The Middle Passage Part 5

All this speaks of accord. But Trinidad in fact teeters on the brink of racial war. Politics must be blamed; but there must have been an original antipathy for the politicians to work on. Matters are not helped by the fierce rivalry between Indians and Negroes as to who despises the other more. This particular rivalry is conducted by the liberal-minded, who will not be denied the pleasure of appealing to their group to show more tolerance towards the other group, and who are deeply annoyed when it is claimed by liberals of the other party that it is the other group which has to do the tolerating. There is also considerable rivalry as to who started the despising.

It is sufficient to state that the antipathy exists. The Negro has a deep contempt, as has been said, for all that is not white; his values are the values of white imperialism at its most bigoted. The Indian despises the Negro for not being an Indian; he has, in addition, taken over all the white prejudices against the Negro and with the convert's zeal regards as Negro everyone who has any tincture of Negro blood. 'The two races,' Froude observed in 1887, 'are more absolutely apart than the white and the black. The Asiatic insists the more on his superiority in the fear perhaps that if he did not the white might forget it.' Like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise one another. They despise one another by references to the whites; and the irony is that their antagonism should have reached its peak today, when white prejudices have ceased to matter.

Few non-Indians know much about the Indians, except that they live in the country, work on the land, are rich, fond of litigation and violence. There were undoubtedly small criminal and army elements among the Indian immigrants a one or two low Indian army ranks survive as surnames a and parts of the Indian countryside, with their recurring unsolved murders, used to have a mafia-like atmosphere. Everyone in Trinidad knows that to run over an Indian in an Indian village and to stop is to ask for trouble; whether it has ever occurred that the driver who stopped was beaten up I don't know.* Nothing is known about Hinduism or Islam. The Muslim festival of Hosein, with its drum-beating and in the old days stick-fighting, is the only Indian festival which is known; Negroes sometimes beat the drums. Indian weddings are also known. There is little interest in the ritual; it is known only that at these weddings food is given to all comers. Even the simple distinction between Hindu and Muslim names is not known; and the Negro makes less effort than the average English person to p.r.o.nounce Indian names correctly. This is partly because of the att.i.tude that nothing which is not white is worth bothering about; partly because Indians are difficult to know; and partly because so many Indians have been modernizing themselves at such a rate that Indian customs have come to be regarded as things out of which people grow. So although Indians make up more than one-third of the population, their customs and ceremonies remain quaint and even exotic.

Everything which made the Indian alien in the society gave him strength. His alienness insulated him from the black-white struggle. He was taboo-ridden as no other person on the island; he had complicated rules about food and about what was unclean. His religion gave him values which were not the white values of the rest of the community, and preserved him from self-contempt; he never lost pride in his origins. More important than religion was his family organization, an enclosing self-sufficient world absorbed with its quarrels and jealousies, as difficult for the outsider to penetrate as for one of its members to escape. It protected and imprisoned, a static world, awaiting decay.

Islam is a static religion. Hinduism is not organized; it has no fixed articles, no hierarchy; it is constantly renewing itself and depends on the regular emergence of teachers and holy men. In Trinidad it could only wither; but its restrictions were tenacious. Marriage between unequal castes has only just ceased to cause trouble; marriage between Hindu and Muslim can still split a family; marriage outside the race is unthinkable. Only the urban Indian, the Indian of the middle cla.s.s, and the Christian convert were able to move easily out of the Indian framework. The Indian Christian was more liberal and adaptable in every way; but, following far behind the Negro on the weary road to whiteness, he was more insecure.

Living by themselves in villages, the Indians were able to have a complete community life. It was a world eaten up with jealousies and family feuds and village feuds; but it was a world of its own, a community within the colonial society, without responsibility, with authority doubly and trebly removed. Loyalties were narrow: to the family, the village. This has been responsible for the village-headman type of politician the Indian favours, and explains why Indian leaders.h.i.+p has been so deplorable, so unfitted to handle the mechanics of party and policy.

A peasant-minded, money-minded community, spiritually static because cut off from its roots, its religion reduced to rites without philosophy, set in a materialist colonial society: a combination of historical accidents and national temperament has turned the Trinidad Indian into the complete colonial, even more philistine than the white.

Much of the West Indian Negro's drive arises out of his desire to define his position in the world. The Indian, with no such problem, was content with his narrow loyalties. Whether he knew his language or practised his religion, the knowledge that a country called India existed was to him a pole. He felt no particular attachment to this country. It is said that Indian Independence in 1947 encouraged Indian racialism in Trinidad; but the explanation is too simple. The Trinidad Indian who was concerned about the Independence struggle and contributed large sums to various funds, washed his hands of India in 1947. The struggle was over, the shame was removed, and he could settle without self-approach into the easy, undemanding society of Trinidad. Indians who went to India returned disgusted by the poverty and convinced of their own superiority. The relations.h.i.+p between Indians from India and Indians from Trinidad quickly developed into the relations.h.i.+p of muted dislike between metropolitans and colonials, between Spaniards and Latin Americans, English and Australians.

