The Middle Passage

by V. S. Naipaul

  On the front page of the Sun I saw – Vol. 1, No. 8 – there was a photograph of Mr D’Aguiar smiling, pen in hand, behind a desk that carried a board with his name and the words ‘Managing Director’. A steel filing cabinet and a safe are at his back. Below the photograph comes Mr D’Aguiar’s New Year message, a gloomy one, belying the smile and the safe.

  It is my view that it would be hypocritical to wish a bright and prosperous New Year to Guianese generally at this period of their country’s history when there is so much hardship and distress in the land through unemployment and underdevelopment and the consequent absence of the means of securing the essentials which make for brightness and prosperity.

  My New Year Message to my fellow Guianese is that we, one and all, bestir ourselves and endeavour to put an end to the depressing conditions which surround us in our homeland.

  How is this to be achieved? – is the question which will be shot at me from all angles. I reply ‘our country is a potentially rich one.’ An I.C.A. investigator told us recently that on looking around B.G. he was tempted to say that we were sitting on our assets. It is my view that we can have no bright and prosperous new years until our country is burst wide open and its wealth brought within easy reach of its people by the expenditure of large sums of money.

  Now for the news. The front page story is ‘$5,500 Bonus for Wong & Khan Employees’. One hundred workers will benefit from this sum, and on page five there is a photograph of Mr Khan, his sleeves rolled up, smiling, shaking a worker’s hand and presenting a cheque. In the background someone who might be Mr Wong smiles straight at the camera. ‘The workers showered praise on Mr Wong and Mr Khan and the company,’ though it appears that ‘Mr Khan said that the workers were drifting in their cooperation with their fellow-workers, and hoped that as from the beginning of the new year, they will look at things from a different angle and will be able to share one common understanding’.

  There is also an advertisement in which, despite Mr D’Aguiar’s gloom, ‘the partners and staff ‘of Messrs Wong and Khan ‘extends [sic] to all our clients and friends a very happy and prosperous New Year’; and, curiously, in a photograph on page eight Mr D’Aguiar himself is seen shaking hands and offering the season’s greetings.

  The editorial, claiming that Dr Jagan is a communist, and that Mr Burnham ‘must be handled with extreme caution’ since ‘the stigma of Communism is not too easily removed’, gives credit to Mr D’Aguiar for putting forward ‘the only constructive plan for the development of British Guiana’. There are advertisements for the United Force and the Sun, I-Cee soft drinks and Banks beer (both D’Aguiar enterprises). And a speech of Dr John Frederick’s is reported:

  Do you want to own shares in a paying concern like Bank Breweries or have to pay taxes to keep the Government concerns which are losing money as the Railway Department and the Pasteurization Plant are doing and then be told that they are yours because they belong to Government?

  Amid these preoccupations God is not forgotten. A religious column (of American origin, from its style and sentiment), whose premise is that whatever your job ‘you can do something to restore to the mainstream of today’s world the values you think are missing’, tells the story of a young New York bank clerk who, though it meant losing $1,800 a year, gave up his job to become a teacher.

  In giving his reason, he said: ‘When the little eyes in front of me light up with the realization that something new has been discovered, it is worth any sacrifice to know that I have been an instrument of this discovery.’

  Another story, from the days of sail, tells of the young seaman who panicked when he went up the mast during a storm. ‘Don’t look down, boy!’ the mate shouted. ‘Look up!’ The boy did so, and came down safely.

  By ‘looking up’ to God and out to the cause of all mankind, your own personal problems will seem incidental, and will be more easily solved.

  Among the passengers waiting in the veranda of the Lethem hotel there was a coloured girl from Georgetown. She said she didn’t care for politics but supposed she was for D’Aguiar. The other leaders were communist. And: ‘Look what Mr D’Aguiar has done for the country with Banks beer.’

