How Guyana Was Made

How Guyana Was Made

If all goes to plan, Guyana is about to get rich. In 2015, ExxonMobil made one of the biggest oil strikes of the past 50 years in the waters off the coast of Guyana. Already the economy is twice as big as it was before the strike

And Guyana is on track to become one of the western hemisphere’s richest countries. But Guyana is also a country of deep, deep social fractures. It has the world’s 20th highest homicide rate, almost three times the global average. So how did this tiny paradise get this way?

Like so many countries in the New World, the answer originates in its colonial experience. But compared to Brazil or Colombia or El Salvador, the story of Guyana is a little different. It’s very different. This video is about how the European Empire smashed together the people of three different continents to create

This little colony of sugar. These videos tell stories of places and people, as I try to find the echoes of the past in the world of the present. So let’s start with the story of Guyana. I’ve touched on the broader colonial history of the region in the previous video, but to recap, Christopher Columbus stopped by in 1498,

Then Sir Walter Raleigh charged through here searching for El Dorado almost 100 years later. Though Spain claimed it due to the Treaty of Tordesillas in which the Pope… The land which is the three modern Guianas was sliced and diced and traded back and forth for centuries between France, Britain and the Netherlands, all

The while being attacked by the Spanish and Portuguese who still claimed it. This all came to an end with the Convention of London in 1814 which gave Britain what was then British Guiana, the Dutch what was then Dutch Guiana but is now Suriname and the French French Guiana or Guyane.

While it was under Dutch control, Guyana was run by the Dutch West India Company, a private corporation for over 170 years although it was operated as three separate colonies, Essequibo, Berbice and Demerara which weren’t unified until being joined together by the British. You can call this Dutch rule if you like

But 96% of Guiana still remained unvisited and unexplored and was inhabited by Amerindian groups. The Dutch only truly controlled the fertile edge on the coast but out on that edge the landscape had been transformed by sugar, mile after mile of flat featureless grids of sugarcane, much of it below sea level and protected

By their famous dykes, ten miles deep all along the coast. As the indigenous population was inconveniently dying of introduced diseases shortly after being enslaved for the plantations, they began the massive import of African slaves. Under the Dutch, brutality knew no limits. Because the slaves owned nothing, it was difficult to punish them.

All that could be taken from them was their body parts. Arms, feet, breasts and testicles would be sliced off as punishment, without trial and without anesthetic. For each amputation the colony doctor was paid £6 and through it all it was often Africans administering the punishment. Indigenous people were drawn into the

Economy as well and for each runaway slave they recovered they would receive 400 gilders or 200 for an arm. The Dutch lived a life of relentless extravagant luxury. Europeans were outnumbered by slaves 11 to 1 and only a quarter of the slaves were working the sugarcane.

The rest were there to service the lives of the Dutch who sank into deeper and deeper depravity. But the thing was, many of these slaves were experienced warriors who had been captured by rivals in Africa then sold to the Europeans who brought them. So they weren’t in fact ready to simply be passive.

The most famous of these uprisings was the Berbice slave uprising which began in February 1763. At the time in Berbice there were only 346 whites with almost 4,000 Africans. In the entire Berbice colony there were only about two dozen soldiers. So on two plantations on the Canj River, enslaved Africans rose up.

The rebels burnt mansions and hacked apart their overlords. The wife of one brutal manager was decapitated and her head spared on a stick. The European population fled. Coffy, or Cuffy, their leader and now a national hero of Guyana led an army of slaves that threatened European control over the entire Guianas.

But it didn’t last long. The British and French both lent the Dutch their troops. After all, considering their own empires, a successful slave rebellion would be a dangerous precedent. Though the extra European firepower was important, much of the actual fighting was done by Amerindians hired by the Dutch.