1947 is not the date. 1946 is the date, when the first elections were held under universal adult suffrage in Trinidad. Then the bush lawyers and the village headmen came into their own, not only in the Indian areas but throughout the island. Then the loudspeaker van reminded people that they were of Aryan blood. Then, as was reported, the politician, soon to be rewarded by great wealth, bared his pale chest and shouted, 'I is a n.i.g.g.e.r too!'

Though now one racialism seems to be reacting on the other, each has different roots. Indian politicians have created Indian racialism out of a harmless egoism. Negro racialism is more complex. It is an overdue a.s.sertion of dignity; it has elements of bitterness; it has something of the urban mob requiring to be satisfied with bread and circuses. It has profound intellectual promptings as well, in the realization that the Negro problem lies not simply in the att.i.tude of others to the Negro, but in the Negro's att.i.tude to himself. It is as yet confused, for the Negro, while rejecting the guilt imposed on him by the white man, is not able to shake off the prejudices he has inherited from the white man, a duality which is responsible for what the Jamaican novelist John Hearne, on a visit to British Guiana in 1957, described as 'the pathetic nostalgia that corrupts so many Negroes. The retreat into apologies for their condition, their endless "historical" explanations and their lack of any direction. The sentimental camaraderie of skin which provides the cheap thrill of being "African".'

In the NegroaIndian conflict each side believes it can win. Neither sees that this rivalry threatens to destroy the Land of the Calypso.

It is characteristic of the Trinidad sense of humour, with its ability to turn grave international crises into private jokes, that the unsavoury and dangerous night-club stretch of Wrightson Road in Port of Spain should be called the Gaza Strip a Gunplay in Gaza Strip was a headline I saw a and that by this local a.s.sociation the name should be repeated in country cafes by proprietors anxious to give a touch of drama to their unpretentious establishments. It was not surprising, therefore, with the Congo occupying the headlines for weeks, that the sonorous names of the Congolese leaders, Kasavubu, Lumumba, Mobutu, should have caught the Trinidad imagination. Anyone in authority, particularly foremen and policemen, became Mobutu: 'Look out, boys. Mobutu coming.' The names of Kasavubu and Lumumba could be applied to anyone; and I came across one person whose temporary nickname was Dag (Hammarskjold). This sophisticated play-acting is part of that Trinidad taste for fantasy, already noted, which finds its full baccha.n.a.lian expression on the two days of Carnival.*

Then comedy turned to tragedy. Lumumba was captured, his humiliations were photographed, and he was killed. Some weeks after the news of Lumumba's death I came upon a procession in one of the main streets of Port of Spain. It was an orderly procession made up wholly of Negroes. They were singing hymns, which contrasted with the violence of their banners and placards. These were anti-white, anti-clerical and pro-African in an ill-defined, inclusive way. I had never before seen anything like it in Trinidad. It was a demonstration of that 'sentimental camaraderie of skin which provides the cheap thrill of being "African" ' of which John Hearne had written. It represented all that was barren in Negro racialism. The Gaza Strip and the policeman who was Mobutu stood for the Old Trinidad. This hymn-singing procession was the new.

I thought then that it was a purely local eruption, created by the pressures of local politics. But soon, on the journey I was now getting ready to make, I came to see that such eruptions were widespread, and represented feelings coming to the surface in Negro communities throughout the Caribbean: confused feelings, without direction; the Negro's rejection of the guilt he has borne for so long; the last, delayed Spartacan revolt, more radical than Toussaint L'Ouverture's; the closing of accounts this side of the middle pa.s.sage.

* These facts about immigration are taken from The West Indies in the Making, by four hands. London, 1960.

* 'A clever and sympathetic Indian journalist took me to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. A hundred and twenty miles by car, through the parched, dust-clouded countryside. At every village, the driver slowed down to ten miles an hour and kept his thumb on the horn. "If a car ran over a man in one of these places," my friend said, "the people would burn the car and kill the occupants." ' John Wain: 'A visit to India': Encounter, May 1961. The old province of Agra was one of the areas from which Trinidad Indians came.

* George Lamming, the Barbadian writer, encountered at Lord's cricket ground in 1957 on the day Sobers scored a hundred against the M.C.C., told of the West Indian who exclaimed delightedly: 'A century on his first appearance in the Kremlin of cricket, man. In the Kremlin.' So the drama of the cold war is adapted to homelier events.

3. BRITISH GUIANA.

If there were but a snug secretarys.h.i.+p vacant there a and these things in Demerara are very snug a how I would invoke the G.o.ddess of patronage; how I would nibble round the officials of the Colonial Office; how I would stir up my friends' friends to write little notes to their friends! For Demerara is the Elysium of the tropics a the West Indian happy valley of Ra.s.selas a the one true and actual Utopia of the Caribbean Seas a the Transatlantic Eden.

