Barbadian PM Mia Mottley’s speech at the recent Energy Expo was well received even by those outside of the event and those sceptical of the oil industry’s effects upon this small land.
Mottley is both forthright and interesting to listen to, mixing what are post colonial themes with an environmental agenda. Both a throwback and a futurist, Mottley told the audience “we are people who have been the victims of colonisation and exploitation” and that after World War II the efforts to close the gap on Western nations only perpetuated the disparity. Looking forward she asked who will decide who produces the 20% of fossil fuels that the full energy transition will still need, suggesting developing countries like Guyana and Ghana should not be barred from exploiting their resources.
Her remarks’ warm reception indicate she is tapping into something very elemental in the psyche of the 21st Caribbean citizen. However a few in the room later seemed perplexed by her speech seeing it as wallowing in old grudges and even proposed this was an excuse for the present dysfunction in our societies.
The fact is this debate is not unique to the Caribbean and it is engaging America more and more as academics explore how even after slavery, institutional racism continued and continues to contribute to the marginalisation of African Americans. As William Faulkner wrote “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” and anyone who has driven in the South can see how the imprint of slavery and Jim Crow endures both geographically and socially. Several books have also covered how red-lining results in African Americans paying higher interest rates than white homeowners. A 2019 Harvard study reported that “the median interest rate for Black homeowners who made $75,000-$100,000 was 4.215 percent, while the median interest rate for white homeowners with household incomes of $30,000 or less was 4.16 percent.”
These are not anecdotal examples open for interpretation but statistical evidence of economic discrimination. Meanwhile electoral laws and boundaries are increasingly being tweaked and gerrymandered to diminish and discourage minority voting.
For Guyana, the past presses down on our everyday present in numerous ways to hamper our development. Let us take the school system, that some six decades after colonial rule has largely kept its same shape despite the best efforts of enlightened Guyanese administrators. The British plantocracy had no need for a large well educated workforce which might drive up costs. On the contrary, such graduates might scorn the cane fields taking away valuable labour. At the same same time the administrators set up a few elite schools in Georgetown to feed the needs of the civil service. So even today while there are some secondary schools in the rural areas generating some excellent students, one looks without surprise at the top pupils to see which schools they attend. It is no coincidence that many of the political elite have been incubated at Queen’s College and one can only speculate how their views of the world were fixed in those formative years, and how collectively these influence the country’s pitiable political narrative.
For the majority of rural and poor students, a non-vocational education remained and continues to remain elusive. This educational inequality directly contributes to the dearth of skills needed to develop the nation today.
Another seemingly small example is the simple sidewalk or pavement. Such infrastructure has been a part of road building for centuries and no statistics are necessary to establish the safety benefits of separating pedestrians from vehicles. What is striking is how few sidewalks there are in Guyana although we now see more being built as part of roadworks.
Why might that be? Perhaps it was that the colonial masters did not see their subjects as fellow humans deserving of safety but as units of labour that were relatively disposable? Thomas Hobbes’ view that a government’s foremost responsibility is ensuring the safety of its people did not apparently apply to colonies.
Whatever the case we live with this each year with the maiming and deaths of dozens knocked over while walking on our roads. Similarly the colonial masters in laying out the villages to surround the sugar mills did not consider such niceties as parks or other recreational areas. They were, and still are, monotonous grids that mimic the adjacent cane fields. Workers as cane, cane as workers. The effect on the inhabitants to this day is to reinforce a sense of drudgery and uniformity. For many, alcohol provides a psychic liberation from this cage.
As for our domestic violence and suicide pandemic, much of this behaviour appears to have been passed down through the generations and seems almost impossible to change. In her book “Coolie Woman” about her great grandmother’s arrival and life in British Guiana, Gaiutra Bahadur wrote extensively of the social dynamics within the indentured labour system that led to domestic violence and suicide.
Finally there is simply no need for us to examine the deep and unique causes behind our current racial divide and its effects upon our efforts even now to build a more functional and democratic society.
So these patterns persist and their historical roots and those responsible need to be called out. It is not wallowing in the past when it is experienced in the present. Ultimately it should be about seeking paths to change because it is our past that has been holding Guyana back and no amount of oil money will make our present and future better.
