power slogans. Most Indian-Guyanese, under Cheddi Jagan’s ousted People’s Progressive Party (PPP), had been sidelined along with Burnham’s 1964 coalition partner, the United Force. They had lost the battle for power, thoroughly vanquished in the ethnic violence and notorious electoral violations which I had experienced as a child in 1960s Guyana.

The Burnham-led administration had now ostensibly embarked on concerted efforts aimed at the decolonisation and restructuring of Guyana’s economy, while taking steps to attract Guyanese and people of African descent to (re) settle in Guyana. The administration saw this repopulation effort as having dual benefits: stemming Guyana’s crippling emigration tide while also fostering new potential votes, thereby challenging what was perceived as the ethnic disadvantage of African-Guyanese. These matters were usually thoroughly discussed at the almost exclusively African-Guyanese social gatherings that I frequented.

And I generally supported these views. I grew up in Victoria, Guyana’s iconic first post-emancipation African village – named after Queen Victoria. Here, African-Guyanese had lived harmoniously with Indian-Guyanese villagers until the Indians were driven out by the US- and UK-sponsored regime-change race terror that fuelled the early civil violence in the early 1960s. I saw myself and Guyana’s other ‘races’ as I had been taught to – through colonial eyes, with all the manipulative racism and self-hatred that entails. Although a product of Guyana’s elite Bishops’ High School for girls, and having mostly accepted the race, class and colour status quo, fortunately I was not such a good student. My lived experience of my formative years in Victoria had sewn little seeds of dissent from this order.

When in London in 1973 I heard that Guyana’s High Commission was recruiting for part-time evening office work and jumped at the chance to meet other Bishops’ and Queen’s College high school alumni. This would allow great opportunities to catch up on news and gossip without the intrusion of loud party music – and to be paid. And there was a lot of partying – mostly at house parties and the Earls Court West Indian Students’ Centre, which were responsible for many romantic encounters, including my first in London.

In fact, our part-time office work at Guyana’s High Commission was rigging Guyana’s 1973 election – although I was amazingly slow to realise this at the time. Many questions bothered me. How did these black-power projects reconcile with the meaning of Guyana’s motto: ‘One People, One Nation, One Destiny’? In what context were the widely documented, covert 1960s US and UK interventions in Guyana to be seen?¹ And why was Guyana’s notorious election-rigging continuing and, indeed, becoming worse (1980, 1985 and the 1978 referendum)? What difference did Guyana becoming a ‘co-operative republic’ in 1970 make? For that matter, what difference did it make when Forbes Burnham’s ruling party declared itself a socialist party and paramount to the state?

Guyana’s hosting of the 1972 Foreign Ministers Non-Aligned Conference, the first of its kind to be held in Guyana, gave Burnham the opportunity to address the evils of imperialism and actively to support African liberation struggles – which I supported. These, however, served to reinforce the Burnham regime’s progressive mask abroad, while it was ruling as a brutal dictatorship at home. If neo-colonialism uses capitalism, globalisation and cultural imperialism to influence a developing country, then the Burnham regime’s collusion with capital epitomised neo-colonialism. This was manifest in London when, in a depressed 1970s’ sugar market, sugar giant Booker – nationalised by the Burnham regime – was able to herald increased shareholder dividends as a result of Guyana’s compensation and marketing payments.

Guyana was becoming subject to increasingly acute economic hardship. Burnham’s PNC government, as part of an IMF bailout deal, was forced to implement severe cuts in government expenditure and the removal of subsidies on food items. There were severe shortages of essential food items such as flour, cooking oil and split-peas. Many Guyanese living abroad began sending essential foodstuff items, to help relieve the suffering of their relatives in Guyana. Working people were the hardest hit, with those least able to cope bearing the brunt of its floundering economy and politically repressive woes and blows. Then came the Jonestown horror in 1978. Jonestown was a US-based religious-type cult which had relocated to a large, remote area of land in Guyana. Led by Jim Jones – a white self-styled reincarnation of figures such as Christ and Buddha – this ‘peoples temple’ settlement was secretly gifted by Guyana’s PNC government in exchange for political support, for example, by participating in government marches. Jonestown – like Guyana’s more urban and thuggish House of Israel sect, which also supported the government – operated outside the scope of most of Guyana’s laws. When US congressman Leo Ryan arrived with a delegation to investigate US citizens’ complaints, they were attacked as they boarded an aircraft to leave Jonestown. Ryan and five others were killed. This precipitated the mass murder/suicide, in which nearly a thousand people died – mostly African-Americans – instantly thrusting Guyana to international notoriety. The Guyana government at the time dismissed it as an ‘American problem’.

