The Writer and the World (80 page)

Almost from the start he had “the oppressed sugar workers as his base”—to use words from the back cover of the 1966 East German edition of his autobiography,
The West on Trial.
After nearly fifty years, those workers (or their descendants) are still there, more or less. And it may be that the very purity of Cheddi Jagan’s Marxist view has helped to freeze people in their old roles.

S
UCCESS
came early to him. In 1947 he became the youngest member of the colonial Legislative Council of British Guiana. In 1950 he and others launched the People’s Progressive Party. This was an extraordinary alliance of the two main racial groups of Guyana—the Africans (as they were called), descended from the slaves, and the East Indians, who had replaced the Africans on the plantations. In 1953 this party came overwhelmingly to power. It seemed then that Jagan was about to become the first leader of the first communist state in the New World. (Fidel Castro was to emerge five to six years later.) Jagan and his wife, Janet, became very famous. For a time they were demon figures in the British popular press, filling this journalistic hot spot somewhere in the interim between Mossadeq of Iran, who nationalized his country’s oil, and Nasser of Egypt, who nationalized the Suez Canal.

But British Guiana was not Iran or Egypt. British Guiana in 1953 was
only a colony. After three months in office, the Jagan administration was dismissed by the London government, the colony’s constitution was suspended, and British troops were sent. Under this pressure the PPP split easily into its African and Indian components. The African and Indian populations of Guyana were almost evenly balanced. Below the Marxist words on both sides Guyana went back to its more instinctive racial ways.

The Indian vote returned Jagan to power in 1957 and again in 1961. But it was the African party that—with American help, and after serious racial disturbances—won the pre-independence elections of 1964. Ever since then, through a series of rigged elections, Cheddi Jagan and his Indian followers have been kept out of power, while—until 1984—Guyana followed a kind of Marxist-African way and became a “cooperative republic.” For the last six years there has been a turning away from “cooperative” principles; but Guyana is now as wretched as any place in Eastern Europe.

Every important industry—bauxite, rice—was taken over by the African-controlled government; and the government gave jobs, or created jobs, for its supporters. So the communist-style tyranny of the state was also a racial tyranny; and the corruptions, petty and big, had a further racial twist. Everything became rotten in this state; everything began to lose money. More and more money was printed; in the racist state, the Guyana currency, once on a par with the currency of a place like Trinidad, became almost worthless. Imports were regulated, many items banned. Guyanese of all races began to pine for certain simple and cheap foods they had grown up on—New Brunswick sardines, Canadian flour, Canadian smoked herrings and salted fish. At a time of plenty in neighboring Trinidad (because of the oil boom of the 1970s), Guyana was experiencing want. Guyanese began to leave, legally and illegally, Indians at first, and then others; they went to Trinidad and Canada and the United States. More than a third of the Guyanese population now lives abroad.

Georgetown, the capital, once one of the most beautiful wood-built cities of the world (with the great hardwood forests just a few miles inland), weathered and decayed. Over the run-down city there now rises, at the end of one of the principal avenues, an extraordinary, mocking monument of the Cooperative Republic: a giant African-like figure, long-armed and apparently dancing, with what looks like cabalistic
emblems on its limbs. This figure of African re-awakening is said to honor Cuffy, the leader of a slave revolt in Guyana in 1763; but there are black people who believe that—whatever the sculptor intended—the figure was also connected with some kind of obeah working on behalf of Forbes Burnham, the Guyanese African leader. Mr. Burnham is believed to have, in the end, mixed his Marxism with obeah, and to have had an obeah consultant.

I
N THE
G
EORGETOWN
Botanical Gardens—one of the many such gardens, of experiment and scholarship, established by the British in various parts of the empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—there is another, complementary monument of Mr. Burnham’s rule. It is the mausoleum that was put up for Mr. Burnham after his death in 1984. It is a spiderlike structure, with a low central pavilion with an outer colonnade of concrete brackets that look like spider’s legs. The intention was that the founder of the Cooperative Republic should be embalmed and displayed for ever, like Lenin; but something went wrong and the body decomposed before it could be treated.

