Part 7 (1/2)

The Jagans are the most energetic campaigning politicians in the West Indies. Every week-end they, or their ministerial colleagues, go to some part of the country. They were going this week-end to Berbice, Dr Jagan's home county, which many people had told me was the most 'progressive' in the country, and they invited me to go with them. Dr Jagan himself was going to call for me at the hotel.

And I was late. I had gone to the restaurant across the road for a 'quick' snack. Forty-five minutes waiting, three minutes eating (scrambled eggs). When I came back Dr Jagan was half-sitting on a bar stool. He wore a sports s.h.i.+rt and looked relaxed. Then I remembered my laundry. I raced up to my room and came down with an untied parcel of dirty clothes, which I gave to the barman together with a tip. (It didn't work. When I came back, two days later, the clothes were still below the bar, a puzzle, I was told, to subsequent barmen.) The Jagans live in an unpretentious one-floored wooden house standing, in the Guianese way, on tall stilts. It is open and unprotected.* There is a pet monkey downstairs, and there is nothing upstairs to distinguish the house from many other Guianese houses, apart from the packed bookcases and the magazine rack (the New Yorker among the magazines).

The trip to Berbice was a family affair. The two Jagan children, a boy and a girl, were going to spend the weekend with Dr Jagan's mother. They treated me with indifference; and considering what has been said and written about them, the boy in particular, I was not surprised. Presently Mrs Jagan arrived. She quickly made ready a they were to eat in the car a and spent a little time choosing a book. She chose The Vagabond by Colette (in Wakenaam she had been reading Doris Lessing). It was a squeeze in the car, but there were two more children to come: the children of Dr Jagan's brother, Sirpaul. We picked them up at a wooden house in another street. 'It's like a picnic,' Dr Jagan said. And, with oranges and bananas being pa.s.sed around to children, it was.

I learned that one of Dr Jagan's brothers was my namesake, and we talked about names. Mrs Jagan said that when Sirpaul was in New York he found himself being treated with exaggerated deference by the hotel staff. The bill explained why: it was addressed to Sir Paul and Lady Jagan.

We were not out of Georgetown yet. A Negro on a bicycle shouted, 'The coolies don't care if Jagan bury them!'

It was the casualness, rather than the abuse, which seemed strange: a small car packed with Jagans, and one of the territory's major political issues finding such simple utterance. One somehow expected something more formal.

'It's a thing you learn in England,' Dr Jagan said. 'To be polite to your opponents.'

We went on talking about names. Mrs Jagan said that another of Dr Jagan's brothers had changed his name from Chunilal to Derek; all but one of the sisters had taken English names.

Exactly one hundred years ago Trollope complained about the British Guiana coastal road a it was the only thing he disliked in British Guiana a and the road hasn't improved since then. The surface is of burnt earth, whose durability is only fractionally higher than that of unburnt earth, and the road is a succession of potholes so distributed that they cannot be avoided, however much a car weaves about. The short smooth 'experimental' stretches provide a brief but shattering contrast and complete one's sense of frustration. Yet taxis and buses regularly use this road, b.u.mping along in a slow, determined straight line when there is traffic, and weaving about like crazy ants as soon as the road is clear. Low-grade bauxite, in which British Guiana abounds, would make a more lasting surface; but burnt earth is a peasant industry and burnt earth has to be used.

We pa.s.sed many Negro settlements. The name of one, Buxton, hints at their story. Thomas Buxton was, with Wilberforce, one of the campaigners for the abolition of slavery; and these Negro villages were established after emanc.i.p.ation, on abandoned plantations co-operatively bought by former slaves who wished to work for no master. The first of these plantations was bought in 1839. It cost $10,000. Six thousand dollars was immediately subscribed in cash by eighty-three Negroes, and the money triumphantly transported in wheel-barrows; the remaining four thousand was paid off in three weeks. The village movement continued in spite of opposition from planters and government. The planters were losing their labour force. The government feared the collapse of the economy and, in order to create 'a free but landless labourer', limited grants of Crown land and imposed penalties on those who squatted on unoccupied land, which was plentiful in British Guiana.*

As it was, Indian immigration solved the labour problem. And the former slaves were defeated by the land, by the problems of drainage and irrigation which only the large estates could tackle. We pa.s.sed through one sad grey village, just like the villages Trollope had seen: grey, weatherbeaten wooden houses standing on stilts on islands of trampled grey mud in a grey swamp. Dr Jagan told me there was no sea-wall in this area, and the inhabitants didn't want one: they were not agriculturists now, but fishermen.