Anthony Trollope, 1860 FROM THE AIR Trinidad's Atlantic coast was outlined as on the map, the waves steadily rolling lace-patterned foam towards the sh.o.r.e, green edged with yellow. The waves began far out and rolled in evenly. On the bright blue water cloud shadows were like submerged rocks or like dissolving drops of ink. Soon blue water turned to brown, its progressively darker shades neatly contoured and sometimes marked off in white. Then the South American continent: a grey-green tufted carpet, worn brown in patches, with rivers like cracks in drying mud. For minute after minute we moved rapidly over the unchanging, unwelcoming land, a small corner of a vast continent, where trees grew and collapsed on muddy sh.o.r.es.

One can learn much about British Guiana from the air: its size, its emptiness, the isolation of its communities. Six hundred thousand people live in a country the size of Britain, and when you fly over the populated eastern coastal strip you see why there is so much unrest in a country which, from its bigness, should be a country of opportunity. The land here is fertile. The sugarcane fields, intersected by ruler-straight ditches, are like machine-made carpets. They go on and on, until the pattern is broken by a huddle of white-and-rust wooden houses, laid out as precisely as the fields: workers' houses: sugarcane land, you feel, going to waste, and the site arbitrarily chosen, for the settlement could have been put down anywhere else in that clear green expanse. 'To force the Negroes of the Virgin Islands to work,' Michael Swan writes in The Marches of El Dorado, 'the Danes cut down their soursop trees, and today in British Guiana sugar must use a hundred subtle methods to maintain asufficient labour force a tropical people prefer a subsistence and little work to hard work and a higher standard of living.'

And emptiness. Fly to the interior. First you go over the sugarcane fields beside the brown Demerara River. Abruptly the fields stop and bush begins; and in the bush there are little irregular areas of timorous destruction a indicating att.i.tudes you will learn to a.s.sociate with British Guiana a where forest has turned to marshland, for the soil here is poor and hardwood trees cannot easily be made to grow again. Within minutes towns, fields and clearings are pa.s.sed, and you are over the forest, thick and choked and even, occasionally flawed by a river that is black or, when caught by the sun, glinting, a vein of gold or red through the dead green. And the forest continues. You cease to look, until, thirty or forty minutes later, the land breaks up into hills and valleys, beyond which lie the savannah lands, in the dry season marbled in green and brown and ochre, scratched with white trails, the beds of diminished streams lined with rich, succulent-looking palm trees. Brazil is not far away, equally empty, a vastness not to be comprehended.

It was strange then to find, as one drove from the airport to the city, that the houses were set close to one another, as on any cramped West Indian island. Bush screened the Demerara River along which we drove and which would have reminded us that we were on a continent. As it was, only the elegance of the wooden houses on tall stilts was not of the islands. The Guianese know how to build in wood; the humblest wooden dwelling has a rightness of proportion and style, while the newer concrete buildings have the recognizable West Indian insipidity and clumsiness. In wood the Guianese have built mosques with minarets and Hindu temples with bal.u.s.trades and domes; they have built a cathedral; they have even managed Victorian Gothic. They are profoundly ashamed of these wooden buildings, regarding them as signs of their poverty and backwardness, shabby subst.i.tutes for the concrete of a rich island like Trinidad; and since everyone also agrees that wooden houses are firetraps, it seems likely that soon only the very poor will live in attractive houses, and that Georgetown, the most beautiful city in the West Indies, in its elegance, unity and s.p.a.ciousness, will be destroyed.

Georgetown is a white wooden city. One would like to sketch it on rough dark grey paper, using black ink and thick white paint, to suggest the lightness and fragility of the two-storeyed buildings, a fragility most apparent at night, when light comes through verandas on the top floor, through windows, through open lattice-work, and the effect is of those Chinese ivory palace-miniatures lit up from within. The city was founded by the British but escaped being built by them a British colonial architecture in the West Indies has had few moments of glory a and was largely created by the Dutch, whose influence remains. The streets are laid out on the grid pattern, and in the Dutch manner ca.n.a.ls once ran down the centre of the main streets. Most of the ca.n.a.ls have been filled in and replaced by asphalt walks lined with the spreading, many-branched saman tree, which in appearance is a n.o.bler oak.

It was perfectly ridiculous then to feel on that first day that I was in a frontier town of the Wild West. It was the wooden buildings, I imagine; and the empty wide streets a I had arrived on Boxing Day. It was also the prevalence of the name of Booker's, a name which went around the world during the crisis of 1953. Booker's are the largest firm of merchants and planters in British Guiana, and at one time virtually controlled the country; according to the People's Progressive Party, they were and perhaps still are the villains of the piece. Now, seeing the name Booker's on hardware stores, foodshops, machine-tool shops, drugstores, taxis, I felt I had come to rescue Georgetown. I walked down the main street on spurs. Old Booker, bearded, gruff-voiced and tobacco-chewing, waited with the five Booker boys to shoot me down. The natives had fled from the streets and were cowering in barbershops and saloons.