This event was pivotal in focusing and propelling my fledgling activism. With each new state-sponsored outrage against the Guyanese populace, I became anxious. The Working People’s Alliance (WPA) formed in 1974, exposed Guyana’s neo-colonial absurdities, manipulations and class contradictions. And when renowned Guyanese historian, Walter Rodney, joined and co-led the WPA on his return in 1974, he used his exceptional ability to analyse and synthesise centuries of history to illuminate Guyana’s issues of the day. The WPA’s organising and education created a serious threat to Guyana’s dictatorship. Their teaching explained the submerged links between imperialism, slavery, indenture and neo-colonialism, and thereby uncovered the nature of Guyana’s tragic Indian/African conflicts. I had found a political home. Following a spell with the Committee Against Repression in Guyana, I became a founding member of the WPA Support Group (WPASG ) UK after the WPA became a political party in 1979. I was also a founding member of the Justice for Walter Rodney campaign following Rodney’s assassination in 1980; and of the Campaign Against Waste Dumping in Guyana. Exposure to Rodney’s and the WPA’s progressive ideas and the organising work were transformative in my political development.

Education, reparation, self-emancipation

Although organising principles for the Caribbean, as elsewhere, are universal, I see the fundamentals of organising for positive change in the Caribbean as rooted in education, reparations and self-emancipation, wherever those involved might reside. The value of education – particularly about one’s own history – for understanding why, and how, there has been such widespread ignorance about empire, colonisation, resistance and decolonisation cannot be overstated. The critical need to change the narratives that we have been taught is predicated on being able to understand and articulate – particularly for non-academics – why powerful neo-colonial interests remain deeply invested in perpetuating existing, incomplete and distorted historic narratives. In tandem with this, new forms of extraction and plunder of human and economic resources are evolved. Working with the WPASG (UK), I began to understand the power dynamics at play among the individuals, groups, governments and institutions in Guyana, here in the UK and within the geo-political and economic webs that drive those relationships. Reading late 20th-century Foreign and Commonwealth Office records at the National Archives in Kew, I also began to recognise the importance of effective, methodical and reliable information systems in colonial and neo-colonial control. But whose truth do they tell?

My political and cultural encounters for the first time with other UK-based workers and students from all over the world – not to mention the many artists, politicians, non-governmental organisation (NGO) workers, activists and scholars – was invaluable in helping to fill the huge gaps in my knowledge of other peoples. These interactions, particularly with British-born children of the Windrush generation, brought home to me the importance of looking at the global picture, of taking the long view. Finally, I began to understand the deep significance of knowledge about pre-15th-century Africa and the pivotal nature of Haiti in the machinations of imperialism, decolonisation and reparations.

A 21st-century, pan-African perspective is imperative for revealing those hidden histories, particularly of Africans, that pervade the grossly distorted narratives expounded for centuries to serve imperialism. Knowing our history enables better contextualisation of current issues such as the Windrush scandal, Brexit, the immigration crises and the CARICOM position on reparations, while devising better solutions. We must recognise, protect and build on what has been done before. To remain effective, organisations must change: adapt processes, but retain values and be strategic to achieve their goals. Today’s generation could learn from earlier generations about conflict resolution, care for the environment, and creating new ways to meet the challenges of developing their full potential. Organising needs ancestral wisdom to be vigilant and alert to attempts to thwart, frustrate or destroy activities that challenge or disrupt the established order. Meeting CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee was an eyeopener to the destruction of the gains secured by workers’ struggles to improve their lives. Agee was a CIA operative (case officer) between 1957 and 1968. His 1975 book Inside the Company: CIA Diary exposed the involvement of the CIA in undermining and overthrowing legitimate progressive governments around the world, while at the same time supporting murderous dictatorships. This is particularly relevant to Guyana because the CIA also intervened in order to undermine and split the progressive anti-colonial movement of the early 1950s. One of the main techniques used was the promotion of racial division and violence. Guyana has never recovered from this intervention, and now more than 50 years later, racial animosity is still strong. And neither of the two major parties which dominate is securing Guyana’s long-term future.

