The Guianas: South America’s Weirdest Countries?

The Guianas: South America’s Weirdest Countries?

On the northern edge of South America are three small territories. Until about 10 years ago, not a single road connected them with the outside world. They sit on the edge of Latin America, and yet none of them are Latino. They’re some of the world’s least talked about places.

And yet, they have interesting stories to tell. Stories of calypso and cults, slavery and sugar. This series of videos is about the Guyanas. These videos tell stories of places and peoples as I try to find the echoes of the past in the lives of the present. This is going to be a story about the Guyanas perched on the top of South America. Originally, they came in five flavors,

Spanish, British, Dutch, French and Portuguese. But now, Spanish Guiana is part of Venezuela, and Portuguese Guiana is the Brazilian state of Amapa. So when people talk about the Guianas today, they mean these middle three, British, Dutch and French. The modern day Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

Only two of them are countries, because French Guiana is a department of France. In fact, France’s longest border anywhere is actually with Brazil. The three Guianas are unique in South America for never having been either Spanish or Portuguese. They’re their own little worlds.

In the words of travel writer John Gimlette, they’ve never known salsa or tango, bolivar, machismo, liberation theology. It’s almost as though the giant at their backs has never existed. They are indeed their own little world. With a combined population of only 1.7 million people,

The Guianas are one of the most sparsely populated regions on earth. Suriname, the size of Florida, has fewer people than Wichita, Kansas. Because the stories of each of the Guianas are so interconnected, this video will tell them together up until the point of independence.

At that point, the series will look at the history and context of each of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana in turn. So let’s begin. In most of the Guianas, the population is almost entirely concentrated on the coast in three towns, Georgetown, Parameribo and Cayenne, each sitting on a major river mouth. Nine out of 10 inhabitants of the Guianas live in this 10 mile strip along the coast. The region known as the Guianas

Consists of what is called the Guiana Shield. Where the rivers run south into the Amazon, That’s the Amazon basin. Where they run to the Atlantic, that’s the Guiana Shield. Its name comes from an Amerindian word meaning land of many waters. And that is spot on.

The biggest rivers have mouths wide enough to contain the island of Barbados. But unlike many of the world’s other great rivers, and make no mistake about it, these are great rivers. They are as much obstacles as highways. The rivers of the Guianas don’t allow shipping due to rapids.

The only vessels that can go very far up them are canoes small enough that you can drag them across land. So the water has for the longest time sealed any interior communities off from the world and therefore limited development. Without an airplane it can take up to four weeks

To get into the interior. All roads stick to the coast and throughout the Guyanas there isn’t even a single natural harbor. It has not historically been a recipe for economic flourishing. Huge tracks of the Guiana Shield are only vaguely described. And each year when scientists can penetrate it,

They yield new species. The Guyanas have the biggest ants in the world, and the biggest freshwater fish. They have jaguars, stingrays, electric eels, and swarms of bugs ready to drink your blood. It’s either an ecological paradise or a tropical hell. A land that humans have never really possessed.

It starts with the muddy coastline, which gives way to swamps in the thick rainforest. These are bound to the south by the Akaray and Tumukumak Mountains, which define the rim of the Amazon Basin. In the Guiana Highlands there are sandstone tabletop mountains called Tepuis. Because of their steep sides,

The tops of many of these are completely separated from the jungle below, and are ecological islands, having evolved their own unique plant and animal species. They are also the source of the world’s highest waterfalls, such as Angel Falls in Venezuela. And it was to visit one of these

That I got up early one morning in Georgetown, Guyana, to take a plane to the mighty Kaiteur Falls. (dramatic music) We flew over Georgetown and Southwest, deep into the interior. Throughout the Guianas, both regulated and unregulated gold mining is a serious problem. The work for much of it done by illegal migrants from Venezuela and Brazil working in the shadows. The flight from Guyana’s capital to its flagship tourist destination reveals mine after mine, scarring the forest. A short walk from the runway is the lookout. On this occasion, there wasn’t so much to see, but luckily there are more lookouts, just a short walk through the jungle. And from there, you can see Kaiteur in all its magnificence.

Every minute, 24 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water fall 27 stories in height. A river almost as large as the Thames slides through the jungle and into mid-air to fall 226 meters and run down a valley more enchanting than any I have ever seen.

In this stunning physical beauty, the Guianas collided with colonialism. Out of the jungle, the Europeans carved these little demographic experiments that became what the Guianas are today. In the next part of this video, we will look at the people’s history of the Guianas.

In telling the indigenous history of South America before Europeans arrived, nothing is certain due to a lack of written and even archaeological sources. With little stone to build with, the jungle pretty quickly has reclaimed most of what the indigenous people left behind.

As a result, much of what I discuss here is going to be about what the Europeans did. Regrettably, the Amerindian perspective on all these things is largely missing. This is because the European sources are more or less the only ones we have. So whenever I say something like

“unexplored” that is always an obviously with the caveat that Amerindian people had been living in the Guianas for millenia and knew the land better than anyone did either before or in fact since. Now you’ll also notice I’m using the word “Amerindian”. Unlike in other parts of South America, that

Is the most common word used in the Guianas. While I was travelling in the region, I was talking to a Makushi girl who told me that there is actually debate within Amerindian communities about whether Amerindian or indigenous is the better word to use, so it’s not settled.