And with the Europeans now having shown up, the slaves that were still in the hands of the planters saw the writing on the wall and rallied to their masters. Many of them were mixed-race Creoles and perhaps saw their rebellion as an African war. So the Berbice slave revolt was put down

Mostly by Amerindians and Africans, not Europeans. The rebellion collapsed into a patchwork of civil wars and was snuffed out. But the Berbice river would never again be lined with plantations. A third of the white population had fled or died as well as half the slaves. On 16th March 1764, 53 of

The rebels were sentenced. 15 were burned over slow fires, 16 tied to the rack and broken with hammers, and the rest were hanged. Slavery in the Americas, at all times and in all places, was a brutal business. This revolt for many Afro-Guyanese remains the most important moment in their history.

They still celebrate it with holidays and statues. Unlike emancipation or even independence, for many this was the point, perhaps the only point when they became agents in their own story. Unlike in Suriname, no substantial community of Maroons or runaway slaves was ever formed in Guyana. But Guyana wouldn’t be in

Dutch hands much longer. And one morning I left Georgetown, Guyana’s capital, to explore the Essequibo, Guyana’s biggest river, in search of what was left of Dutch rule. Throughout the Guianas I was travelling with my friend Dan, who had joined me for the trip. We left for the Essequibo River early one Sunday morning:

Market day. We went along the coast, past towns called Rotterdam, Mary & Harlem, and Waller’s Delight. We arrived in Parika. On the dock we found a party boat, where the festivities were just getting started. The Essequibo runs for some thousand miles, making it Guyana’s largest river, and the

Third largest in all of South America. It flows around 365 different islands. Where it meets the Atlantic, its mouth is 32km wide. Here the banks of the Essequibo were once the richest farmlands in the world. This map from 1796 shows how the banks of the Essequibo were once covered in sugar plantations.

As measured by what the Europeans were willing to trade in their treaties, this area was given the same value as vast areas of West Africa, or the Indian city of Madras. It wasn’t long before we got ourselves a ride, heading up river to Bartica. The banks of the river are now clad in jungle. Almost all of this used to be from plantations. Bartica is a gold mining town, sitting between the Essequibo and the Maseruni. You can see gold everywhere in Bartica. It is, surprisingly, the largest town in the Guyanese interior. Most of the miners I’ve read are Brazilians. There’s a shadow economy here as well, and I’ve read that plenty of the gold

Sneaks out through back channels, passing cocaine on its way out. In Bartica, all the streets are sponsored by Pepsi. It’s hard to really wrap your mind around the fact that this isn’t a muddy lake. It’s a river. It’s Sunday afternoon and the beach is busy. And Dan can’t resist a swim. Bartica is a quiet town and on a Sunday night almost everything was closed. We found a Chinese place and got a vegetable chow mein each for about $4. The next morning we’re back in the boat to go to Fort Island. Fort Island was once the capital of the Dutch colonies of Essequibo and Demerara. It protected Dutch interests against European rivals. The center of this was Fort Zealandia, built of course by African slaves. The shape of the fort, like a lozenge, is modelled on similar West African forts from the same period.

It was from here that the Dutch administered the colony of cruelty. After checking out the fort, it started to rain. A man invited us to shelter under his roof, and when the rain stopped, he showed us around his garden. So what are these palms? Will they be coconut? Yeah, they are coconut. I got this, soursop tree. Sweet corn. Next week I get corn. Ah, it’ll come next week. Cool. Hot po. Yeah, you eat it all. Never eaten anything like that before. Well, it grows also wild. Yeah, no, it’s not wild

Really. We planted it. Interesting. So you guys could like take how much you want, you know. You want, right? Yeah. Listen to me. Take it, man. Fruit’s good by fruit. Yeah, thank you so much. It’s really nice. You’re welcome. Anytime you come back, Guyana. Now only about 70 people live on the

Island, down from some to 100. There’s a small museum on the island and set in cold metal on the floor, an insignia that perhaps accurately commemorates Dutch rule in Guyana. As well as the fort in the museum, they have a small school and a shop. The lady in the shop

Offered us a ride back to Parika. This entire coast is below sea level protected by an impressive sea wall, another legacy of the Dutch and their engineering expertise. From the playground we headed back to Georgetown for a dinner of Creole food, Indian curry, flavors filtered through generations spent on the edge of South America. Meanwhile, back in Bartica, the light is fading over the river. This little gold mining town in the interior was the scene of an event that is sadly representative of the crime and social fracture that is all too common in Guyana today, another part of the legacy of the violence of colonialism.