In fact the Christmas celebrations were still going on. A sour-faced white drunk leaned out of the window in the house next to my boarding-house; and in the room next to mine there was another drunk who was groaning and intermittently singing Puccini to the radio. I could hear every sound he made. The wooden part.i.tion and the ventilation gaps at the top ensured that. As a result, I found myself walking about on tiptoe, doing everything as quietly as possible, just listening to the noises next door.

Late that night I was awakened.

'I'm a b.u.m, I'm a b.u.m,' the man was saying. He gave a prolonged groan. 'I've just realized what a terrible b.u.m I am.'

'You only make yourself so,' a woman said, plaintive yet consoling.

'No, no. I am a b.u.m.' Then, reflectively: 'Biggest blasted b.u.m in B.G.'

'You make yourself that way.' The woman sobbed a little.

Silence. A groan, a rumbling s.n.a.t.c.h of song. Then: 'Do what your mother tells you!' the man roared.

I lay straight and still in bed, unwilling to move, to make any betraying noise.

I had been told that the Guianese Christmas celebrations last a week, and I was not surprised next morning to hear the drunk next door freshly drunk. As soon as I could I left the house. I made many telephone calls, with such success that by the middle of the morning Abdul, friend of a friend, was taking me to the Rahimtoolahs, friends of his, rich and respectable people who lived in a large house in an elegant area. The upper floor, open, jalousied and with Demerara windows, was cool and airy; but the paint was peeling and the furniture was rough. The house had large neglected s.p.a.ces, and there were only calendars on the walls.

Mr Rahimtoolah, a big man with fat quivering thighs revealed by shorts, and a blotched face and a turtle-like neck, said apologetically that he was living in a wooden house only for the time being; he was soon going to pull it down and build something modern in concrete.

He introduced us to Mike, a young English National Serviceman with dull slanting eyes, big teeth, heavy lips and a line-moustache that was very faint and definitely askew. Mike had the appearance of someone much abused; he was the friend of plump-cheeked Miss Rahimtoolah.

Whisky was brought out and we were asked to admire the gla.s.ses. They carried the words 'Ballantine's Guide for Beginners': they were marked off like measuring gla.s.ses, the varying depths labelled 'teetotal', 'timid' and 'tally-ho'. On the bottom of the gla.s.s a man hung from a scaffold: this was 'the last drop'.

'You went to the Chinese last night?' Mr Rahimtoolah asked one of his Portuguese guests.

'We decided to go to the Indians after all.'

They were speaking of the clubs of Georgetown; and Mr Rahimtoolah, with much pride, explained the frenzied activities of the clubs during the festive season, while his daughter pa.s.sed round fresh drinks.

In the women's corner talk began about the respective merits of Great Britain and British Guiana.

'People in B.G. are more hospitable than people in Britain,' Mr Rahimtoolah said.

'I agree,' said Mike.

Then they talked about the seasons, and how wonderful it was to have spring, summer, autumn and winter instead of just a rainy season and a dry season. I felt the conversation had been rigged for Mike's benefit: he now spoke about the seasons like an expert called in to give advice. He described snow in detail and announced that he was going to tell a 'funny story'. Miss Rahimtoolah and Mrs Rahimtoolah laughed in advance. It happened, Mike said prefatorily, 'before we moved to the new house.' He paused to allow this to sink in; his gla.s.s was filled; he drank. I was waiting impatiently for the story which already had Miss Rahimtoolah giggling, the bottle of whisky shaking in one hand, the other hand covering her mouth. At last the story came: one winter Mike's father, going out of the back door for an undisclosed purpose, had been covered by snow falling off a roof.

Mrs Rahimtoolah shrieked and said, 'I love England.'

Mr Rahimtoolah looked at her indulgently.

Abdul, reclining on a Berbice chair, spoiled the mood of Indo-British amity by saying that he hated England and never wanted to set foot in the country again.

He took everyone by surprise. He looked surprised himself.

'Of course I had friends,' he said, destroying the silence he had created. Then, smiling at Mike: 'But they were reserved friends.'

'That's England, though,' Mrs Rahimtoolah said, relaxing.

Mike agreed. He looked mollified, and made a little speech about the warmth of his welcome in British Guiana and the hospitality of the Guianese people.

The embarra.s.sing moment had pa.s.sed. Two national myths had been flattered: Guianese hospitality, English reserve. Mr Rahimtoolah shook his fat legs in relief.

Some overdressed young girls, evidently of families as respectable and rich as the Rahimtoolahs, came up the steps, and there were gay exclamations. Mike was taking them all to the army camp; the outing appeared to be of importance.