She told me that Amerindian remains the standard and that’s also what I’ve read, so that’s what I’m using, even if that isn’t usually used elsewhere in South America. So this is what we know. The Guianas were largely populated with Arawak speaking people. These are the same people that spread

Throughout the Caribbean islands, eventually being partly replaced by the Caribs, who also came from the Guianas, and who gave the Caribbean its name. These two groups, the Caribs and the Arawaks, are who met Alonso de Ojeda’s first expedition from Spain at the Essequibo River in 1499.

After sorting through a few names, the Europeans called this area the “Wild Coast”. In theory, Spain was the first European empire to claim this area, as well as the rest of the Western Hemisphere, with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, when the Pope split the

World between the Spanish and the Portuguese. It was another 30 years before anyone tried to land, and they were attacked by the locals. Spanish interests understandably diminished after this, and they only ever occupied the northwest end, which is now part of Venezuela. The Portuguese colonized the southern portion,

Which is now the Brazilian state of Amapa, and the bit in between, well, that was up for grabs. So with the Spanish losing interest, the first proper European explorer was the Englishman Walter Raleigh in 1594. He was searching, like many at the time, for El Dorado.

He told of rumors of a city made of gold and described attractive women with an environment overflowing with bounteous food, which stimulated more European interest. The people that became the Pilgrims in the United States actually flirted with the idea of planting New England along this coast.

By the end of the 1500s, the Dutch were beginning to sniff around. They were the first to stitch together a viable economic entity. They were most interested in trade rather than colonization, and throughout the 17th century, the Dutch established trading outposts under the banner of the Dutch West India Company.

They were always competing with the English, and both the English and the Dutch were periodically harassed by the Spanish and Portuguese, who argued that this was their land because the Pope said so. And the whole time settlements were collapsing because of being destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese,

Or because of conflicts with the natives. The French joined this game of musical chairs as well, though their first attempts collapsed within months. For the next 200 years, the three great European powers of France, Britain, and Holland would snatch each other’s colonies up and down the coast.

These were wars that always began and ended in Europe, and there were nine of them. First Dutch, second Dutch, Grand Alliance, Spanish succession, Jenkins Air, Austrian succession, Seven Years, American Independence, and Napoleonic. During this time, what is now Guyana changed hands nine times, Suriname six times,

And French Guiana seven times. At one point, the Dutch had all three, and so did the British. But throughout these centuries, this entire game was played out almost entirely on the coast. The Dutch, for example, only ever visited about 4% of the land they claimed.

So at the end of all this warfare, the Europeans carved out shares that more or less reflected their military power at the time. Britain got the biggest part, an area about as large as the UK itself. This would become Guyana. Dutch Guyana was half the size of this, and would become Suriname.

Then France was left with the smallest territory on the entire continent, which would become France. I mean, it’s still literally a part of France, but we’ll cover that later in the series. All of this, however, is not to say the borders are settled. Venezuela, for example, right now,

Claims almost 70% of Guyana, another topic we’re going to dive into in the next few videos. So what were the Europeans trying to do? By the 1700s, the Europeans were addicts, and they would pay any amount to get their fix. The drug, of course, was sugar.

An investor in sugar could double his capital in less than three years, and sugar from the Guianas created millionaires in Bristol and Amsterdam. The Guianas became the archetypal plantation colonies. Sugar dominated the economy of the Guanas for over 300 years, creating a ruling class known as the Plantocracy.

Before its decline in the 1860s, sugar was 95% of British Guanas exports. Sugar has shaped the Guianas, transforming both the population and the landscape. You can still see it from space. Mile upon mile of oblongs: sugarcane fields. For each square mile of cane,

10 million tons of earth needed to be shifted, and 65 miles of drainage canals dug, and none of this work was done by Europeans. After finding that the native people weren’t suitable as slave labor, mostly due to their susceptibility to old world diseases, the mass importation of Africans began.

These colonies were entirely the creation of slaves. They chopped the wood, stacked the bricks, dug the canals, cleared the roads, planted the cane, and harvested the sugar. The history of almost everyone in the Guanas in one way or another leads back to slavery.

It’s in the language people talk, the food they eat, and of course, in the people themselves. All the Europeans got involved in the slave trade. The Dutch brought the first slaves in 1652, and even minor players like the Danes and the Swedes brought human cargoes to the wild coast.

But it was the English who made this an industry. By 1760, they had a fleet of 146 slave boats capable of carrying 36,000 slaves. To quote John Gimlette again, “No one knows how many African lives were merged with the Guainese clay… but it must be hundreds of thousands.”