  Improbably, there was a connexion. In the Caribbean territories a brewery is invariably among the earliest industrial projects. It is a mark of progress and a promise of modernity, and the local beer is a source of much local pride: Red Stripe in Jamaica, Parbo in Surinam, Carib in Trinidad, Banks in British Guiana. Wherever in British Guiana you heard the United Force spoken of approvingly you heard about Banks beer.*

  In the boarding-house in Georgetown the drunk was still drunk, still groaning, still on his bed. I moved.

  Georgetown, most exquisite city in the British Caribbean, is for the visitor the most exasperating. Try getting a cup of coffee in the morning. The thing is impossible. Yesterday you expressed a dislike for lukewarm ‘instant’ coffee, particularly when the coffee is placed on the water and not the water on the coffee; so this morning your hotel offers you half a teaspoon of last year’s coffee grounds in a pint of lukewarm water, since in your folly you said that you ‘used’ ground coffee – ‘use’, revealingly, being the Guianese word for ‘drink’ or ‘eat’. Protest is futile. The Indian waiters are sluggish from overwork and too cowed by abuse from employers and patrons to understand anything. (‘I treat my people well,’ one Indian complained angrily last night to the proprietress, ‘but servants and me not the same class, you hear.’ ‘I know, I know,’ she replied, sympathetic to his suffering.) When you came down this morning at a quarter past seven and inquired why you had not been awakened at half past six, as you had asked, the middle-aged waiter, with a look of terror, said it wasn’t half past six as yet. One sip of the coffee, and you know you can’t drink any more, in spite of the plastic doily on the yellow-checked oil-cloth.

  So you start sweating through the hot white city looking for coffee. The cafés serve cold drinks only; the hotels, instant coffee. You telephone a friend, who recommends a café with an inviting name. You ask directions of several Guianese, who mislead you not out of malice or ignorance but out of pure stupidity. Eventually you arrive at Kate’s Kitchen, say. You wait for fifteen minutes; you order half a dozen times; and half a dozen times some torpid waitress, Portuguese, African or Indian, her tumescent belly suggesting constipation, writes down your simple order with illiterate deliberation, as though her pencil were a stylus and her pad made of wax. No coffee comes, though. You are not known in Kate’s Kitchen; therefore you are not served.

  After half an hour you rise, sweating, for the café is hot and unventilated, and you find yourself saying passionately but precisely, ‘You Guianese are the slowest people I have ever met.’ You alone are affected by these words; the waitresses simply stare and you go out into the white light trembling with anger, solacing yourself with the words of abuse which have just leapt into your mind.

  Inhospitable, reactionary and lethargic except when predatory: these were the words. And thereafter, whenever my frustration neared breaking point, I played with them, changing an adjective, adding another, until I was able to ‘look up and out to the cause of all mankind ‘.

  It is equally impossible to get a meal. About the only thing Georgetown restaurants and hotels offer is ‘chicken in the rough’, and unless you share the Guianese passion for this ‘modern’ dish with the American name, which is nothing more than a piece of roast chicken served up in a dirty basket (it is the baskets the Guianese like) you are going to remain hungry. No point either in telling the waiter that you are in a hurry. It will be fifteen minutes before you get a menu and an hour before you get your scrambled eggs. Don’t complain: the man has been hurrying. You can’t cook in your hotel room; you can’t cook in the street. What do you do? These extracts from my diary, which read like extracts from the diary of an enfeebled explorer, tell their own story:

  January 17. One of those dreadful Georgetown days. Shopping at Bookers. Taxi for 45 cents. No lunch. The rumshop; the
Bookers snack bar; the buying of tin-opener and paper cups.

  January 25. One of those Georgetown days. Woke up in dreadful temper. …

  The malarial sluggishness of the Guianese is known throughout the Caribbean and is recognized even in British Guiana. Some employers prefer to recruit islanders, who, they say, have greater gifts of initiative and self-reliance. I was told that it is dangerous to leave a Guianese in charge of a surveying station in the bush: the surveyors will return to find the hut collapsed, instruments rusted, and the Guianese mad. The islander, on the other hand, will be found in the midst of a tidy plantation, which he will leave with reluctance.

