Going back to the ‘30’s and the ‘40’s, an enduring message for young people growing up in Guyana was that the white culture was supreme. It was not posted on billboards, there were no articles in the newspapers saying so, but you would get the 
message in all sorts of ways, some insidious some openly said, and, ironically, some of the loudest proponents were our own Guyanese people. As a 17-year-old out of Saints and working for B. G. Airways, I vividly recall a black policeman at the Karanambo airstrip, standing under the wing of the DC-3 Art Williams’ aircraft, referring to some property dispute in the Savannah, pontificating that “de Englishman doan mek sport wid he land”. This was 1954 folks, and I was a small boy, knowing my place, so I didn’t make any comment, but it jolted me, an unknown country boy from West Dem., and looking across the Savannah the thought hit me. “What is he sayin? De Englishman land? Dis is Guyana; it’s our country. All right, we’re a colony, but this is our place.” I was a green youth at the time, but I was to look back on that incident with the policeman as a time when I started to question things that had been drummed into me. It was the first of many lights dawning.