Self-emancipation means that workers, constituents and social movements must push power holders, power brokers and politicians to deliver on their promises. As Frederick Douglass observed in 1857:

Douglass makes it clear: organising works best by doing. And a good place to start is with the burning issues that are of concern here and now. What can I do to make my world better? This was our ethos when we established the Campaign Against Waste Dumping in Guyana. This successful campaign helped to abort the Guyana government’s decision to import and store toxic waste from the US in 1988.

We must work with others to channel our anger into positive outcomes. Struggles that appear to be ineffective, unsuccessful or even failures still help to change existing conditions, whatever official spin is applied and irrespective of whether or not power concedes the impact of those struggles. Remember that whatever is ‘given’ can be taken away; no struggle, no progress – and struggle involves sacrifice. Whether as an artist, administrator or athlete, child, cleric or carer, educator or engineer, layabout, lawyer or linguist, scholar or scientist, parent, police or politician, artisan or activist, bartender or boss: we all play a role in shaping our world and all can be included in organising. We all – actively or passively – contribute as part of the problem, part of the solution or sometimes both by our own ignorance, contradictions or naivety. Although Guyana’s state/PNC violence of the 1970s and 1980s assassinated young Walter Rodney and crushed the WPA as a mass party, the WPA’s work remains transformative in abating Guyana’s ethnic traumas. If only working people knew their power. We are limited only by our imagination.

The effects of rising income inequality and the polarisation of societies pose risks beyond national economies to global migration and environmental consequences. Economists’ cult of growth, consumer fetishism and large-scale privatisation, monetisation, industrialisation of goods and services all have their considerable and seductive attractions, particularly to those whose primary interest is money-making. Such calculations, however, seldom attempt to value the many social and environmental costs and benefits. These are excluded from their financial calculations – or only included in very selective and superficial ways. By the time the long-term consequences become apparent, those responsible for the decisions and the major beneficiaries are long gone – or have morphed into new projects and entities. Britain’s utilities, prison, health and social care, education, criminal-justice services and financial markets attest to this. Gold rush ‘investors’ have left Guyana polluted. In 1995 at Omai mines, owned by a Canadian and an American company, there was a horrific accident in which about three million cubic metres of cyanide-tainted waste, that was being stored in a reservoir, burst its banks and flowed into the Essiquibo river. The danger was immediate to the local indigenous people and others who use the river for fishing and drinking-water.

Mercury pollution is also a problem, as it is barely monitored, and there is little regulation of the thousands of small-scale gold-miners who use and carelessly dispose of mercury in the local rivers. Such inadequate protection, management and redress systems do not bode well for Guyana’s much vaunted impending oil boom.

Great people – even those we love – make wrong calls and do bad things (and bad people and people we dislike make correct calls and do good things). Do not go with something that matters just because of who says or does it if it does not make sense to you. If someone cannot explain something in clear, plain language that a bright young person can understand, it is because they themselves do not quite understand it. Idolise no one. The personal is the political, hence we also need to challenge colleagues’ wrongdoing and bad behaviour and hold each other to account, privately with colleagues first, then within groups, in a kind and constructive way and in a spirit of love. It is a very important part of political work that to some extent we (community groups, colleagues and family) see ourselves as accountable to and responsible for each other. To remain silent about blatant wrongdoing by holders of public office, or those who live and work among us in our cultural, political, professional, social and even familial domains, tacitly endorses that behaviour. Once people become habituated to all sorts of unacceptable practices they go to sleep while terrible things are done. The repugnant is normalised and becomes the status quo.

