Dear Editor,
I respond to Ravi Dev’s letter of April 11 in which he accepts my source(s) in which “East Indians” were quoted as participating, in one incident, in the 1856 Angel Gabriel riots (Ref: “Summarizing the Angel Gabriel riots of 1856”). Dev also raised a number of wider implications of my response, in the course of which he established motives to me that bordered on my “equating” Indian and African-Guyanese participation in the riots in a “systemic manner.” My focus on Orr and 1856 was almost exclusively referencing African Guyanese contradictions with the Portuguese (and please note these columns do not permit much engagement with details; they are merely historical summaries, given the 2,000 average word limit) I listed several instances of African-Guyanese dissension with the Portuguese, the white plantocracy and governor and endemic anti-black racism. In sum, nowhere in my original piece (before or after the quote) did I follow up with a contention that Indians were involved in a widespread way in the mainly African Guyanese riots, although to be fair to Dev, he could read the inference that Indian Guyanese were more widely involved from the placement of the quote in the article from the specified sources. But to indicate that I was, wholesale and retail, ascribing equality throughout the piece is unfair.
As Dev indicated, I raised wider issues in my letter arising from my understanding of the thrust of his concerns and my perception that Dev was discomfited with Indian Guyanese involvement (which we now both agree was minor) in the riots of 1856. Dev’s specific question was linked to the question of Indian (and by extension African-Guyanese relations with the Portuguese at the time). My response to Dev’s concerns to be frank, was evinced by a wider concern that African Guyanese could be somehow painted with the broad brush of being sociologically prone to, or driven to riots and rioting (and by extension violence) as against other groups. And this is why I intervened with my own comments on sources, riots, and the incident of 1914 with Indians at Grove with the Governor along with minor African collaboration in the event. This is also why I wrote more broadly on riots and skirmishes in Guyana over time and attempted to propose that “riots” in the specific instances of African and Indian insurgency against the colonial state were human responses to the extreme spiritual, psychological, physical, social and economic violence of the plantation complex and that the historical record shows both groups engaged widely (although separately for the most part) in what I would call, righteous violence.
In a previous historical column in Stabroek News, I sought to give an outline of ‘disturbances’ in colonial Guyana and I listed these as including “strikes, petitions, inter-ethnic violence, vocal protests, riots, marches, sit-ins, “rowdyism”, sabotage (including fires), pilfering, absenteeism, contentious gatherings, desertion, and foot-dragging.” Dev’s concentration appears to lie solely with Indian-African ethnic conflict and his well-developed pet thesis on the causation of ethnic riots and his use of Horowitz and so on. This is a fair comment on his part, given the contents of my letter, but my concerns/comments were elsewhere and Dev bypassed these, including the issue of Indian indentured resistance to colonial conditions and how these are sometimes omitted from the national narrative. Like Dev, I am “speaking from my present.” We all inevitably do. I recall one zoom conference when a well-informed Guyanese academic expressed surprise that there were many Indian “riots” (or as Pulandar Kandhi put it more broadly in the title of a Guyanese history gazette, “Indentured insurgency on the sugar Estates of British Guiana 1869-1913”) in the colony. The perception here, on account perhaps of the fairly widely developed discussion on the 1889 and 1905 riots (as against 1856) and more significantly, the three separate riots in the 1960s (collectively deemed “the 60s” ) is that African-Guyanese were exclusively involved in rioting in Guyana.
The underpinning elements of African Guyanese response at the time had to do with extreme grievances against the colonial state (as with Indian Guyanese and their respective grievances). Ravi cites Brian Moore in one part of the quote as stating that “The Creoles developed a complex of oppression with respect to the Portuguese.” This complex was however not unmoored from a collaboration between the colonial state and the Portuguese (in general). As the said same Brian Moore states in another text (Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism: Colonial Guyana, 1838-1900): “the only economic sector outside the mainstream plantations that was not deliberately depressed as a matter of policy was the retail commercial sector. But because of its great potential for lucrativeness, it was skillfully manipulated both through taxation (licences) and credit restrictions to ensure that the ex-slave population would not control it and thus earn its way out of the plantation labour and poverty. Consequently, largely on racial grounds, the Portuguese immigrants were facilitated to establish a virtual stranglehold on this area of economic activity.”
The suppression of the non-plantation sector (except for the retail business from which African Guyanese, who initiated it, were removed and Portuguese installed) was conducted in every sector of society. There was sustained all-out war against African Guyanese. Fruit trees and livestock were destroyed. Farms and gardens were flooded out. Punitive taxes were inflicted only upon African Guyanese villagers: for example, small boats and donkeys widely used by villagers were taxed while hundreds of punts, horses and mules on each estate were not taxed. Generally, government revenues were collected in disproportionate amounts from African Guyanese and spent in the interests of the white plantocracy. Part of the payment for Indian immigration was from these revenues collected mainly from African Guyanese. Immigration, mainly of Indians but also of Africans, Portuguese and Chinese, was employed to depress the cost of African Guyanese labour. The general result of this attack upon African Guyanese was that village life was rendered economically unsustainable for most villagers. Villages became depressed. Villagers migrated, chiefly to Georgetown, Wismar/Mackenzie and to the gold and diamond fields. African Guyanese villages have never fully recovered from this attack.
Neither of the two major race groups had any control over their insertion into the country. In total, it was the strategic interests of the white planters which prevailed and their actions, together with the immigration project and suppression of both groups (and others) has had a powerful influence on the shape and form of African-Indian relations to this day. Like Ravi, I have always been interested in addressing “the dynamics of our ethnic relations in Guyana.” This extends to concerns in the public mind about the ways, in this case, how Indian-African relations and actions (as in the case of riots or insurgencies) are perceived historically. Ravi centres his theory on “ethnic riots”. However, I was not directly discussing inter-ethnic conflict in my response, but riots in general against the state. All in all, I am glad that the summary on the 1856 ‘Angel Gabriel’ riots brought forth a wider discussion on the still uncomfortable portions of Guyanese history, although, in the course of our interlocking discussion on the quote at the centre of the debate, wider aspects and themes of the 1856 riots were seemingly overlooked.
Sincerely,
Nigel Westmaas
