Wild Coast Read online

  In the absence of revolution Britain cast around for an enemy within. On Fleet Street the Jagans were depicted as traitors. The Daily Express even suggested that Janet the Hygienist was trying to ‘ape the Mau Mau terror’. Soon the colonial police were bashing down the door of Charlotte Street, and confiscating books that would have been perfectly legitimate in London. Then, in 1954, both Cheddi and Janet were imprisoned for travelling without permits, and a few literary infractions. Cheddi spent six months in a penal colony deep in the bush.

  I asked Joey whether this had left him resentful.

  ‘Nope,’ he replied, airily, ‘he always admired the British.’

  What no one had spotted was that the enemy was everywhere, among the people themselves. The great fault line that runs through Guyanese society began to crack open. The first casualty was Cheddi’s party, the PPP. Stimulated by the prospect of power, the Indians declared Apan Jhaat – or ‘each to his own’. Meanwhile, in 1955, the Africans broke away. ‘The coolies,’ declared their leader, ‘have taken over the party.’

  It wasn’t long before the insults turned to rocks. Over the next few years the abuse escalated into strikes and scuffles and then full-scale riot. It infuriated the African faction (now called the PNC) that they couldn’t defeat the Indians in the elections of 1957 and 1961, and so they abandoned Marxism and unleashed their fury across the city. Whole neighbourhoods were burned, Indians were looted and the police were caught in the crossfire. More troops arrived, only to be hated by both sides. It didn’t help that one of the first regiments to turn up was called the Black Watch.

  Soon the colony was barely functioning at all. The Indians discovered that they could close down the countryside, while the Africans turned off the city. Nothing stirred except the flames. In desperation, Cheddi’s government sought help from Cuba, while the Africans had Washington’s support. British Guiana had become a little sugary pawn in a much bigger game.

  Then the killing began. Ramdat’s father was only one of hundreds to die. Both sides casually ambushed their victims and then hacked them apart. Grenades were tossed into buses, and there were acid bombs and dynamite. Over 1,400 homes were destroyed, and 15,000 people were displaced. A ferry and several cinemas were also blown up, and at Plantation Leonora a group of Indian strikers were mown down with a tractor (one of them, Mrs Kowsilla, being famously cut in half). But the worst place of all was Wismar. There a crowd of 18,000 Africans descended on the town, with petrol bombs and knives. ‘Kill the coolies!’ they screamed, and the entire Indian population of 1,300 was jeered all the way back to Georgetown. Along the road eight women were raped, one man was decapitated and another burned alive. The rest never returned, and – later – the town was renamed Linden, after the African leader.

  ‘It were a warning,’ said Ramdat, ‘of the power of the mob.’

  But not everyone remembers it like this. I once met an old boatman on the Berbice River, and I asked him about the Indians of Wismar. He thought about it for a moment, staring deep into the black water, and then shook his head. ‘They got what them deserved.’

  I often walked back along the old battlefields.

  All quiet now, it was hard to believe the violence of fifty years before. The trees had grown back, and the scorch-marks had long since faded away. Sometimes I’d walk through Stabroek and Lacytown, where the fires had flourished, reducing whole neighbourhoods to little stumps of charcoal, but there was no sign now of this self-inflicted blitz. Fretwork and fancy carpentry were blooming once again. Occasionally I’d pass down Water Street and Robb Street, where the rioters had once screamed at each other under a blizzard of tear gas and rocks. Nowadays this was the place to haggle for a boom box or cover yourself in trinkets. But it was also here that a colonial police superintendent called MacLeod was standing one turbulent morning in February 1962. Just as he was wondering how his life had come to this, a burst of gunfire smashed through his lungs and brought it to an end. All he learned that day is that you never know where you are with Georgetown until it’s far too late.

