Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  But that’s not where I was heading. Instead, I walked back through Stabroek and followed a row of huge black railings to St Andrew’s Kirk. Here the story looked different. Built in 1818, only fourteen years after the British takeover, the kirk was exorbitantly Scottish. Around the walls were Scottish saints and Scottish flags, and the whole thing was slathered in varnish the colour of ancient peat. What was odd was that, although slavery was already in retreat, this was a work of ecclesiastical forced labour. The kirk had even borne a notice on its door: NEGROES AND ANIMALS NOT ALLOWED. Clearly, even then, the established Church was no friend of the slaves.

  I sat down in one of the pews and drank in the cool. The kirk’s apartheid days hadn’t lasted long. No sooner was the varnish dry than the debate began – not here, of course, but thousands of miles away, in the coffee shops of London. In the end it was won by a coalition of ideas. On the one hand were the Evangelists, on the other the adherents of Adam Smith. Together, they’d argued that propping up a bloated, slave-owning plantocracy made neither moral nor economic sense. In 1834 slavery was banned.

  Meanwhile, in the colony, there was one last gift for the slaves, and that was God. Guiana was flooded with missionaries. It ought to have been the beginning of harmony, but instead it was an age of dissent. A vague sensation of suffering became a burning sense of injustice. After the riots of August 1823 hundreds of slaves were executed. Their heads were stuck on poles, and displayed in the little gardens next to the Sidewalk Café.

  At the far end of the kirk two girls began to sing. Their beautiful African voices filled the church and drifted upwards, out through the open doors and across the city. I could see people stop and turn to listen. In the gorgeous cascade of notes there were both waves of human happiness and centuries of regret. This, I imagined, is how redemption would sound.

  And so it might – except that, in the minds of many, the fight had yet to end.

  Out on the housing schemes, revolt was about the only commodity in limitless supply.

  One day I got an Indian driver to take me to Timehri. All the way Ramdat Dhoni chattered on about the Blacks. ‘They never saves nothing, they lives for today, and they always lies …’

  I said nothing. As long as I was compliant, he kept his eyes on the road.

  ‘… They got lots of women, and most of them is teefs …’

  ‘What about work?’ I ventured.

  ‘Lazy!’ squealed Ramdat.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ever since slavery, never been back in the fields!’

  ‘And what if they don’t get work?’

  ‘That’s when they ends up in places like this, Timehri …’

  We were now churning along a sandy road, tall grass on either side.

  ‘It’s a no-go zone,’ said Ramdat grimly. ‘Get a puncture, you don’t stop …’

  From among the stalks, matted heads peered at us blankly.

  ‘… all they got is guns and dope …’

  And shacks, I noticed, made of cinder blocks and plastic.

  ‘Not exactly housing,’ I said.

  ‘In Guyana, a housing scheme is never no more than a good idea.’

  Ahead of us a child was sharpening a cutlass, or a machete. Ramdat swerved.

  ‘They all teefs,’ he said bitterly. ‘All the Africans is teefs.’

  Obviously Timehri brought out the worst in everyone, including Ramdat Dhoni. With his open, chubby face and his swaggering waddle, I had no idea then that his anger went so deep. I thought he was merely doing what so many Guyanese do, sowing a little verbal carnage among the neighbouring races. Generalisation was the general rule. Among the Asians, I would hear Ramdat’s words time and time again, throughout the Guianas. Even V.S. Naipaul – himself an Indo-Caribbean – had considered the Africans slow, sullen and impulsively deceitful, and would write of the ‘malarial sluggishness’ that stalked their kind.

  But the Afro-Guyanese would probably agree with the Asians on one thing: slavery had transformed the concept of labour. It was not as though abolition had suddenly switched off the power. No, Africans would happily work in a town, or in a uniform, or – better still – for themselves. (The biggest of the ‘housing schemes’, Buxton, was originally an African co-operative.) They’d even half-kill themselves digging for gold upriver. But what they wouldn’t do was work that involved a boss, dirt and an affront to their new-found dignity. If this was the only option, they’d rather revert to dissent. Despite a shortage of cane-workers, thousands of Guyanese lived like this, in impoverished defiance. Often it meant retreating to the margins of society, to a place like Timehri.

  ‘The police still doesn’t come here after dark,’ said Ramdat.

  His son had done his military service in the housing schemes.

  ‘Tell you, Man, every night was like a little civil war …’

  That was when the city got its razor wire and began to feel under siege.

  ‘We still got a murder rate three times that of the USA …’

  I asked Ramdat what the fighting was all about.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘People here’s nuts. Like they want some kind of revenge.’

  Everyone remembered this sudden surge of congenital fury. Those that could got out, including all of Ramdat’s family. Worse, however, was to come. First, in 2002, New York gathered up all its Guyanese criminals and sent the whole lot home. Then, four years later, the GDF – or Guyanese Defence Force – managed to lose a huge consignment of AK-47s. After that, people began to hire little armies of their own. Foreign embassies turned into castles, and at night the streets were shackled in chains and then abandoned to the outlaws.

  I asked Ramdat whether things were any better now. He hesitated.

  ‘Probably, yes. Especially since we killed Fineman and Skinny.’