New Amsterdam, British Guiana's second town, stands on the Berbice River. Dr Jagan had been told that the ferry left at five minutes past two. We got to the river in good time, and there we learned that the ferry left at 1.25 and 3.45. 'The inefficiency of people in this country,' Dr Jagan said. However, a launch of the Blairmont Estate was due to make the crossing soon; and to get the necessary permits we drove to the estate office, a low white building, the ditches around the well-kept lawn cool with the broad flushed discs of the Victoria Regia lily, which the explorer Schomburgk discovered on this very Berbice River. Mrs Jagan told me with a girlish giggle that they tried to keep their relations with the estates as correct as they could; and I felt, though she didn't say so, that this asking of a favour, and the promptness with which it was granted, was an embarra.s.sment.

As soon as we got to the other bank a man came up to Dr Jagan and gave him two dollars for the party, and we were met by an elderly Negro, a party-worker. New Amsterdam was a stronghold of the opposition, and we learned that Mr Burnham himself, the leader of the opposition, was in town (he had probably caught the 1.25 ferry) and was to make a speech that evening. Mrs Jagan said that sometimes on these campaigning tours government and opposition had to share the same government rest house. There was no danger of that here, however. We were staying at Government House.

Government House in New Amsterdam is the old Davson estate house, white and grand and elegant, two-storeyed, standing on tall pillars, the broad veranda wire-netted, the floors s.h.i.+ning, the rooms high and large, and everywhere the rich smell of old wood, the unmistakable smell of the tropical estate house. Something remained of the Davsons. In the drawing room, on walls otherwise unfurnished, there were two framed photographs of Dovedale; and in the room I was given there was a coloured print, bluish and faint and misty, of Eton. In the veranda, shadowed by wide eaves and protected from insects by wirenetting which nevertheless permitted one to see the garden and the tennis court, the party-worker and I talked. He sat on the wicker chair as one who entered the house now by right; but his hat was on his knees, and his talk was mostly of the Davsons. He spoke of them with more than affection, with relish; while Dr Jagan slept in one of the rooms upstairs, and the hot afternoon stillness was emphasized by the m.u.f.fled booming of a loudspeaker announcing Mr Burnham's speech that evening.

The loudspeaker went on and on. The party-worker turned to politics, reluctantly I fancied, for the party's prospects in New Amsterdam were not bright. It was the old issue of race: New Amsterdam was predominantly Negro and the Negroes were afraid of Indian dominance. He himself didn't see what dominance had to do with it. In B.G. it was open to anyone to 'progress' a in the West Indies to be progressive is to be determined and able to acquire a and there were Negroes who were as 'progressive' as the Indians. He just wished there were more progressive Negroes; and there could be, for though the Indian owned more, the Negro earned more.

I had heard this before in Georgetown, and from supporters of the other side. In their uncertainty, their fear of being twice overtaken, not as individuals but as a community, first by the Portuguese (between whom and the Negroes there were riots in 1856 and 1889) and now by the Indians, in their feeling that time was against them, many Guianese Negroes were in this mood of self-a.n.a.lysis. At Christmas there had been a campaign urging the Negroes to save, to buy only what was absolutely necessary. The campaign had failed, and the stores had complained of racialism.

In Georgetown a Negro woman of energy, charm and sensibility had spoken to me for an hour, with urgency and something like despair, about the shortcomings of the Guianese Negro. She wished the Negro to behave with dignity. It nauseated her to see Negro women jumping up in street bands at Carnival time: no Indian or Portuguese or white or Chinese woman did that. (But they do in Trinidad, where it is a sign of modernity and emanc.i.p.ation.) The Negro wasted his money on drink, which was for him a symbol of wealth and whiteness. (This is, of course, an over-simplification, though it should be said that Dr Jagan recognizes alcoholism as one of the country's problems.) She wished the Negro could have the thrift and determination of the Indian; many respected coloured families had wasted their substance and were completely in the hands of Indian money-lenders. Above all, the Negro lacked the family feeling of the Indian; this was the root of his vulnerability. Three hundred years of slavery had taught him only that he was an individual and that life was short.

And now, in the veranda of the Davson house, the party-worker was speaking of the same problem, less a.n.a.lytically, but with less urgency and despair. There were progressive people everywhere, he was saying; no one race had the monopoly of progress. So the talk turned to the great families of Guiana, and came back to the Davsons. Mrs Jagan joined us a the children had been sent on to their grandmother's a and we had tea.