  Other times I’d duck back across the centre. Here the city was at its most beguiling, swooning with parks and gardens, and more than a touch of denial. These days no one admitted to having joined the riots. Anybody would have thought the upheaval was seismic in origin and had happened all by itself. But the trouble with this was that so many hideaways had somehow survived. I was always coming across places where plots were supposed to have been hatched: hotels, offices, bars and even a school of ballet. Perhaps the most conspicuous of all was Congress House. Everyone agreed that the PNC had spent most of the ’60s here, cooking up home-made bombs.

  It would soon be the turn of the Africans to rule.

  Over on the seaward side of town was the last bastion of Indian rule.

  Cheddi, it seemed, had chosen a residence that looked the way he felt. The Red House was grand and yet spartan, and covered in bristly crimson shingles. At first I thought it was abandoned: the shutters were bolted, and the grass grew long in the yard. But then I noticed that the front door was open, and so I went inside. It was breathlessly hot, and all I could hear was the furious bandsaw of flies. There was no furniture, just highly polished floors and my own reflection, wandering around, upside down and slightly perplexed.

  After a while an Indian appeared. She wore the clothes of a child but had the face of an older woman. When she moved, she made no sound at all, and I half-wondered if she’d been there all the time. I asked her if I could see where Dr Jagan had lived, and she tilted her head and gestured towards the stairs. I clattered upwards through the gloom and the thickening stratum of heat and flies, while she floated along behind. We stopped only when we got to the attic. There were only two rooms to see. One had a glass case full of gifts: a silver dish from the Americans, a carriage clock from the Queen and some pieces of rock from Zambia. I nodded approvingly, and the little apparition floated off, beckoning me to follow.

  The second room was Cheddi’s study, looking exactly as it had the day he fell from power in 1964. There was his hammock, his old driving licence, a roll-top desk and an armchair with freshly laundered antimacassars. For three years he’d worked away up here, controlling the currency, dreaming up taxes and closing down the newspapers. I noticed that his armchair tipped up, so that – like his patients – Dr Jagan could lie back and contemplate the pain.

  Behind me, the little sprite hovered in the shadows.

  ‘What are these?’ I asked her.

  On the desk was a large collection of old jars: mints, toffees and humbugs.

  ‘He loved sweets,’ whispered the girl.

  It was the only thing she ever said, but it left a powerful impression. While all around him the city burned, the Great Comrade–Dentist was up here, secretly ruining his teeth. By the end the colony was in such poor shape that even the Trinidadians were suggesting it be placed under UN control and run by New Zealand. But Britain and America had other plans. They’d spotted that, by tweaking the electoral system, they could put the Africans in charge. All it involved was a switch from ‘first-past-the-post’ to proportional representation. Although the Indians would still have the most popular party, the Africans could then unite with the Portuguese and the Amerindians and oust them from power.

  Cheddi howled at the unfairness of it all, and soon it was the Indians letting off bombs. They burned part of the railway and blew up the US Consulate (injuring, among others, Miss Guiana, now better known as Shakira Caine). But none of this changed anything. Once in charge, the Africans began to negotiate independence. Two years later, in 1966, the old colony was renamed Guyana, and the British departed in a great display of feathers and tootling trumpets.

  ‘Madness,’ Joey told me. ‘We shouldn’t be independent, even now.’

  So began the next twenty-eight years: an African dictatorship in the margins of South America.

  Lorlene often talked about the man who became the kabaka, or African king. It was almost as though her life c
ould be divided into three parts: the time before Burnham’s reign (idyllic), the time during it (catastrophic) and the time since (yet to be decided). If only she could understand the world of Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, then everything else would fall into place.

  ‘Is there anything left of him?’ I asked. ‘Around the city?’

  ‘Not much,’ she said. A concrete memorial and the place where he’d lived.

  One day we all got in the car and went over to Castellani House.

  ‘I haven’t been here for years,’ shuddered Lorlene as she drove up the drive.