We ourselves left, and went on to the Ramkerrysinghs, whose Christmas week entertaining, Abdul told me, was fabulous. At any time of day or night food and drink were to be had in any quant.i.ty; and, appropriately, the Ramkerrysinghs dispensed their hospitality in what looked like a large hall, thoroughly contemporary, though, thoroughly modern. The living area was not broken up by walls; the bedrooms in one corner were marked off by part.i.tions that followed a wavy line; in another corner was the kitchen; and in another there was a large well-stocked bar, fitted up to look like the genuine commercial thing, where guests sat on stools and the host played barman. It was the Ramkerrysinghs' claim that they had every drink in the world. This looked likely.

We were introduced briefly to the eaters outside the kitchen. Then we joined the drinkers at the bar. I couldn't take any more whisky. I asked for red wine. There was none. I was given some hock instead. 'Take some ice, nuh,' one of the drinking Ramkerrysinghs said, and he dropped two cubes in my gla.s.s. I drank quickly and then was taken on a tour of the house. In the veranda that ran down one side of the house there were many more people. From their appearance and the looks they gave us, they clearly belonged to the house; they seemed used to having peasants shown around. In a wavy-part.i.tioned bedroom we came upon a whole group of women lying on beds. I felt I had intruded into a zenana, and the effect was heightened because the women appeared to be of many races.

I said nothing to them and they, lying in a heap like puppies, stared superciliously at me.

I returned with relief to the bar, pa.s.sing various china ornaments on the way, among them an open book on which was written the Lord's Prayer.

At the bar they were talking about the soft drinks industry: it seemed that 'compet.i.tions' were killing the trade.

'Put chits in one or two corks,' said the senior Mr Ramkerrysingh, behind the bar. 'Is what I would do. No fuss, no bother.'

The drinkers, at his instigation, were experimenting wildly with one drink after another, wines, liqueurs, spirits. Already slightly broken by the morning's drinking, I decided to stick to hock on the rocks. The senior Ramkerrysingh pushed the ice-bowl towards me and I took two pieces of ice. As soon as I dropped them in, the drinking Ramkerrysingh who had put the ice in my first gla.s.s, said, 'I don't know where you learn to drink. You don't know you mustn't put ice in wine?'

The senior Mr Ramkerrysingh said he liked living simply himself, and that the purpose of the establishment was to entertain foreign businessmen: the hotels of Georgetown were inadequate.

'You got to impress these fellers,' he said. 'And I can tell you what I put out I more than make back. When you dealing with big people you got to treat them big. You got to think big.'

Abdul nodded and said to me, 'Mr Ramkerrysingh always thought big. He started in a small way, you know. Those of us now starting have a lot to learn from him.'

It was surprising to hear, when we sat down to eat, that the country had been going to the dogs since politics and the Jagans had come to it.

When we went to Abdul's home we found his wife distressed. Her car had hit a child. She had stopped, but the child had got up and run off. No one would tell her whose child it was or where it lived a 'You know these black people' a and so she didn't know whether the child was injured.

In the boarding-house the drunk was still drunk.

Outside Stabroek Market, its pavements bright and cluttered with fruit-sellers, their baskets, trays and boxes, I asked an elderly Negro, who was respectably dressed and pus.h.i.+ng a bicycle, to direct me to the Government Buildings.

'I am pa.s.sing by there,' he said. 'Hop on.'

I hesitated. He was very small and thin. But he insisted, and I felt I would have offended him if I refused. So I sat on the crossbar, he pushed the cycle off with a run, hopped on to the saddle, breathing heavily, and we wobbled through the traffic. In this way I arrived at Mrs Jagan's office.

I had read and heard so many malicious accounts of Mrs Jagan that I was prejudiced in her favour. Although she has suffered much from visiting writers, she received me kindly in her small air-conditioned office. She sat behind a large desk, neatly ordered, on which were photographs of her husband and children. Her bag was on the floor. I thought her far more attractive than her photographs: women who wear spectacles rarely photograph well. A plain cotton frock set off her balanced figure; large hoop ear-rings and red toenails gave her a touch of frivolity which seemed incongruous in that office, the door of which was marked: Hon Janet Jagan, Minister of Labour, Health and Housing. She looked tired, and her talk was frequently broken by nervous laughter.

She said she was a pessimist. No one was more surprised than she when they won the elections in 1957. The country had lost much of its drive since 1953, when the const.i.tution was suspended, she and others were imprisoned, and the British troops came in. Many supporters, 'without stamina', had deserted at that time; and the country had lost further when the party which had come to power so completely in 1953 split in 1955 along racial lines, Indians on one side, Negroes on the other. Race had, in fact, now become a major issue in British Guiana. She spoke of this with genuine regret. It was a subject to which she often returned during our subsequent meetings, and I fancied there was more than regret at racialism: there was regret for the camaraderie and the friends.h.i.+ps of 1953. She remembered what certain people, now enemies, ate, how they talked, what her children had said to them. Since 1953 the party had also lost the support of the intellectuals; and this was a blow, for British Guiana did not have the talent that Trinidad had.