Dr Jagan had to make two speeches later that afternoon, not in New Amsterdam but in outlying villages. The car had come over by the 3.45 ferry; and, leaving Mrs Jagan to Colette, we went to the party office, a run-down wooden building, to pick up party-workers and loudspeaker equipment. On the way out of town we picked up the local speakers, among them Mr Ajodhasingh, the member for the region, who, I was told, was in disgrace with his const.i.tuents because he had not visited them for some time.

There was a lorry-load of blue-uniformed policemen at the village where the second meeting was to be held; and another lorry-load at the village where we stopped. The policemen had taken up positions on either side of a red shop-and-rumshop of wood and corrugated iron. Some boys were sitting on the rails of the shop gallery and such crowd as there was was so scattered, in yards across the road, on the steps of houses nearby, that at first it seemed there were more policemen than audience. Dr Jagan was at once surrounded in the yard of the shop by a delegation of rice-farmers; himself a tall man, he was hidden by these farmers, who had put on their visiting clothes: pressed khaki trousers, stiff s.h.i.+ning shoes, ironed s.h.i.+rts that were white or bright blue, well-brushed, new-looking brown felt hats.

The party-workers hung up the loudspeaker and tested it. Mr Ajodhasingh was introduced, and while he made a fighting, over-energetic speech about the achievements of the government, copies of the party newspaper, Thunder,* were hawked around. The rice-farmers released Dr Jagan only when he had to speak. As soon as he began, the party-workers and Mr Ajodhasingh drove off, to 'warm up' the second meeting. Dr Jagan's pa.s.sion contrasted with the pastoral scene and the placidity of his audience, separated from him by the road. Along this road there pa.s.sed a scampering cow and seconds later a running herdsman; a pundit in turban, dhoti and white jacket, briskly pedalling a bicycle; a tractor, two lorries. Dr Jagan spoke about the buying over of the Demerara Electric Company; the land resettlement scheme; the electoral boundaries report. Night fell while he spoke. He spoke for an hour a the children in the shop gallery continually whispering, giggling and being hushed a and his speech was well received.

Abruptly he turned and walked into the shop, alone and still and withdrawn, and drank a Banks beer. Fortunately for him there was no photographer. Earlier that week Mrs Jagan had been photographed drinking an I-Cee beverage, a D'Aguiar product, like Banks beer, and the newspapers had made much of it.

In the next village the warming up had not been successful. The loudspeaker was out of order, and the party-worker was speaking, unheard, standing on a box below the eaves of a large new concrete foodshop, which was brilliantly lit and had its doors wide open. The small crowd, mainly Negro, was scattered in talkative little groups about the bright yard and dark road. Whenever a vehicle approached, its headlamps blinding, a group on the road broke up, moving to the gra.s.s verges, and never quite reformed. Movement was as constant as the chatter. The speaker, a Negro, was casually though repeatedly heckled with accusations of discrimination by the government against Negroes. One man, clearly a village character, from the humorous ovation given him whenever he spoke, asked again and again from the darkness of the roadside: 'What has the government done for the region?' And: 'How many people from this region have been granted lands?' His vocabulary was impressive a 'lands' had a startling legalistic ring a and doubtless hinted at the basis of his popularity. The party-workers attempted ineffectually to deal both with questioners and the faulty loudspeaker. The loudspeaker was eventually abandoned; and Dr Jagan, unaided, delivered his earlier speech with a similar pa.s.sion. He received more attention than the speakers before him, but the crowd remained disorderly. There were more accusations of discrimination against Negroes, and from the roadside groups even some mild cursing.

We drove back in silence to New Amsterdam. In Government House, in the big, dimly-lit dining room, its freshly painted walls bare except for an old Dutch map of New Amsterdam (Hoge Bosch around a tiny settlement) our food was waiting, covered by cloths at one end of the long, polished table. Mrs Jagan came down, looking as though she expected news of disaster: I saw now what she meant when she said she was a pessimist. Her hair was freshly brushed; I suspected that she had been reading Colette in bed.

'How did it go?'

'All right.' Dr Jagan was brief, fatigued; he seemed to be able to move continually from pa.s.sion to repose.

Mr Burnham's meeting had already begun. We could hear his amplifiers booming indistinctly across the otherwise silent town.

After dinner Dr Jagan went out visiting, and at Mrs Jagan's suggestion I went to Mr Burnham's meeting. It was in one of the main streets and the Jagans' chauffeur drove me there. Mr Burnham, in a plain short-sleeved sports s.h.i.+rt, was speaking from a high platform. He spotted the chauffeur and made a comment too full of local allusion for me to understand. But the chauffeur was mortified; though he was a seasoned political campaigner himself, he remained curiously sensitive to any intemperate or aggressive language. At the disorderly meeting earlier that evening he had clapped his hands to his ears when a woman spoke an obscenity.