  It was a huge wooden barn of a place in the fringes of the zoo. For Burnham it was perfect: a life spent among flamboyants and peacocks, trees that sprouted cannonballs and reptiles that lived for ever. In the photographs that have survived he looks exotic and well groomed, as though he himself had a tail full of plumes. Everyone agreed he was charming and articulate. V.S. Naipaul said he was the best public speaker he’d ever heard. With his heady blend of Christianity, Marxism and liberal democracy Burnham had soon emerged as the Africans’ champion. Only his sister was suspicious. On the eve of his election she published a pamphlet called Beware of My Brother Forbes.

  Nowadays his old house was used as the National Gallery. Here was Guyana depicted from every angle, slathered in colour, contorted, post-modernised, pre-Raphaelited, reassembled from egg boxes and draped in nudes. All that was missing was Burnham. Every trace of him had gone – from his cabinet rooms down to the last drop of Chivas Regal. It was a remarkable act of sanitation (which had all the hallmarks of Janet Jagan, who’d refurbished the gallery). The life of one of the world’s most exuberant black politicians had simply been painted over.

  It was the same on the floors above. This was painful for Lorlene, to discover that her nemesis had vanished. There was nothing left to be shocked by or to mock, or even to understand. It was typical of Burnham to be like this. Right from the start, his rule had been artfully insidious. To begin with, it had seemed no more than a change of décor; the Union Jack was exchanged for the Golden Arrowhead, the statue of Queen Victoria was moved to the zoo, and – in parliament – a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh was taken down and replaced with one of Burnham, looking equally Jacobean. Even the Americans still loved him at that stage, as he’d renounced Marxism and slapped a huge tax on anything communist. Guyana was the perfect former colony.

  ‘Then, in 1969,’ said Lorlene, ‘we became a republic.’

  Nobody much minded this, but it was a sign of things to come.

  ‘A year later, we became a co-operative republic.’

  ‘What did the co-operative bit mean?’ I asked.

  She didn’t know, and nor did anyone else. Burnham promised that it would ‘make a small man into a real man’, and his ministers began signing themselves off, ‘Yours co-operatively’. But it was more than just a game of words. At heart were old African anxieties. Burnham fretted that he was too compliant, too much the product of a master and only outwardly black. It was time to reassert the communal values of his ancestors and become more African again.

  Castellani House had never seen anything like this before. Burnham began striding around in dashikis and calling himself kabaka; he threw his piffling weight behind the liberation movements in Angola and Mozambique, and allowed Cuban planes to refuel in Guyana en route to war. Then, just to complete the picture, he recognised China and nationalised sugar and all the mines. As the Americans withdrew, they were replaced with Zambian advisers and North Koreans. Among their more ludicrous ideas, the Koreans came up with rice terraces. ‘Imagine that!’ said Lorlene. ‘Rice terraces! Here, in a country short of everything but space …’

  We’d reached the top floor, a maze of smaller rooms. Lorlene stopped.

  ‘This is where they brought my father,’ she said, ‘the night we were expelled.’

  Having rearranged his friends, Burnham then turned on his enemies.

  First he fixed the Indians. By the time of the 1968 election they significantly outnumbered the Africans and ought to have won. But once again Burnham had changed the rules. This time overseas voters were allowed to vote, and he invented an entire electorate of ghosts and Mickey Mouses, and Guyanese with addresses in the fields. Jokes like this could be run and run, and kept the PNC in power until 1992.

  Next Burnham turned on the dissenters. He suspended the constitution and the right of habeas corpus, and announced the ‘paramountcy of the party’. Every public building had to fly the PNC’s flag, and every military officer had to swear an oath of party loyalty. Meanwhile, the army was about the only organ of state still in development. It absorbed a sixth of the government’s budget and 3 per cent of the workers (almost all of them African). With its socialist movements and red militias, it became an assiduous enforcer of the chaos.

  But even if these ragtag outfits failed to scare anyone, there were always a few thugs that would. Most impressive was the House of Israel. Although it was run by an American fugitive, its goons would do anything for Burnham. They wore PNC colours, broke up strikes and called themselves his ‘church’. Funnily enough, they always seemed to be around whenever his opponents were getting a bayonet in the guts or a bullet through the head.