Specifically, I had called that morning to have my trip to the interior arranged. We turned our attention to the large map on the wall behind the desk; and abruptly one was reminded of the size of the country a the Rahimtoolahs and the Ramkerrysinghs had made one forget. Mrs Jagan had travelled widely through the country; she knew it better than most of the Guianese I had met. The district of Berbice in the east was her favourite. It was the liveliest. It produced the cricketers, most of the writers, and the best politicians: her husband, of course, came from Berbice.

The side door of the office opened, and Cheddi Jagan himself came in. He was wearing a suit and carried a briefcase. He had just come in to say that he was off to the bank to sign the agreement for the loan to buy over the Georgetown Electric Company.

It was an oddly domestic scene, and I felt an intruder.

In 1953, when the British Guiana const.i.tution was suspended and British troops went into the country, the Jagans were the pariahs of the West Indies. Trinidad was so horrified it forbade Cheddi Jagan to step off the plane at Piarco airport; it should be noted that most of the important Trinidad politicians of the time have since been discredited. The Jagans and their party were accused of fomenting strikes, undermining the public service and the public force, spreading racial hatred, and generally advancing the cause of international communism. 'Reliable sources' established that there was also a plan 'to set fire to business property and residences of prominent Europeans and Government officials ... This information was supported by reports of unusual sales of petrol to individuals without cars who carried it away in cans or bottles.'

It is all there in the United Kingdom Government White Paper, published on 20 October 1953, twelve days after the const.i.tution had been suspended: a doc.u.ment that reduces the events of exciting weeks to forty-four unemotional, numbered paragraphs, in six parts a Introduction, Activities of Ministers, The Economic Consequences, The Danger of Violence, People's Progressive Party Leaders and Communism, Action by Her Majesty's Government a each part with its sub-heads in italics, the whole accompanied by three appendices: a doc.u.ment that never loses its temper and never drops the 'Mr' or 'Mrs' or 'Dr' from the names of people it helped to put in jail.

The most striking thing about this doc.u.ment is its appearance. In British Guiana it was 'Reprinted by Command' by the Bureau of Public Information. The words are on the t.i.tle-page; and this t.i.tle-page, which consists of ten printed lines s.p.a.ced all the way down, with its italic capitals, its four type-faces, its commas at the end of two lines and a full stop at the end of the last line, has a curiously old-fas.h.i.+oned appearance, recalling the typography of a hundred years ago, and seeming to relate to events as old. On the back of the t.i.tle-page there is a full-length sepia photograph of the Queen; the caption is in Gothic letters. On succeeding pages there are photographs of Sir Winston Churchill (a large star at the top); Sir Alfred Savage, the Governor (he is given a smaller star); the Chief Secretary, the Hon'ble John Gotch (Churchillian star for him); the Speaker, Sir Eustace Woolford (small star); the President of the State Council (small star); the Attorney General and the Financial Secretary (squeezed into Appendix C, between the lines of paragraphs nine and ten respectively, and unstarred). The impression given by these photographs in the midst of pages speaking with White-Paper calm of reprehensible thoughts and deeds is that these persons have been unwarrantably and unfairly affronted and bullied by those whose photographs do not appear.

I had heard much of the Rupununi, the savannah country south of the forest belt, and I was going to spend a few days there, at Lethem, the administrative centre, which is on the Brazilian border some two hundred and fifty miles from Georgetown. In the old days you went to the Rupununi by river, a long and difficult journey of many weeks; later there was a cattle trail. Today you can get there in ninety minutes by the Dakotas of British Guiana Airways. But on the coast, aware only of the colonial apparatus of the country and the nearness of the Caribbean islands, you can still forget that British Guiana has a border with Brazil. For most Guianese the coast is Guiana; everything beyond is bush.

And so it is. The bush begins at Atkinson Airfield, which is just twenty miles south of Georgetown. The Americans built this field during the war and they still use it; their sleek modern aircraft, silver and orange, delicately poised on the ground, make the up-tilted Dakotas look underprivileged and overworked. The office and store-rooms of British Guiana Airways are in a cheerless shed, formerly part of the American buildings. Gra.s.s grows through the steel-mesh of the runway, which has buckled here and there; and there is bush all around.

It was raining and the pa.s.sengers stood among their boxes and baskets on a raised gallery. They were not a crowd one a.s.sociated with British Guiana. Many of them were white; there were four Amerindians; and the pilot, a tall, plump man wearing a red s.h.i.+rt, was a European. The coast a sugarcane, irrigation ditches, workers' houses, political rivalries, communism a was already far away. Under cheap black umbrellas, roughly painted B.G. AIRWAYS in huge letters, not to promote pride, one felt, but to prevent theft, we went out to the plane. There were no seats inside. A narrow metal ledge ran down either side of the plane; on this thin rubber cus.h.i.+ons had been placed, linked one to the other and equipped with safety belts. The front of the plane was stuffed with cargo. I noticed cartons of beer, a bed, a sewing-machine and many bags of flour: everything in the interior, from safety pins to Land-Rovers, has to be flown in by these valiant Dakotas, at nine cents a pound.

