#ethnopolitics

They are cunning. Their aim is to open Guiana to the people of African descent to immigrate here. Why? To tip the racial balance. We are numerically superior. They want to change that advantage. But I have a surprise for them. We won't be coerced or dragged into any West Indies Federation. We will be pursuing a continental destiny with our neighbors Brazil, Suriname and others.

These two charismatic leaders were clever politicians. Universally, politicians extend themselves to the limits, embracing even impropriety to win. Politics is not a profession of saints. My reliable information was that it was the troubleshooter  Janet Jagan who made the suggestion that their supporters should be told to embrace the elections as a racial issue. They were numerically superior. The idea was swiftly approved though, with some reservations, as this concept excluded blacks. For instance, the deputy leader of the party, Brindley Benn, was black, and so were many members of the party. This could have been counterproductive! The slogan would be Apen Jhaat. Translated from Hindi, it means "vote for your own." Clearly, because it would be to his disadvantage, Burnham appealed to all at a public meeting that danger lurked within this racial division. He'd sooner have voters support him because of his belief and not because of his race. This was interpreted by many to mean that he was less concerned about the damage of racial division than losing the elections. However, Apen Jhaat, that seemingly innocuous gem of an idea, gave birth to the racial disease that prevailed forty-six years later in the year 2001. That conflict had intensified.

Later on it turned out that the [1961] riots were part of a CIA-inspired movement. But having been there, I know that the CIA can only act on the basis of divisions that are already there. There were profound divisions that are still coming out into the open in Guyana today. Up until then, like most of my generation, I was a Marxist because Marxism gave you a key which said look, you can understand the reality of which you're a part. This was my thinking until then. But from that moment I said, no, there is something important that this paradigm cannot deal with. A lot of my rethinking came out of that experience. It was not a matter of negating the Marxian paradigm but of realizing that it was one aspect of something that was larger. So everything that happened to me would come out of that moment.(p.140)

Between 1953 and 1960, critical developments took place in the political life of British Guiana and in the colony’s relationship to the United Kingdom and the United States. After suspending British Guiana’s constitution, the ruling Conservative Party embarked on a concerted campaign to destroy the People’s Progressive Party. The Conservatives’ tactics included stimulating racial politics in the colony, pitting blacks against Indians. The U.S. government and the U.S. trade union movement quietly backed the British. But the effects of two momentous international events—the Suez Crisis and the Cuban Revolution—shattered the Anglo-American alliance on British Guiana. In the aftermath of the Suez debacle, Britain’s new leaders concluded that they should dismantle the empire. The British decision to allow Cheddi Jagan and his supporters back into government dismayed U.S. policymakers. Their dismay grew into alarm as they persuaded themselves that an independent Guyana led by Jagan would be a facsimile of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. By the end of the decade, British Guiana had become a Cold War battleground and the scene of an Anglo-American diplomatic confrontation. The colony had also been transformed into a divisive society, with its politics marred by deep ethnic and racial divisions.(p. 47)