Through all of this—Marxism and racial tyranny, and economic death, and obeah—Cheddi Jagan has sat at his post, the leader of his party, always there, the possessor of a purer Marxist way, waiting to be called. His support has always come from the Indians, but he has never accepted that he is just a racial leader. In the hardest times of African oppression he has supported whatever legislation came up that could be seen as socialist or Marxist. So, to some, out of the very purity of his Marxist vision, he has conspired against both the interests of his supporters and his own political success.

He is seventy-two now. With the disappearance of communism in Europe, and now that it no longer matters to the United States or Russia what happens in Guyana, the elections coming up may be free: and Cheddi Jagan may at last win. But times are now very hard indeed, with interest rates of 34 per cent, with the Guyana dollar worth an American cent, and with worthwhile foreign money staying away. All that a rational government could do is to reverse the nationalizations of the last twenty-five years. So that power, if it does come to Jagan, seems likely to end in failure, or the undoing of his legend.

Cheddi Jagan’s party headquarters, Freedom House, is an old white
wooden building in a bazaar-like street. I went to meet him there. He was grey, with glasses, but brisk. He was in a short-sleeved slate-blue safari suit. It revealed a certain fleshiness about his waist, but for a man of seventy-two he was in remarkable shape; and I felt that this was important to him as a politician.

He said he had no illness: every year since 1966 he had had a check-up in one of the “socialist countries.” He spoke the now old-fashioned words without hesitation, so that in the little upstairs room of Freedom House, with the easy chairs and the coffee cups and all the papers, and with a view, through the open door, of the inner office with a framed black-and-white print of a drawing of Marx and Engels and Lenin, it was as though, whatever had happened outside, nothing had changed here.

I wanted to know how he had endured since 1964, what internal resources he had drawn on, why he hadn’t given up, like many of his followers. He appeared not to understand the question. He spoke instead of the past, of the beginnings of his movement, and the great years from 1948 to 1964. He spoke with his old vigour, and in his academic, public-meeting way, ticking off points on his long fingers, and managing complete sentences that were full of facts and names and references.

He telescoped the twenty-six years since 1964. Then, answering a question of his own, rather than one I had asked, he said that people had often asked him why he hadn’t gone in for “armed struggle.” He called to someone in the outer office to bring him some papers. When they were brought, he took one which dealt with the Guyanese deficit. This sheet, smudged and printed on both sides, had been rolled off an antiquated “duplicator,” and it had the acrid, oily smell of the duplicator ink. The graphs, not easy to read, showed that the Guyanese deficit had grown from 4.2 million Guyana dollars in 1965 to 1,309 million in 1988. The point he was making—and it was almost as though it was part of an old political strategy—was that it was better for the government to be undermined by its own stupendous deficit rather than by armed struggle, “which you were bound to lose.”

Here his wife put her head through the door. Thirty years had passed since I had last seen her. I had remembered a woman of a great attractiveness. Thirty years, applied, as it were, all at once, had made her scarcely recognizable. At first I saw only the pale colour of her abundant hair, and the colours of her clothes, tan and black, foreign colors in the setting, not Guyanese or Caribbean colors. She was thinner in face,
plumper and looser lower down, and she wore slacks; and her skin was looser. But then her eyes, her light voice (still American after nearly fifty years in Guyana), and her nervous laugh began to fit the younger person I had remembered.

Her talk was of her two children and her five grandchildren. Her son, now forty, lived in Chicago, where his father had studied. Her daughter lived in Canada.

In 1961 Janet Jagan’s reputation in Guyana was that of the foreign white woman revolutionary, an American Jewish radical. Now it was said that she had withdrawn. An old political enemy said, “She’s matronly, but don’t tell her I said so.”

G
UYANA
was the first place I travelled to as a writer. It was part of a project on European colonies in the Caribbean and South America. I was twenty-eight. I was an artless traveller, and was soon to discover that, whatever the excitements of new landscapes and of being on the move, a journey didn’t necessarily result in a narrative on the page.