Mr Burnham is the finest public speaker I have heard. He speaks slowly, precisely, incisively; he makes few gestures; his head is thrust forward in convinced, confiding, simple but never condescending exposition; he is utterly calm, and his fine voice is so nicely modulated that the listener never tires or ceases to listen.

The manner conceals an amazing quickness, all the more effective for never revealing itself in an acceleration of pace or a change of pitch.

'Burnham!' a youth shouts as he cycles past. 'Mister to you,' is the reply, the voice so even that it is some seconds before one realizes that the words are not part of the speech. 'You lie! You lie!' someone calls from a pa.s.sing car. This is not dealt with at once. Burnham completes the sentence in hand. 'And,' he continues, the car now diminished in the distance, 'as that jacka.s.s will never understand ...' The timing has been perfect; the crowd roars. Someone in the audience starts to object. Burnham ceases to speak. Slowly he swivels his head to gaze at the offender, and the bright light plays on a face that expresses fatigued yet somehow tolerant contempt. The silence lasts. Then Burnham, his expression now one of annoyance, turns to the microphone again. 'As I was saying,' he begins. His reputation in British Guiana undoubtedly accounts for part of his success. His speeches are known to be entertaining and the crowds come to be entertained, as this New Amsterdam crowd undoubtedly was; a large, good-humoured, mixed crowd.

Unfortunately Mr Burnham had little to say. He indicated a general disapproval of what was going on, without doc.u.menting his case effectively. He spoke of the need for education, and promised to establish an economic planning unit when he came to power. He spoke of Mrs Jagan, his former a.s.sociate, as 'that little lady from Chicago, an alien to our sh.o.r.es'; and he played indirectly though not the less unpleasantly on the racial issue. 'I warn the Indians ... Jagan has said he wants to gain control of the commanding heights of the economy. The commanding heights. Let me translate for you: your businesses, your land, your shops.' To the Negroes in the audience the message was clear.

In 1953, after the British Guiana Const.i.tution had been suspended, I heard both Mr Burnham and Dr Jagan speak at Oxford. Though power and responsibility have brought about certain changes, Dr Jagan remains what he then was. The same cannot be said of Mr Burnham. In 1953 he spoke, however uncertainly, like a man with a case. In 1961 I felt he had none. What had happened in the interval? What caused the Jagan-Burnham split of 1955?

In British Guiana it is almost impossible to find out the truth about any major thing. Investigation and cross-checking lead only to fearful confusion. Dr Jagan blames Mr Burnham's opportunism; Mr Burnham, he says, was badly advised by West Indian politicians. And it is true that after his election victory of 1957 Dr Jagan sought a reconciliation with Mr Burnham. On the other hand, in his Georgetown chambers, where he more or less repeated the arguments of his New Amsterdam speech, Mr Burnham a in private a man of such charm that one almost regretted that he was a politician a said that his 'political demise' had been planned by the Jagans even before the 1953 elections. Reconciliation was therefore out of the question; besides, Dr Jagan was 'a Stalinist' and Mrs Jagan not an intellectual. This, however, does not explain Mr Burnham's failure, granted his great gifts, to provide constructive or stimulating opposition. My own conclusion, for which I can offer no evidence, is that between these men, who have shared an important Guiana experience, there remains a mutual sympathy and respect stronger than either suspects, each perhaps regretting the other for what he was.

However, the rift exists, and it has divided the country racially, creating a situation which reflects, as in a mirror, the Trinidad situation: in Trinidad the Negroes are the majority group, in British Guiana the Indians. With almost one half of the population contracting out of the self-government experiment, the country is dangerously weakened. Racial antagonisms, endlessly acting and reacting upon one another, and encouraged by the cynical buffoons who form so large a part of the politically ambitious in every population, are building up pressures which might easily overwhelm the leaders of both sides and overwhelm the country; though British Guiana, because of its physical size and the isolation of its communities, can better withstand disturbance than Trinidad.

On Sunday morning we drove east along the Corentyne coast to Port Mourant, Dr Jagan's birthplace. Port Mourant is a sugar-cane estate of flat, hideous vastness, miles long and miles deep. The people are proud of the vastness, and believe too that Port Mourant produces the finest Guianese. They are only slightly less proud of their cricketers than they are of Dr Jagan. The house of Joe Solomon, who miraculously threw down the last Australian wicket in the tied test match at Melbourne, was pointed out to me more than once by people who had known Solomon ever since he was a boy.

