Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0154/01548.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 42KB | 652 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01548}
$Pretitle{282}
$Title{Guyana
Chapter 3.    Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{William B. Mitchell}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{british
east
guiana
sugar
planters
demerara
indian
indians
system
new}
$Date{1969}
$Log{}
Country:     Guyana
Book:        Guyana, A Country Study
Author:      William B. Mitchell
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1969

Chapter 3.    Historical Setting

     The history of Guyana is primarily the story of its diverse people.
Nearly 95 percent of its people are descendents of the immigrant workers that
were brought to the region during the 19th and early 20th centuries to work
on the sugar estates. At first, slaves from Africa were imported to fulfill
the industry's pressing labor needs. Later, when trade of this nature was
prohibited, it was replaced by the indenture system which drew first from
Portugal and China and then from the Indian Subcontinent. Guyanese ethnic
communities are thus historical phenomena that have assumed unique economic,
social and political characteristics through the years.

     Each major ethnic group maintains its own interpretation of Guyana's
history. The individual citizen tends to view the nation's past in terms of
the experiences of his own ethnic community.

     The descendents of Guiana's African slave population, the Afro-Guyanese,
are quite conscious of their historical legacy. Although little survives of
the original tribal culture, the average Afro-Guyanese does realize that his
ancestors were brought to the area in chains and forcibly subjected to the
harsh life of the sugar plantations. The recognition of the injustices
suffered by his forefathers has engendered in the Afro-Guyanese a feeling
that the society owes him at least an unbiased chance to make his way in the
world. The indenture system, which prevented the free slaves from extracting
better wages and working conditions from the planters, is recalled with
considerable bitterness.

     Unlike the Anglicized Afro-Guyanese who tends to deprecate the tribal
culture of his distant ancestors, the East Indian maintains a deep respect
for his cultural legacy. Indeed, of Guyana's several ethnic groups the East
Indian community remains the most coherent and folk-oriented. They are
particularly proud of the accomplishments of the freed indentured laborers who
left the sugar plantations to establish themselves as rice farmers. The
achievements of this independent peasantry secured new educational and
occupational opportunities for their offspring and an expanded socio-economic
role for their community as a whole.

     Neither the Afro-Guyanese nor the East Indian population exhibits
bitterness toward its former British rulers. The primary reason for this
phenomenon is the fact that the national independence movement disintegrated
more than 10 years before Guyana became a sovereign state. From 1955 through
1966, the primary struggle for political power was not between the European
rulers and the subjugated masses but between the two main ethnic communities.
As frustrations and anger were channeled away from the British authorities,
ethnic tensions escalated rapidly. The East Indian challenged the
Afro-Guyanese for the skilled jobs that once represented the safe domain of
the Afro-Guyanese community, and he also began to emerge from his traditional
position on the bottom rung of the Guyanese society. The Afro-Guyanese was
inclined to view these developments as an illegitimate usurpation of his
hereditary rights.

     While the histories of the Portuguese and Chinese immigrants in Guyana
are remarkably similar, their attitudes toward their legacy are quite
distinct. The forebears of both groups entered the region as indentured
laborers who subsequently escaped the sugar estates to seek a better life
in the world of commerce. Throughout the 20th century these two ethnic groups
have formed the core of Guyana's domestic business community. Their superior
economic position was reflected in the colonial social structure in which they
enjoyed a status second only to that of the British. Given this set of
circumstances and the fact that they were also of European extraction, the
Portuguese came to anticipate that they would inherit the British mantle of
authority once independence had been granted. The institution of democratic
elections, however, frustrated those expectations and relegated the Portuguese
to a position of secondary political importance. These developments have
naturally generated a certain degree of Portuguese resentment. The Chinese, on
the other hand, never became established as a coherent ethnic community.
During the colonial period, their attention was devoted to their commercial
enterprises and they remained on the periphery of the socio-political life
of British Guiana.

Discovery and the Early Dutch Settlement

     Present-day Guyana was first recognized by Europe in 1498 when Columbus
sailed along the coast during the last of his three voyages. Little attention,
however, was paid to this area until the last decade of the 16th century and
the arrival of Sir Walter Raleigh. Searching for El Dorado-the mythical city
of gold-Raleigh and the Dutch explorers who followed him mapped the coastline
and established friendly contact with the primitive Amerindian natives.
Efforts by these early adventurers to stimulate the colonization of the
Guianas finally produced a Dutch expedition in 1616 that formed the settlement
of Fort Kijkorveral on an island in the Essequibo River at its confluence with
the Cuyuni and Mazaruni. In 1621 the colony was placed under the direction of
the newly-incorporated West Indian Company of the Netherlands. This group of
Dutch commercial concerns administered the settlements known as Essequibo and
Demerara for 170 years. Although it was under the general jurisdiction of this
private group, the other region of present-day Guyana, Berbice, was governed
separately as a patroon.

     Dutch expansion into the interior of Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice
made it clear that the good will of the Amerindian population was necessary
for both the profitability of trade and the safety of Dutch settlements. In
addition, early attempts by the Europeans to enslave the Amerindians had
proved uneconomical and reinforced the tendency to treat these nomadic hunters
as allies and not as subjugated natives.

     Although the settlements engaged in the cultivation of crops, such as
tobacco, cotton, and coffee, agriculture remained at the subsistence level.
Moreover, Guianese production of these commodities on a commercial basis was
hurt by the development of the southern region by the United States. Unable
to compete, Guiana gradually shifted away from these crops toward sugar cane.
First grown in the Pomeroon settlement in 1658, sugar became the dominant
commodity in both Essequibo and Demerara. Berbice continued to specialize in
coffee and cotton.

     The rapid growth of sugar production in the first quarter of the 18th
century brought a movement toward the coastal strip. The migration from the
interior occurred over an extended period of time as the soil along the rivers
was progressively exhausted. This trend was officially recognized in 1738 by
the transfer of the Dutch administrative center from Fort Kijkoveral to Fort
Island at the mouth of the Essequibo River.

     The appointment of a new secretary to the West Indian Company of the
Netherlands, Laurens Storm van's Gravesande, also occurred in 1738. Four years
later he was elevated to Commandeur, the colony's highest office. Gravesande
opened the Demerara region to settlement in 1746, and it grew so rapidly
that by 1750 a separate Commandeur had to be appointed to govern its affairs.
Gravesande was thereupon named to the newly-created post of Directeur-General
of Essequibo and Demerara, thus retaining his position as the Company's chief
overseer in Guiana. Berbice continued to be administered separately.

     For the next 30 years, Graves