To understand the social considerations that helped to sow the seeds of urban crime in some areas of George-town (particularly during the nineteenth century) you have to reflect, considerably, on the political circumstances of the period, the stereotypes that fashioned the ‘haves and have-nots’, which had its roots in European stereotypes. Those stereotypes even went as far as placing the blame for their poverty on the poor themselves.
There was a philosophical dimension to defining the condition, too, one which justified poverty and marginalisation as being located in some kind of divinely-ordained fate. Whether any of these ideas can triumph as authentic definitions of a human condition is questionable. In real life they manifested themselves as degrading material poverty; incomes and by extension, sustenance, were sorely lacking, as well as opportunities for decent survival. What this stratification enabled, though, was a justification of sorts for the allocation of resources, mostly in a particular direction. This rich/poor divide, this creation of what contemporary analysts might be inclined to describe as the have and the have-nots, helps to explain the phenomenon of the rise of crime in Georgetown.
Old Stabroek served as the capital of a slave colony that included New Amsterdam. Prior to 1838 it functioned as a port town for the benefit of planters and merchants. The free people of colour and poor whites were assigned to particular areas of the township. They worked as butchers, tradesmen and vendors, mostly on commission. Goods were supplied by ship captains who brought consignments from Europe for distribution by hucksters.
The abolition of slavery and the experiment of indentureship give rise to conflict between the freed Africans on the one hand, and the planter class and European merchants, on the other. The rise of independent service businesses from among the freed Africans did not sit well with a planter class used to slave labour. They were, first discouraged, then replaced with the Portuguese. In retrospect it was the beginning of the ‘divide and rule’ regime, the genesis of ethnic conflict and violence.
While, by the 1880s, those conflicts had petered out, new ones arose, linked to the imperative of survival. Henry Kirke, Magistrate and Sheriff of Demerara commented in the years leading up to the 1900s as follows: “Let any one walk through the yards which lead out of lower Regent Street, Lombard Street and Leopold Street in Georgetown, and let him ask himself how he could expect respectable law-abiding citizens to be raised therein.” This was the period that heralded the 1905 riots.
At that time the physical conditions in which people lived meant that the child mortality rate had reached around 30 per cent. One witness at the Mortality Com-mission referred to the houses of the poor as “dog houses”; another expressed his amazement at the capacity of labourers to do hard manual labour from 6:00am until noon, with sustenance consisting of no more than a cup of “sugar water and a few biscuits.” The majority of labourers received work only a few days each week. Young men out of work were recruits for the ‘Centipede’ (or ‘Santapee’ – A.J Seymour) street gangs. These young men also spent a great deal of time playing ‘Cheefa’ (possibly a version of the current popular Chic-Chic board gambling game) (see ‘A History of the Guyanese working people, 1881-1905’ by Walter Rodney).
The male and female Centipede gangs, young and rumbustious, emerged not just to lend demonstrable support to rioters comprising underpaid stevedores and domestics in their plight, they also embodied the raw resistance, a sub-culture of defiance, if you will, to the social order as symbolised by the ‘haves and the have-nots’ in George-town in the early twentieth century.
The Centipede/Santapee bands, incidentally, were essentially masquerade bands, with an ‘attitude’. They were spawned in the poor ‘necks of the woods’… Bourda, South Hampton, Tiger Bay and Charlestown/ Albouystown. A handed-down oral history has allowed names like Freddie Bandula, Putagee Tonus, the Tiger-ess of Tiger Bay and Goblet Joe to become noted for notoriety. That was the era in which the urban street fighters earned their reputations. The ‘Santapee’ bands were mostly confined to South Georgetown… Werk-en Rust, Charlestown, Albouystown, Le Penitence, and Ruim-veldt. By the 1950’s the term ‘Santapee’ had receded though what it had represented, a street-based retaliation to the social circumstances of the day, had, unmistakably, made its point though the social conditions against which it had risen up never really went away.
The housing congestion was never completely abated. The tenement yards (Martin Carter’s ‘Nigger Yards’) were where much of Georgetown’s population lived. These areas were not supported by any social infrastructure, not least, schools equipped to offer a sound education. So bad was the housing situation that when, in 1962, 138 hire-purchase and 50 apartment houses were offered for rental, the response was four thousand applications!
That was a time, too, when young boys became barefoot bread winners, selling, among other things, newspapers. Poverty and need gave rise to pockets of crime which developed. Youngsters perfected an adeptness at cutting sleeping comrades’ pockets and making off with their newspaper money so that the hapless victims would be unable to purchase papers for sale, or to ‘nick’ dice and gamble at cards until his losses had been replenished.
During that period, too, ‘Sagi-wangs’ (incurable drunks) who, in their drunken stupor, would lie carelessly in the streets, would also have their pockets raided. These were the training grounds for young men who would grow up to become ‘pick pockets’, some following in the footsteps of fathers and older brothers. Others took a different social route. They became waterfront workers, pursuing ‘chip and paint’ labour and other semi-skilled jobs on the various wharves.
The waterfront provided an irreplaceable place of relief for generations of poor, unemployed Africans. Some lived and died there. The environment there also bred generations of ‘hustlers’ who made ‘something on the side’ acquiring and selling pilfered goods. By the nineteen eighties, however, the modernization of the merchant marine shipping industry threw down a challenge to which the ‘primitive’ waterfront culture had no effective answer. Packaging had shifted from crates to containers, removing much of the need for manual labour and, in effect, placing a large number of waterfront workers on the breadline. The options, in the circumstances, were limited and crime was close to the top of that list of options.
The end of the waterfront ‘hustle’ narrowed the options for the largely uneducated working class urban Guyanese. The limited cottage industries were insufficient to absorb its unemployed. The decline of the waterfront as an employer of mostly African-Guyanese labour coupled with their unchanging responsibility to support themselves and their families made the pursuit of options an urgent necessity. Self-employment, underpinned by a rising level of ingenuity flourished.
During the period prior to and following the country’s attainment of Independence, however, there arose an increasing desire for settled employment. After Independence the Guyana Defence Force became an option. Others opted for small scale gold mining. Efforts to create an industrial sector were undermined by the oil crisis.
Working class communities in the south of George-town where unemployment was rampant and where the school curriculum paid little attention to skills-training that could have job-creation potential made the situation worse. Nor were attempts at low-budget housing the answer. Children grew up quickly and where relocation was not an option, overcrowded homes and squatting became commonplace.
But the ‘ghetto youth’ had their ‘ambitions’ too. In the late sixties to seventies the 65cc Honda motor cycle followed by the 100cc became symbols of a make-believe elevation. These were accompanied by other appurtenances, not least, distinctive dress styles, and haircuts, assorted swaggers and a bewildering array of head gear. ‘String bands,’ musical groups offering contemporary ‘sounds’ appealed to the street hustler. There occurred, as well, something of a shift in the crime pattern, away from purse snatching, ‘break and enter’ and ‘choke and rob,’ to motor cycle-aided payroll heists. There were incidentally, unwritten ‘rules’ even in that criminal culture. Close relatives (mothers, sisters, ‘lady friends’ and neighbourhood folk) were not to be relieved of their money and valuables… and there were rules that embraced retribution that attended the transgression of that understanding. The rules were sufficiently stringent to ensure, in many cases, that stolen property was restored to the owners.
Urban crime has sometimes held a certain attraction for ‘white collar’ criminals… in the more ‘upstanding’ segments of the society where acquisition by questionable means was by no means absent. Crime, albeit at a more sophisticated level, also flourished in that realm.