An elderly American sat next to me. He was very tall and had a stoop, but his enormous chest still suggested great power. If I had known that he was eighty-five, and that he was Ben Hart, one of the Rupununi pioneers and one of its famous characters, I would have paid him greater attention.* As it was, I was more interested in the four Amerindians who sat facing me. This was my first sight of these people, known fearfully to Trinidadians as 'wild Indians' and contemptuously referred to as 'Bucks' by coastland Guianese. The man was barefooted; he wore khaki trousers and a loose white s.h.i.+rt and held a handkerchief to his face. The two women stared at the floor. The small girl in a pink frock and broad-brimmed straw hat stared at the other pa.s.sengers, but as soon as you caught her eye she pulled in her lower lip and looked down. They became animated only when, as we began to fly low over the savannah, the plane became suffocatingly hot, the ride grew b.u.mpy, and some people were sick. Then the women smiled slyly at the other pa.s.sengers and covered their mouths with their hands as though to hide giggles.

Our first stop was in a field at a place called Good Hope, and it was like stepping out into another country, into the scene of a Western. The flat red land, dotted with tussocks of coa.r.s.e gra.s.s, stretched away to pale blue-grey mountains. The sun was fierce and we sheltered under the wings of the plane. The plane comes to Good Hope once a fortnight, and everyone seemed to have come out to greet it. But they didn't make up a crowd; and it was hard to see where they came from, for only one house was visible, apart from the collapsed hut next to the landing field. Nearly all of them must have walked, for there was only one Land-Rover, and this belonged to Cesar Gorinsky, a formidably handsome Russian emigre who is reputed to be one of the richest settlers in the Rupununi. The Hollywood-Western atmosphere was greatly helped by the presence of a tall, rangy, barefooted man who looked like a film Texan, dressed like a film cowboy, and talked with an American accent. He turned out to be a German from Hamburg; he was Gorinsky's a.s.sistant.

Questions of nationality seemed unimportant in the setting which, though strange, was yet so familiar that the exotics were not the Amerindians whom I was seeing in quant.i.ty for the first time, but the two Negro policemen in smart black uniforms and bush hats. And this, too, was a singular reversal of the roles, this policing of Amerindians by Negroes: in the days of slavery the Amerindians were employed to hunt down runaway slaves. And now these policemen spoke to me of the Amerindians as of some primitive, unpredictable people, who needed to be watched.

One of the policemen waved a hand. 'Brazil over there, you know.' The word clearly excited him. 'One time they come over here, you know.' He laughed. 'But you know the English people and their land. We chase them back, man.' Questions of nationality didn't matter. Here the Negro policeman could speak of himself as English, and it seemed right. Everything on the other side of the border was Brazilian; everything on this side was English; and the English had no doubt which was superior.

The adjective most often used to describe the interior of British Guiana is 'vast'. 'Vast', too, are the natural resources; these are invariably 'untapped'. The impression created is that forests have simply to be cut down for a wealthy new state to grow. In fact, a good deal of the untapped interior rests on infertile white sand, and the problem of reafforestation has yet to be solved. There is bauxite, but gold and diamonds are obtained only in small quant.i.ties.

The Rupununi is typical of British Guiana. It is 'savannah', 'gra.s.sland', 'cattle country'. Yet you can drive for a day without seeing a cow. The ground, in the dry season, when I saw it, is brown-red and hard and in parts composed of pure laterite. What looks like gra.s.s turns out to be sedge. Only cashew trees and mango trees flourish, occasional startling clumps of green, in this burning wasteland. And the sandpaper trees: stunted and gnarled, they have the appearance of carefully tended fruit trees, and are at times so evenly s.p.a.ced that the savannah seems an endless orchard. But this is only Nature's mimicry: the leaves of this tree have the abrasive quality of sandpaper. In between these trees there are the ant castles, conical structures of grey mud that are sometimes six feet high. Castles and b.a.s.t.a.r.d orchards, especially when seen on an incline, suggest that the land is fruitful and peopled. Each castle throws its black shadow like a primitive stone monument protected by a National Trust and one feels that in the next shallow valley a village will appear, an inn serving warm meals and cool drinks. But the road just goes on, past more ant castles and sandpaper trees. A grey colonnade of green-crowned palms marks the course of a stream; the blue-grey mountains bound the horizon. The illusion is past; one is really quite alone.