On the night of February 17th, 2008, some 20 masked, camouflaged gunmen, led by a man named Rondell ‘Fineman’ Rawlins, arrived on speedboats and landed at the Transport and Harbour’s Wharf. They attacked the police station first, stealing guns, cash, ammunition and a vehicle. They then rode around Bartica, shooting

At civilians and attacking the offices of a mining company, stealing more cash and gold. At the Wharf, ready to depart, they executed six more. After the hour-long rampage, twelve people were dead. The whole thing is shady. A few weeks earlier, the gang had murdered another dozen people in just 20

Minutes in the village of Lusignan. Once again, the police were slow to respond. Rawlins, who was already wanted for the assassination of the agriculture minister in 2006, was later killed by the Guyanese security forces. Guyana, it has to be said, is not for beginners. Anyone that has spent any time in Georgetown can tell you that, and can feel that. We haven’t finished the story about how Guyana became the way that it is. And the last piece of the demographic puzzle was yet to fall into place.

For that, we need to turn to the British. So the next phase in Guyana’s history starts with the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars. France occupied the Netherlands, Britain declared war on France, and in 1796 took over these three little sugary colonies on the South American coast. Guyana was briefly returned to the Dutch, but when war broke out once

Again, the British regained them. And in 1814, at the London Convention, Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice were all formally ceded to Britain. In 1831, Britain united them into what was then called British Guyana. And those, more or less, are the borders we have today. Economically, not a huge amount changed. Political, economic, and social

Life continued to be dominated by the Plantocracy. Below them was a small number of freed slaves, many of mixed African and European heritage, with some Portuguese merchants. At the bottom, of course, was the great mass of African slaves. On the periphery of all this were the Amerindians, living in small

Concentrations in the interior. Though the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807, that was just the transportation part, and in Guyana, slavery ground on, evolving in increasingly perverse ways. Some slaves even had their own slaves. With no more slaves able to be imported, in Guyana they were encouraged to breed.

One of the agricultural societies in Stabroek offered a medal to the plant who raised the greatest number of baby slaves. In other words, it was the farming of human beings. There was another rebellion in 1823, in which over 10,000 slaves rose up in the Demerara and Essequibo regions. Hundreds were executed and their

Heads stuck on poles to be displayed in the gardens. And yet 15 years later, in 1838, they were all free. What followed emancipation was an immediate exodus from the plantations, as the former slaves moved to the towns and villages. To this day, urban Guyana is largely dominated by Afro-Guyanese.

So now, with an acute shortage of labour, the ethnic composition of the colony would change once again. The British authorities turned to elsewhere in the empire, and nowhere had a surplus of people quite like India. They were coming not as slaves, but as indentured workers, signing contracts to

Work for a period of time in return for their transport and the provision of food, shelter and basic necessities. In theory, at the end of their contract, they would return to India with savings from their work. In practice, however, workers often received little or no pay and worked long hours in difficult conditions.

The coolies, as they became known, weren’t much better off than the Africans before. They were confined to their plantations, and without knowing it had signed up to being fined and flogged, it didn’t take long before they were revolting as well. In the hundred years until 1950, there were at least 16 major revolts.

It has to be said, though, that unlike the Africans, they weren’t stripped of their names, their languages, or their religions. However, just like the Africans, most never ended up making it home. Between 1838 and 1917, when a shortage of wartime shipping and opposition inside India bought the traffic to an end,

Almost a quarter of a million Indians arrived in Guyana. Now, Indo-Guyanese are the single largest ethnic group in the country. Nearly 40% of the population today descends from people bought here from India. Meanwhile, changes were afoot. The planters were beginning to lose their hold on the colony. A new Afro-Guyanese middle class had

Started to build up and was demanding changes. In 1909, Afro-Guyanese became for the first time a majority of eligible voters. This wasn’t a full democracy, of course, but it was a start. Guyana’s economy had also gradually become less dependent on sugar and more on rice and bauxite, creating new power

Centers aside from the planters. By the end of World War II, Guyana’s political system had expanded political awareness. Independence was on the horizon. This is when the structure of Guyana’s politics that would determine its modern history was formed around two political parties and two peculiar characters. The first was the People’s Progressive

Party, or PPP, founded in 1950. It started as a multi-ethnic, center-left party with support from both Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese. The party chairman was an Afro-Guyanese called Linden Forbes Burnham. He had won a scholarship to study in Britain as British Guyana’s brightest student, getting a law degree from the London School of Economics.