  One Guianese official I spoke to blamed malaria. But malaria isn’t all. There is history as well. Slavery lasted for three hundred years and was of exceptional brutality: in this matter of slavery the Dutch record is even blacker than the French. The African, as a result, is passionate for independence, and for him independence is not so much an assertion of pride as a desire to be left alone, not to be involved. Hence the number of African prospectors in the interior of British Guiana, who never make a fortune but live happily beyond the claims of society and just within the law. Hence the existence in neighbouring Surinam of de luie neger van Coronie, the lazy Negroes of Coronie, who live placidly in their remote settlement, occasionally taking the odd coconut to the oil-factory for a little ready money, ask for nothing else, and are the despair of the oil-factory, planners, politicians and oil-consumers, for the unrefined oil produced by the people of Coronie is more expensive than the refined oil imported from Holland.

  Then there is the land. The fertile coastal strip has to be protected against the floods of Guiana’s many rivers, and, being below sea-level, has to be protected against the sea as well. Irrigation and drainage, valueless unless carried out on a large scale, are beyond the small farmer. The estates must therefore be large. And the evils of the latifundia follow: those clusters of workers’ houses seen from the air, in the midst of fields that go on and on, regularly intersected by ruler-straight irrigation ditches. ‘Today in British Guiana,’ Michael Swan wrote in 1958, putting the case for the estates, ‘sugar must use a hundred subtle methods to maintain a sufficient labour force Most of the evils in the sugar industry can be traced back to the fears of labour shortage.’ The indenture system, which replaced slavery and brought over hundreds of thousands of Indians to the West Indies, operated most harshly in British Guiana (if we forget the treatment of Indians in the French islands and Chinese in Cuba). For the efficient running of the latifundia the workers must be regarded as a caste apart and must continually be reminded of their condition.

  And everywhere on the coast you can see reminders of the past, of affronts deliberately offered, it seems, to the labourers of the latifundia. The ‘ranges’ – long rooms cut up into a number of tiny rooms, each occupied by a family – have nearly all disappeared; one or two on the outskirts of Georgetown are pointed out as curiosities. But when you travel by the decadent railway between Parika, on the Essequibo River, and Georgetown, your eyes are caught by more than the water-lilies in the grassy ditches. On one side of the tracks you see the workers’ houses, small, similar, huddled; and on the other side you see the quarters of the senior staff: authority confronting subservience: a standing provocation, you would have thought, to any people of spirit.

  It is easy to blame the planters, to blame Bookers. Sugarcane is an ugly crop and it has an ugly history. The foolishly authoritarian overseers mentioned by Michael Swan have a dishonourable ancestry. But in British Guiana it is the land which is ultimately to blame. The land required the latifundia; the latifundia created Bookers. And though Bookers must be given credit for their radical reforms of recent years, they must bear responsibility for what they have been and what, with the best will, they could not help being. Not harsh and unimaginative employers, which was unavoidable, even on the latifundia; but for being, for creating, a colonial society within a colonial society: a double confinement for the Guianese.

  Slavery, the land, the latifundia, Bookers, indenture, the colonial system, malaria: all these have helped to make a society that is at once revolutionary and intensely reactionary, and have made the Guianese what he is: slow, sullen, independent though deceptively yielding, proud of his particular corner of Guiana, and sensitive to any criticism he does not utter himself. When the Guianese face goes blank and the eyes are fixed on you, you know that receptivity has ceased and that you are going to be told what the speaker believes you want to hear. It is hard to know exactly what Guianese are thinking; but if you make up your mind in advance you will find much corroboration. ‘Everybody lies in B.G.,’ a Guianese told me. It isn’t lying; it is only an expression of distrust, one of the Guianese’s conditioned reflexes; and one cannot help feeling sympathy for the Colonial Office officials who went to British Guiana in 1957 and concluded that Jaganism was a spent political force.

  That the Guianese people should have been politically aroused and organized is not surprising. The latifundia and the difficulty of communications bred a feeling of community which is missing in a place like Trinidad. Whether the people are politically educated is another matter. It has been discovered in America and England that political policies can be sold like any other commodity. In British Guiana the issues are never confusing and there is no need to sell anything. Political judgements are as simple as they were for the girl who was for Mr D’Aguiar because he brewed Banks beer.