This was the transatlantic slave trade, which between 1500 and 1840, transferred some 12 million Africans to the Americas. In the same period, around 3.4 million Europeans crossed the ocean as well. In other words, for the first three centuries of European colonization of the Western Hemisphere,

For every European that came to the Americas, three Africans made the same journey. The crowds on the streets of this new America were African crowds. The farmers were African farmers. Until the later mass migrations of Europeans at the end of the 19th century, demographically speaking,

The colonization of the Americas was an extension of Africa into the Western Hemisphere. And nowhere was this truer than in the Guianas. The slaves were given new names, erasing their history, and they learned the languages of their masters, usually English. Throughout Guyana and Suriname,

The most widely spoken languages today are Creoles. Guyanese Creole in Guyana, and Sranan Tongo in Suriname. There are also the languages of the maroon communities in Suriname and French Guiana, like Saramaken, Ndyuka, Matawai, and Kwinti, all based on English, though with substantial injections of African, Amerindian, and other languages.

One of them, Ndyuka, even has its own script. And today’s people of African descent are themselves divided into Creoles, who are mostly located along the coast, and Maroons, who are descendants of people who escaped slavery and settled in the interior regions, self-sufficient and beyond the reach of Europeans

For literal centuries. In Suriname, almost one in six people is descended from maroons, or runaway slaves. For 200 years, they lived completely separately in the interior, speaking their own languages and practicing their own religions. In fact, in some ways, there was as much or more African culture

In the jungles of the Guianas as there was in parts of Africa. Theirs is a fascinating story, which we will delve into in the Suriname videos. Chattel slavery made slaves anonymous. They were something to be bought and sold in stores, entirely based on their physical characteristics.

And the slave owners that ultimately owned them, for the most part, never even set eyes on them. They were thousands of miles away, safe from the disease and the heat, getting rich in London or Paris or Amsterdam. From 1652 until 1870,

When the Dutch finally ended it in their colony, slavery defined the Guianas. Meanwhile, as their lands were invaded by people from other continents, the Amerindians were forced back into the hinterland. Now they make up only about 3% of the population of the three Guianas.

However, even they played their part in the slave trade, respected for their skill in tracking down runaways and taking a place in the colonial hierarchy, just below the whites. And then into this story, we have another group of people, because for all of the scale

Of the transatlantic slave trade, the largest ethnic group in both Guyana and Suriname today is not African and certainly isn’t Europeans, it is Indian. And no, I’m not talking about indigenous people from the Americas, I’m talking about Indians from India. After the abolition of slavery in the colonies,

The plantations still needed labor. And so Indians were brought as indentured servants. Now they are about 40% of the population of Ghana and over a quarter of Suriname’s. They too are a massive part of the story of the Guanas, as you will soon see. To make it more complicated,

You have the Hmong communities brought by the French from Indochina to French Guiana, and in Suriname, the substantial community of Javanese, who were recruited from the Dutch colony of Indonesia, now making up well over 10% of the population. The Guianas, you could say, are a demographic science experiment

Composed mostly of people who didn’t really want to go there. So that, broadly speaking, is the story of the Guianas. In this series of videos, we will look at each of them in turn, the history, the society, the politics. There’s a lot going on.

At the top of South America are three small territories. Until about ten years ago, not a single road connected them to the outside world. They are some of the world’s least talked about places and yet all three have interesting stories to tell. Stories of sugar and slavery, calypso and cults. In this series of videos I’m going to tell the story, of the Guianas…

Books
– John Gimlette, Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge, 2011
– John Hemming, Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon, 2008
– Charles C. Mann, 1491: The Americas Before Columbus, 2005
– Charles C. Mann, 1493: How the Ecological Collision of Europe and the Americas Gave Rise to the Modern World, 2011
– McNeill, J. R, Mosquito Empires; Ecology and War in the Greater Carribbean, 2010
– English colonies in Guiana and on the Amazon, 1604-1668, James A. Williamson, 1923

Articles
– The Economist
– Tim Merrill, ed. Guyana: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1992.
– ‘A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas’, Adam Rutherford The Atlantic, 2017
– Suriname: 2016 Country Review, www.countrywatch.com
– ‘Genome-wide Ancestry and Demographic History of African-Descendant Maroon Communities from French Guiana and Suriname’, Fortes-Lima et al, Am J Hum Genet. 2017
– FREIRE, José R. Bessa. “Da ‘fala boa’ ao português na Amazônia brasileira”. Amerindia. Revue d’Ethnolinguistique Amerindienne, Paris, 1983, 8, pp. 39-83
– ‘MI5 files reveal details of 1953 coup that overthrew British Guiana’s leaders’, Associated Press, The Guardian, 2011
– Richard Price, ‘Maroons in Guyane: Getting the Numbers Right’, Brill, 7th December 2018
– Scott B. MacDonald, ‘Has anything changed since French Guiana’s 2017 social upheaval?’, April 20, 2021
– ‘A Path to Prosperity for Oil-Rich Guyana’, Harvard International review, 27 September, 2023
– ‘Venezuelans to vote in referendum over large swathe of territory under dispute with Guyana’, AP, December 3rd 2023

00:00 Intro
00:56 Overview
04:47 Kaieteur Falls
08:24 A People’s History of the Guianas
14:25 The Transatlantic Slave Trade
18:10 Arrivals from India
19: Conclusion