Sometimes the savannah is on fire: an irregular slowly-moving line of low, broken flame that divides the land into two colours: brown-green on one side, black on the other. Hawks fly above the white smoke, waiting to pounce on the snakes and other creatures that escape across the fire-line. The fires are started by ranchers who wish to burn away the gra.s.s-choking sedge; and more indiscriminately, in defiance of the law, by Amerindians, who like to see the savannah burn; at times, I was told, whole mountains are on fire. After such a fire the savannah becomes truly lunar: a landscape in which curling copper leaves hang on gnarled, artificial-looking trees rising out of the black ground.

In the valleys there is balata-bleeding and tobacco-growing, and this, together with the ranching, is enough to support a few people and to make some even rich, but scarcely sufficient to make the area valuable to the rest of the country as a whole. The Rupununi is not a land so much for the pioneer as for the romantic. The pioneer wants to see cities rise in the desert; the romantic wants to be left alone. The Rupununi settlers want to be left alone; though they depend on Georgetown, there is an unexpressed resentment at the desire of the government in Georgetown to administer the area a this administering of small, widely separated communities is a burden on a poor country a and relations between officials and settlers are not altogether easy.

Some of this resentment is undoubtedly racial. Government officials, the police in particular, are Negroes; and in the Rupununi the Negro, the black man from the coast, is still a symbol of threat and terror: the runaway slave, once the enemy of the Amerindian and now his corrupter.

In Trinidad there is no memory of slavery; in British Guiana it is hard to forget it. The very word 'Negro', because of its a.s.sociation with slavery, is resented by many black Guianese; the preferred word is 'African', which will cause deep offence in Trinidad. Everyone knows that Amerindians hunted down runaway slaves; it was something I heard again and again, from white and black; and on the Rupununi, and wherever one sees Amerindians, it is a chilling memory.*

Lethem, the administrative centre, named after a former governor of the colony, is a tidy, rambling settlement of a few dozen concrete houses in the ugly Caribbean style set about corrugated red laterite roads. The ranchers speak of Lethem as a city and say it is overcrowded. At first this seems an affectation, an excess of the boy-scout spirit, but after a few days of travelling through the empty savannah you begin to feel yourself that Lethem is a city, with almost too many amenities. It has an airstrip, an abattoir, a hospital and an hotel, a power plant, a cricket ground a the hard Rupununi earth makes a good pitch a and a pavilion. On the airstrip next to the abattoir, the blue-grey mountains low in the distance, the Dakotas land and take off regularly in a flurry of red dust, bringing in supplies, taking out beef; the policemen stand un.o.btrusively by. Occasionally a small plane flies in from across the border and a Brazilian merchant or smuggler (the frontier is unpatrolled and knows no customs checks) jumps out, as from a taxi, with a suitcase, to wait perhaps for a day or two for the plane to Georgetown.

Over the two-storeyed concrete residence of the district commissioner the Union Jack flies high enough to be visible to any Brazilian across the border. And the district commissioner, Neville Franker, a Guianese, was all that a district commissioner should be. His official manner was impeccable and rea.s.suring; in private he was relaxed and entertaining and his conversation was edged with an agreeable cynicism. He was new to the area, and it was fitting that, playing that week in his first cricket match in the Rupununi, and going in first wicket down, he should be top-scorer with fifty-three. There could have been no more appropriate way in this part of the world for a district commissioner to call attention to his authority and no more appropriate way of showing the flag.

The centre of life in Lethem is Teddy Melville's hotel, which is at the end of the airstrip. 'Hotel' is too grand and cold a word for this establishment which looks like a large, rough dwelling-house that has been constructed with difficulty in the desert out of the plainest materials. 'Inn', with its suggestion of isolated shelter, welcome and warmth, is a better word. Here the tourist, moving about in comfort by plane and Land-Rover, can be flattered that he is a traveller. There is always room at this inn, if only a hammock on the concrete-floored, trellised veranda, and always food.

The armchairs in the veranda are of local leather, and in the small dining room the antlered hatrack is hung with ropes and holsters. A friendly pig wanders in and out, hoovering the floor; and occasionally a baby anteater makes a shy appearance, edging shakily along the wall on column-like legs that look like those of a stuffed toy but conceal sharp curving claws which in the adult animal make it a match for the jaguar. There seem to be Melville boys everywhere, handsome, well-built, with light, elastic movements: the illusion of the 'Western' is strong. In the bar, where you drink excellent Brazilian beer at a dollar and thirty cents a litre, Portuguese (or Brazilian) is heard as often as English. This, like the Portuguese label (Industria Brasileira) on the unfamiliarly large beer bottle, is no illusion: Lethem is a frontier town.

The New Year Dance is a big thing in Lethem. It takes place in the hotel, and hand-written bills stuck to the door of the bar said that there was to be a Brazilian band, which was coming all the way from Boa Vista, two rivers, five hard hours and eighty miles away. Lorry-loads of Brazilians were coming as well, for each of these frontier towns, Lethem and Boa Vista, enviously regards the other as a place of vice and adventure; it had already been whispered to me that Boa Vista had brothels.