  One week-end Mrs Jagan went to Wakenaam, one of the flat, damp, rice-growing Essequibo islands, to open a new overhead water-tank. I went with her. For the first time Wakenaam was going to have a pure water supply and everyone had dressed for the occasion. A photographer from the Government Information Services was there. The speeches were made and applauded, but before Mrs Jagan could set the pump in motion (item eight in the typewritten programme, which was not strictly followed), a man wearing a suit and a hat rose and complained about the new rates so noisily that the ceremony was almost ruined. He continued to complain during the celebration – soft drinks downstairs, whisky upstairs – and at one point seemed to be threatening to withdraw his support for the government.

  This is the level of political judgement in British Guiana. Wherever ministers go they are met with trivial complaints; whenever, in a country area, Dr Jagan stands still he is at once surrounded by people who have favours to ask. That the government is elected does not matter; the people require it to be as paternalistic as before, if a little more benevolently; and a popular government must respond. ‘The people’ have learned their power, and the sensation is still so new that every new voter regards himself as a pressure group. In this way the people – not the politician’s abstraction, but the people who wish to beg, bribe and bully because this is the way they got things in the past – in this way the people are a threat to responsible government and a threat, finally, to their own leaders. It is part of the colonial legacy.

  * * *

  From the Georgetown Evening Post, 17 January 1961:

  OVER THE TEACUPS

  Faye Crum-Ewing received one of the biggest surprises of her life on Saturday night, during the course of her 18th birthday party, held at the Main Street residence of her two aunts, Misses Ivy and Constance Crum-Ewing.

  About 10 o’clock a drawn cart pulled up at the entrance of the home and a few boys of the Royal Hampshire Regiment at Atkinson entered the hall toting a huge box. That was their birthday gift to Faye from Alan Bishop, Evan Ozon, David Perry and Dr Peter Kerkohn.

  The boys insisted that she open it at once, and as she raised the lid, what do you think popped out? A live person in the form of Evan Ozon, holding up three gift boxes! What a shout there was from all the guests present! The first gift box was inscribed with the words – ‘from her three high-class friends’.

  And on opening this Faye saw a replica of the Alms House and some of its attendants. The second box contained a tin of harpic and a toilet brush, and the third most unusual binocu
lars made from two liqueur bottles held together by china ware.

  Never was a surprise so well thought-out and executed, and even now we keep wondering what became of the drawn cart near the front steps of the Crum-Ewings’ Main Street home.

  Faye herself looked most attractive and was her usual sparkling self. She wore …

  The Guianese scale of distance is curious. They will tell you with pride that the Essequibo, their largest river, is twenty miles across at its mouth and contains islands as large as Barbados. Yet they will speak of the settlement of Bartica, only forty easily navigable miles up the Essequibo, as bush, ‘the Interior’, though it was in this bush, along rivers the colour of burnt sugar, that the earliest plantations were established: the ‘dream of perished Dutch plantations’, in the words of the Guianese poet A. J. Seymour, ‘in these Guiana rivers to the sea.’ Very little remains of these plantations: heaps of bricks here and there – the flat red bricks one has seen individually delineated in so many Dutch paintings – which came from Holland as ballast in Dutch ships, and which, because of their association with carefully rendered sunlit church walls and interiors ordered or boorish, are so disturbing to find in the bush, where they recall only the brutalities of the slave plantations.

  In West Indian towns history seems dead, irrelevant. Perhaps it is because the past is so unimaginable; perhaps it is the light; perhaps it is because so much is makeshift and new and the squalor so wholly contemporary. To feel the past you need the emptiness of these Guianese rivers. These rivers, this bush, these rocks are just as they were before the New World was discovered: just such a scene, the river banks bristling with dead, fallen trees, the bush not separate trees but something draped and festooned and heavy, something decaying, with living trunks like white pillars and branches like white veins in the lustreless green whose reflection in the black water is like tapestry-work.