The PPP’s leader in parliament was called Cheddi Jagan. His parents were born in India, and he had studied to be a dentist in the United States, where he met Janet Rosenberg, a Jewish-American communist who became his wife. She’s going to pop up a little later in the story, so remember the name.

These two brilliant men, Burnham and Jagan, would shape independent Guyana. So the PPP gained momentum, uniting both African and Indian voters in sweeping elections. But the British, who still controlled the colony, were worried about their anti-capitalist message, as were the colony’s business interests. Soon Burnham and Jagan began to struggle

For power within the party, and support for each of them quickly began to fall mostly, though at this point still not entirely along ethnic lines, with Afro-Guyanese supporting Burnham and Indo-Guyanese supporting Jagan. That is when Burnham broke away to form the second of our two important political parties,

The People’s National Conference, or PNC. The fault line running through Guyana’s society was beginning to crack open. Meanwhile, for Guyana, there was no struggle for independence. Britain, reeling from World War II, couldn’t wait to get rid of the colony. But in the 1950s, what worried them, and its ally the United

States, was communism. Now crucially, as he broke away, Burnham moved towards the political center, while Jagan stayed on the left. This would change everything. Jagan, leader of the PPP, was now sounding a lot like a communist. Into London Airport comes the man around whom revolves the grave situation in British Guyana.

Dr. Chedi Jagan, the deposed Prime Minister of the colony, is here to protest against the government’s claim that he and his American-born wife led a plot to make Guyana a communist control state. World attention focuses on Georgetown, as the British government takes action to halt the growth of communism in the country.

From the headquarters, papers and pamphlets are removed for closer scrutiny by police authorities, and a portrait of Stalin goes with them as evidence. The British government claims that such strict measures have been taken to forestall a threatened, red-directed revolt in Guyana. These two, say the colonial office, have strengthened their links with Moscow

Since the doctor came to power, and have used the People’s Progressive Party to spread the communist doctrine through the British colony they adopted as their home. So the British suspended the constitution, imposed an interim government, and sent a warship and an army to occupy Guyana. In 2011, Britain’s MI5 declassified

Documents that showed that Prime Minister Winston Churchill had the elected government of Guyana overthrown, because he was afraid that Jagan was going to lead the country into alliance with the Soviet Union. Even though MI5 also found there was no evidence of them receiving outside support from any communist organization, MI5 tapped Jagan’s phone

And read his letters. Churchill wrote to his colonial secretary, “We ought surely to get American support in doing all that we can to break the communist teeth in British Guyana.” How much of an ideologue Jagan was is debatable. While it was true that he expressed support for Stalin, Mao, and Fidel Castro,

Jagan did always say that Marxism would have to be adapted to Guyana’s particular situation. Make of that what you will. The British locked up the Jagans, sending Chedi to a penal colony in the interior. And for the next three years, Guyana was ruled under emergency powers. But the problem was,

Jagan’s party wasn’t going away. In 1960, Indo-Guyanese outnumbered Afro-Guyanese at 43% of the population, compared to 38%. The PPP kept winning elections, and in 1961 Jagan was back in power. And with each election, the ethnic division was hardening. With the PPP becoming more Indo-Guyanese and the PNC becoming more Afro-Guyanese,

The politics of ‘Apan jhat’, Hindi for “vote for your own kind” was becoming the rule in Guyana. In 1958, a West Indies Federation, which is something I had never heard of, was created as a political union to join the various Caribbean islands of the British Empire into one unit on independence.