As a political observer I was uncertain and diffident. I thought that in this kind of writing I had to take people on trust. I cast aside—as belonging to another form—my novelist’s doubts. So in my book I wrote more romantically than I actually felt about the African or black racial movement of the late 1950s. I allowed myself to see it as it was presented to me, as a kind of redemption. I suppressed my fears about its glibness and sentimentality, and its element of viciousness.

And although I spent some time with the Jagans, formally and informally, in Georgetown and in various places in the country, when Cheddi Jagan was premier of the colony and Janet Jagan the minister of health, I never allowed myself to believe that their Marxism was more than a British Labour party kind of socialism.

Forbes Burnham in 1961 was leader of the opposition. He was witty and mischievous, very black and smooth-skinned, already heavy, though still with the manner of the bright scholarship boy. He carried his character on his face and in his physique: but I never allowed myself to make anything of my feeling that Burnham was a sensualist and dangerous, someone at once wounded and spoilt, full of vengefulness.

And I never thought—since I shared to some extent the background of both Burnham and Jagan—that these two Marxists between them
would actually overturn the society. I saw what I thought I should see, what I was more comfortable seeing. In this I was like the people of Guyana.

B
ARTIN
C
ARTER
was one of the poets of the Guyana awakening of the early 1950s. To him much of the confusion in Guyana came from a misuse or misunderstanding of language. A word like “socialism” came to Guyana without its history, without the varied meanings given it by people like Robert Owen and Bernard Shaw and William Morris. Everyone in Guyana had his own ideas of socialism, according to the books he had read; in this matter people did not always understand one another. Not everyone would think of socialism as an economic system. “A socialist would become simply a good man, a nice man. And that remained the idea about socialism for a long time among the general population here. Today that is different, because everything that has gone wrong is associated with socialism.”

And Martin Carter told this story: “Pandit Misir, a brahmin from the west bank of the Demerara River, was a member of Cheddi’s party. This was at a place called Vreed-en-Hoop—which, incidentally, had been owned by John Gladstone, father of William Ewart Gladstone, the British prime minister. Cheddi had been distributing booklets sent out by the British Communist party to its friends not only in Georgetown but in the Third World. Among the booklets was one called
Capitalist Society.
This would be before the elections in ’53.

“There was a public meeting called by Cheddi on the west bank at which Pandit Misir functioned as the chairman. It was a huge crowd. And the pandit—he would have been between thirty-five and forty-five, but he looked much older—was in his top form because of the crowd and the presence of Cheddi Jagan.

“He told the crowd that before he introduced Cheddi he would like to tell them something himself. Upon which he declared: ‘Dey got a t’ing called capitalist society. Um [it, in the local pidgin] like bird-vine. When um put hand ’pon you, um don’t let go.’ Bird-vine is a result of birds cleaning their beaks on trees after having eaten a certain type of fruit, the fruit of course of the bird-vine—it’s a well-known plant to people who live on the coast.

“And that’s all that Pandit Misir said, and the crowd roared, because
they understood that the pandit intended to convey to them that capitalist society was something oppressive. Which means that all the plantation experience had been summed up in the two words, ‘capitalist society.’ Pandit Misir himself didn’t know better. He was a slim, tall man. A passionate man, and what he said about bird-vine would convey much more than Cheddi’s disquisition on the theory of surplus value of Karl Marx.”

So that—in this analysis—somewhere between the pidgin of Pandit Misir and the vague set phrases of Marxist lore, the realities of Guyana would have been distorted or lost. And one side of the terrible farce of the Cooperative Republic would have begun to be prepared.

A
N ASSOCIATE
of Cheddi Jagan’s in the late 1940s was Sydney King, an African village schoolteacher. He broke away from the Jagan party in the mid-1950s. At some later stage he had an African transformation. “With the Indians glorying in their civilization, Africans here had a sense of self-pity.” And, as part of an “African naming movement” that he tried to get started, Sydney King gave himself the name of Eusi Kwayana.