The population of Port Mourant is mainly Indian, and Dr Jagan was going to open a Hindu temple that morning in one of the workers' settlements: white wooden houses set about a rectangular pattern of narrow asphalted streets. We found a large crowd of men, women and children, dressed mainly in white, waiting on the road and in the scuffed grounds of the new, white-washed temple. The temple was of concrete. I thought it heavy and inelegant, as so many Guianese concrete buildings are; but it was interesting because, though Hindu, it was clearly Muslim-inspired. Muslim architecture, as formalized and distinctive as Muslim doctrine, can be more easily remembered than Hindu, and more easily reproduced. Apart from a few simple Hindu temples, the mosque is the only non-Western type of building that most Indians in Trinidad and British Guiana know.

Dr Jagan was welcomed without formality by his brother Udit, a tall, well-built man who still works on the estate. Udit wore a blue s.h.i.+rt, and his khaki trousers were folded above his ankles; he was barefooted. Mrs Jagan introduced me to her mother-in-law, a short, st.u.r.dy woman in white. She wore the Indian long skirt, bodice and orhni. Her son had inherited the features which, on her, were a trifle heavy. Her manner was simple, patient and self-effacing. As soon as she had greeted her son she withdrew. Dr Jagan and his wife were garlanded. Then on the threshold of the temple Dr Jagan made a very short speech about the importance of self-help and his pleasure at opening a building which was an example of that. He cut the ribbon a West happily blending with East a and helped to take the image inside. We took off our shoes and followed. The concrete floor was covered with linoleum in three widths of different patterns and colours. Men sat on the left, women on the right. Mrs Jagan sat next to her mother-in-law. A gentle young brahmin with shoulder-long hair brushed back flat, and a frogged white silk jacket, acted as master of ceremonies. A middle-aged singer of local renown, accompanying himself on the harmonium, sang a Hindi ballad he had composed for the occasion. Its subject was Dr Jagan; the words 'nineteen fifty-three' occurred often, and in English. At the end some people, including myself, started to clap.

'No! No!' cried a blue-suited, bespectacled man on my right. 'This is a temple.'

The clapping instantly died down and many of us tried to pretend that we hadn't been clapping.

The brahmin urged us to cooperate.

Dr Jagan spoke again. It made a change, he said, to hear songs of praise. The temple was a fine building, and a good example to the people of Guiana, who needed to practise self-help. In spite of all that had been said to the contrary, his party guaranteed religious freedom; his presence was proof of that.

'Say a few words in Hindustani,' the blue-suited fanatic whispered in English. 'They would appreciate it.'

Dr Jagan sat down.

There was another song. Then, to my surprise, the secretary read a report on the temple's activities; this was necessarily very brief, but it was too much for the women, who began to chatter among themselves.

'Silence!' the fanatic called, jumping up.

The brahmin urged the people to cooperate and called gently for order.

The fanatic rose to his stockinged feet to move the vote of thanks. He began with a Hindi couplet and chastised us at length for desecrating the temple in the very hour of its opening by clapping. Then he spoke about the Sanatan Dharma, the faith. Staring hard at Dr Jagan, he said: 'The Hindus of this country will fight for their religion. Let no one forget that.' Dr Jagan stared straight ahead.

Immediately after the ceremony Dr Jagan was besieged by people talking about land. The rest of us put on our shoes and went to an old wooden shed that adjoined the temple, and there we were fed on halwa, chipped coconut, bananas and soft drinks. We went out to the car and waited in the hot sun for Dr Jagan. The crowd around him was growing, and his attempts to step backwards to the road were frustrated. The chauffeur was sent to get him away. The chauffeur, a small man, worked his way into the crowd and disappeared. Someone else was sent. 'Is always the biggest crooks who hold him back like that,' Dr Jagan's mother said. She had prepared lunch for him at home; she was impatient to take him off; and it was hot in the car. Eventually, after many minutes, Dr Jagan freed himself and came out to the road, some people still at his heels.

Dr Jagan's mother and the family of his brother Udit live in one of the workers' houses across the main road from the compound of the estate senior staff, which is fenced around with wire mesh and guarded at the gate by a watchman. The workers' houses, standing on stilts, and sheltered by many fruit trees, give the impression of being choked together. Each house, however, stands on a fair amount of land: the feeling of oppression is created by the maze of narrow, dusty, improperly drained tracks between the houses, the fences on either side of the tracks, and above all the trees, rustling in the wind which carries the smell of cesspits. Yet it was easy to see why the Jagan children are always eager to come down to Port Mourant to stay with their grandmother. For a city child there would be enchantment in the flat, well-swept dirt yard, cool with water-channels and low fruit trees.