To survive and thrive, carrying generations of trauma, we need to repair ourselves. That is why reparations must start with the self. Most of us – British and Caribbean people – have been brainwashed by imperial doctrines and, unwittingly or otherwise, become co-opted into the neo-colonial ethos. Britain’s reparations must address the historic terror and damage of human trafficking and exploitation; the British government must issue an apology and seek to make restitution. Whatever the challenges, there is always something that can be done; we must keep going. Many Caribbean people now live the life our ancestors dreamt of; they would see in us their dream come true. We know that there is still much further to go, but we must recognise how far we have come. Imagine what could be achieved if only working people knew their power. We must address the global, sustained and macro-economic forces that impact business, economy, society, cultures and personal lives – to reinvent today. The use of ‘nudge science’ – relatively subtle, inexpensive techniques used to change people’s behaviours – could be a useful tool, for example. Major socioeconomic, demographic and technological shifts occurring across the globe will have a sustained, transformative impact on the world and humanity in the decades ahead. In the face of rapid urbanisation, changing demographics and accelerated innovation a better world is possible. We must remain hopeful.

Those with discernible migrant heritage are so often told that empire and enslavement were a long time ago and that they should move on. Yet any probe beyond the surface divulges the extent to which we all continue to live the legacy of empire, enslavement and colonisation.³ Forms of colonisation have evolved; however, robust structures that maintain and reinforce exploitation of the many by the few remain. The continuing role played by white supremacy and racism also remains manifest in 21st-century hyper-globalisation. The rich elite (‘the one per cent’) manage networks of control which include major mass-media conglomerates. Many states have been captured and governments so influenced by them that the financing of elections subordinates the civil voice and democracy is deformed. Both Caribbean and British communities continue to be prey to these vagaries.

Some folks yearn for the past: bring back empire, bring back the British, bring back the good old days. The legacy of empire remains palpable in all our lives, quite flagrant in Guyana’s abysmal oil-boom negotiations: corporations make a killing and the local elite live large at poor taxpayers’ expense. The plight of Guyana’s working people is that the remnants of an elite manoeuvred into power in the 1960s to 1980s by the UK and USA continue to serve the interests of mostly western capital. In 2015 the Guyana government gave themselves salary increases of 50 per cent on their election, on top of the generous allowances and benefits (including medical treatment abroad) at the taxpayers’ expense. It is as if they had simply swapped places with the former colonial settlers. Even Guyana’s immigration practices of the 1970s and 1980s are repeated with Haitians, Cubans and Venezuelans today. Indian-African conflict to this day hinders Guyana’s development. Thirty-five years of campaigning finally won, under Guyana’s PPP government, an independent commission of inquiry into Walter Rodney’s death. The commission, comprising three respected Caribbean Jurists: Sir Richard Cheltenham, KA, QC (chairman); Mr. Seenath Jairam, SC; and Mrs. Jacqueline Samuels-Browne, QC, started taking evidence in April 2014. The current APNU-AFC government, however, immediately and abruptly halted the commission’s work after its election in 2015. At the time the commissioners requested a further two weeks to complete the inquiry, but the government refused to grant it.

Some British media, NGOs and individuals spoke out against Guyana’s colonial and neo-colonial plight: Granada Television’s ‘World in Action’ programmes of 1968 (‘The trail of the vanishing voter’, broadcast 11 December 1968 and ‘The making of a prime minister’, broadcast 6 January 1969) clearly illustrated the vote-rigging that took place with overseas voters. Individuals, such as the late Lord Avebury, played a leading role in exposing the fraudulent elections that the PNC used to keep itself in power. He led an international team of observers to the 1980 elections. Their final report stated that ‘we were obliged to conclude, on the basis of abundant and clear evidence, that the election was rigged massively and flagrantly’.⁴ But British economic gain prevailed. Britain colluded in or acquiesced to overt and covert US actions to ensure that the right people won power in Guyana and elsewhere. Educational institutions in both British and Guyanese establishments are yet to decolonise their curricula. The Brexit strategy in trade, aid and culture now re-ignites neocolonialism to court the Commonwealth. Nearly half a century later I am still here in London, living the 21st-century colonial legacy and working towards decolonisation. I have a reason and a right to be here – and there is work to be done.

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1 These interventions had been going on since 1945.

2 Extract from a speech entitled ‘West India Emancipation’ given at Canandaigua, New York, on 3 Aug. 1857 to mark the 23rd anniversary of the event.

3 See, for instance, the research project ‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership’, based at University College London.

4 UK Constitutional Law available at: https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/2014/07/29/derekobrien-comment-on-the-caribbean-commonwealth-caribbean-elections/