But Jagan vetoed Guyana’s inclusion because in the Federation, those of Indian descent would be greatly outnumbered by those of African descent, unlike in Guyana itself, which would almost certainly mean an erosion of Indo-Guyanese influence. This move went against a previous pledge the PPP had made and led to the final loss of

Afro-Guyanese support. Burnham, on the other hand, had learned to listen. He couldn’t win if only supported by lower class and urban Afro-Guyanese. He needed the middle class as well. Socialism wouldn’t bind the two groups together, so he chose something else. Race. And so, like that, the PNC abandoned their Marxism.

Or, at least for a while. Now the racial tension became strikes, which became riots. The Indo-Guyanese were a majority in the countryside, while the Afro-Guyanese dominated the city. Strikes would paralyze one or the other. Whole neighborhoods of Georgetown were burned. The colony was grinding to a standstill. Jagan’s government

Asked for help from Cuba. And so, in turn, the United States supported Burnham and the PNC. And in this hemisphere, it’s really the Americans you want on your side. Now Guyana was being sucked into the whirlpool of the Cold War. As writer John Gimlette put it, “British Guyana had become a little

Sugary pawn in a much bigger game.” We now know from declassified documents that the British government allowed CIA agents to use all their methods to make sure that the first leader of independent Guyana would not be Cheddi Jagan. So the CIA-funded opposition, who organized riots and disturbance, violence ripped apart the country.

There were ambushes and grenades thrown on buses, and several cinemas were blown up. In 1964, 18,000 Afro-Guyanese attacked Wismar, Guyana’s second city with petrol bombs and knives. The entire Indo-Guyanese population of 1300 was expelled to Georgetown. Eight women were raped on the way. One man was decapitated, and another burnt alive.

They renamed the town after their leader, Linden Forbes Burnham. Violence was ripping apart the country. Thousands of homes were destroyed, and hundreds were killed. The British government declared a state of emergency and assumed full powers. But now, the British and Americans had decided that Burnham, while still technically identifying the

Socialist, was preferable to Jagan, and they would help to bring him to power, meaning Afro-Guyanese rule. But with Indo-Guyanese being close to half the population, Jagan was the only plausible head of state of an independent Guyana. Putting their foot on the scale, Britain tweaked the electoral system, so that by uniting their Afro-Guyanese

Voters with the small numbers of Portuguese and Amerindians, the PNC could force the PPP out of power. Now it was the turn of the Indo-Guyanese to fight the injustice. They blew up the US consulate, injuring bystanders who included Miss Guyana. But it didn’t change anything, and like this, British Guiana hurtled towards independence.

With the Americans receiving assurances from Burnham, Guyana was ready to be freed. The PNC won the elections of 1964 in coalition with a conservative party. The socialist and mainly Afro-Guyanese PNC had joined forces with the capitalists to force out the socialist and mainly Indo-Guyanese PPP. Burnham became Prime Minister on December 14th, 1964.

He would be there for a while. Two years later, the British were finally ready to leave, and the colony was renamed Guyana. It was now on its own. As John Gimlette describes it, “So began the next 28 years, an African dictatorship in the margins of South America.” And it’s here the

Story gets really weird. A socialist dictatorship, a rebellion on the savannah, a mass suicide of an American cult, and finally, a flood of sweet, sweet oil. The next video is about independent Guyana. When the music and dancing stops, the Guyanese will return to the serious job of nation-building.

Guyana is a place of deep, deep social fractures. It has the 20th highest homicide rate in the world, almost three times the global average. Almost anywhere here in the capital city it’s strongly advised not to walk alone at night.

So how did this tiny paradise get so violent? Unlike Brazil or Colombia or El Salvador, the story of Guyana is a little different. This video looks at how the Europeans smashed together the people of three different continents to create this little colony of sugar.

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
01:22 Background
02:23 Dutch Guyana
06:47 Essequibo and Bartica
11:41 Fort Island
17:00 The British
19:40 Indentured Labour
21:30 The PPP and PNC
26:30 Racial Division
29:20 Independence