  That left only the media, and people like Lorlene’s father. The papers were easy enough: they could be starved of newsprint or charged with ‘public mischief’. But for people who also worked in radio, a different approach was needed. Just like Lorlene’s father, they were summoned here at midnight.

  ‘And what did Burnham do?’ I asked her.

  ‘He was charming, as usual. He just said you’ve got a nice family, and you should think of them.’

  With charm like that, the Jameses were gone within the week.

  ‘I hate to think what would have happened if we’d stayed.’

  We were standing at one of Burnham’s windows, looking out across a canopy of scarlet blossom. ‘This city is like paradise on Earth,’ said Lorlene, ‘until you know what goes on beneath.’

  As we drove back, I began to see not so much a city built by slaves as one worn down by Burnham. Beneath its beautiful canopies and fretwork the infrastructure had long since crumbled away. The canals were clogged, the roads had collapsed, the drains were imploding, and the last of the railways were now just a streak of cinders. Everyone agreed that it hadn’t always been like this.

  ‘The trains were the first to go,’ said Lorlene. ‘He sold them to Nigeria.’

  After that, people told me, the buses failed, followed by the post office. Guyana, it was said, had the first postal system in the world that stopped for the entire weekend. Even now, no one had any realistic expectation of letters or parcels, or a public bus from A to B. But this was nothing compared with the malevolent spells that Burnham had cast over the country’s natural wealth. Rice was cursed because it was the source of Indian wealth. Sugar simply failed through neglect and became unavailable for a while, even though it grew everywhere like weed.

  Then, as scarcity took hold, Burnham banned the import of food. Potatoes and wheat, he said, were tools of the capitalist West. After that, almost all imports were banned. Engines failed, and there were no alarm clocks, fan belts or tractors. Production halted, as scarcity stalked every aspect of public life. For much of the dictatorship there was a black market in lipstick, and aspirin could only be acquired through the racketeers. ‘We became a nation of smugglers,’ said Lorlene, ‘and, in many ways, still are …’

  She waved an arm at the cars. ‘Almost all contraband, from Suriname …’

  After cars, she said, came fuel, drugs, guns and girls.

  ‘Smuggling is now instinctive, a way of life …’

  The concept of collapse still has the Guyanese heading for the exits. To begin with, emigration was just a steady trickle. In the first eight years of Burnham 22,000 people left, followed by 28,000 in the four years after that. The poor slipped over the borders, and the rest took to planes. Burnham tried to stop them for a whi
le. Watching the Guyanese at the airport was (as one foreign journalist put it) like watching caged animals getting their release. Soon the trickle became a torrent. Since independence, almost a quarter of the country has left. Even now, some 93 per cent of tertiary graduates pack up their bags and leave. Google ‘Guyanese Club’ and you’ll find that almost every Canadian town has one. Another 70,000 headed to Britain. There, in a country they found educationally slack, they and their families had often thrived. Among them were surgeons, lawyers, sportsmen (Mark Ramprakash), politicians (Baroness Amos, Bernie Grant and Trevor Phillips) and performers (Eddy Grant and Leona Lewis). The sheer breadth of their talents speaks volumes for the depth of Guyana’s loss.

  ‘The only people still here,’ said Lorlene, ‘are those who either have a passion for the place or can’t afford the ticket out.’

  A few weeks later, I had tea with an old bomb-maker, who’d led the resistance. We’d arranged to meet at the Cara Lodge Hotel. I loved this place, and occasionally stayed there whenever I needed to be downtown. In a city of lacy buildings, this was the laciest of all. From the outside, it reminded me of a wedding dress, all spotlessly white and frilly. But on the inside it was dark and breezy, with wide open decks and wooden walls that creaked and yawed like a ship. Once it had been the home of a family called the Taitts, and here they’d hosted the colony’s first philharmonic orchestra, its first Marxist party, its first basketball team and its first school of ballet. Even Cheddi and Burnham had conspired here, before they fell out.