A letter in Kaieteur News this week, by Mr M Maxwell, made the trenchant point that our forefathers came to Guyana already imbued with the racial prejudices of their ancestral homelands; that those ethnic divides, while recognized and exploited by the British for their own advantage, were a pre-existing condition; it was certainly used but just as certainly not created by the colonialists. Mr Maxwell’s further point was that the division persists today decades after the colonialists are no longer in charge, and he identifies it as being “most responsible for the tragic state of our society” and therefore something that “needs to be discussed” and confronted.
The historical evidence and the anecdotal stories are on Mr Maxwell’s side. There are frequent scholarly references to the matter of entrenched racial positions among the various groups coming to Guyana in the days of slavery and indentureship, and anyone growing up in Guyana would have to have been aware of the condition,