  People would often tell me the story of Fineman and Skinny. It was like Robin Hood, except with no obvious sheriffs, no heroines, a crate of Kalashnikovs and twenty-five Robins, who stole mostly from the poor. I’d often seen Fineman’s poster, still pinned up in shops and garages, and plastered over trees. WANTED, it said, FOR MURDER. Sometimes he was wanted alone, sometimes with his band of men. They didn’t really need identikit pictures. It seemed that behind the killings was a macabre gang of runaway caricatures: Coolie Boy, Baby James, Not Nice, Chucky Daniels, John Eye, Dread, Capone, Bullet, White Boy and Ratty.

  No one knows why Fineman started killing.

  ‘Came into Lusignan,’ said Ramdat, ‘shot twelve Indians, just like that.’

  Soon the police had him everywhere, killing everything that died. Ramdat could list them all: ‘ … a government minister, a TV presenter …’ Others, such as Lorlene, were less convinced.

  ‘Fineman was the bogeyman,’ she’d said, ‘our one-man wave of crime.’

  ‘Even kids talked about him!’ said Ramdat, ‘and dreamed of him at night …’

  Then it ended. Several months earlier the army had found him, here in Timehri.

  ‘And this is where they shot him!’ said Ramdat, skidding to a halt. ‘Right here! Blew his head off!’

  We peered out. There was nothing there but the seething grass.

  ‘And what about the gang?’

  ‘They’re still finding them.’

  Sure enough, over the next few weeks the rest of the gang were shot. Their posthumous portraits always appeared in the papers; bluish skin, muddy hair, eyes like marbles, and faces shot away. It was, I suppose, the modern equivalent of heads on sharpened sticks.

  We drove back, looking out for little bits of India.

  The horizon was just a long green curve of sugar. It was like being out at sea, moving almost imperceptibly through the swirling currents of cane. Every now and then Ramdat spotted what he was after. Temple! Mosque! Prayer flags! Occasionally we even bumped through little clusters of pink stilted houses, which he called the ‘estates’. Only Africans, he told me, lived in ‘villages’.

  Then we’d be back in the cane. Once I
saw some tiny figures working through it, with machetes and burning torches. The air was like hot, wet pulp, and the figures moved as though they were wading through the heat. I imagined that the slaves had looked something like this – until abolition. After that, most of them had refused to cut the boss’s sugar at all, even for his poxy wages. Without muscle, this ocean of sugar would have reverted to mud.

  ‘So that’s when my family got here,’ said Ramdat, ‘about 1840 …’

  ‘Do you know where from?’

  ‘Of course. We’re from Bengal!’

  Ramdat made an unusual Bengali. Neither he – nor any of the Ramdat Dhonis before him – had set foot in India for the best part of 200 years. He no longer spoke the language or wore the clothes, and he wasn’t even sure where Bengal was. But, for all that, he was still obstinately Indian. He wobbled his head, worshipped Hindu gods and – whenever we went out – he brought bundles of dhal and rice, wrapped up in paper and string. It was almost as though he was just quietly waiting to head back to the home he’d never known. This, after all, is what his forebears had always intended. ‘They signed a five-year contract,’ he said, ‘but then they never had the money for the passage home.’

  Most Guyanese Indians could tell a similar tale. Between 1838 and 1917 almost a quarter of a million of them had arrived in the colony. It was like Exodus in reverse, a flight into bondage. Under the terms of their indentures the ‘coolies’ (as they became known) were no better off than the Africans before. Not only were they confined to their plantations but they’d also inadvertently agreed to being fined, starved, locked up for absence, abandoned, underpaid, flogged and doused in salt pickle. It was hardly the Promised Land. In the century to 1950 there were at least sixteen major revolts. What else could they do? Like Ramdat’s ancestors, few had enough for the journey home.

  ‘So here we are!’ he laughed, ‘in a place we didn’t want to be!’

  I’ve often thought about this. Perhaps it would be Guyana’s epitaph? Apart from the few Amerindians and a handful of adventurers, almost the entire country was descended from people who’d rather have been somewhere else. As between Africans and Indians, however, there was a difference. While the Africans were stripped of everything, the Indians carried on living in a world of their own; they never intermarried, never took anyone else’s god and never changed their names. They even cornered off the cane fields, undercutting African wages and buying them off the land.

  ‘So no wonder you don’t get on?’ I asked Ramdat.

  The head wobbled. ‘They think we’re rich …’

  ‘And you think they’re lazy?’

  Ramdat paused. ‘I can’t forget how they killed my father …’

  Ah, I thought, the piece that’s been missing all along.

  Ramdat broke the silence. ‘He was a water engineer.’

  ‘And who were they?’

  ‘Big crowd of Africans. Beat him down in 1963.’

  He told me what happened, and then neither of us said much for a while. We just sat, watching the cane blurring past. I shall probably never understand how Ramdat senior’s brains had ended up on the kitchen floor, or how so many others like him had died, but I could at least get some feeling for how the present had begun. To do this, I’d visit a dental surgery and meet a man whose parents had been republican royalty, and for whom he had nothing but contempt.

  As the Age of Sugar waned, the Rule of the Dentists began.

  It took me a while to find their surgery. Charlotte Street was like a riverbed, rippling along through old rocks and cataracts of tarmac. Occasionally the surface vanished altogether, offering eerie views of the world within. But even when I found my footing, I struggled to find the address. This was not uncommon in Guyana. Houses often had no number at all, or a wrong one, or one that bore no relation to those before. Sometimes I’d be making good progress along a street when, suddenly, twenty houses would disappear, only to reappear half a mile away in the opposite direction. It was almost as though the forest spirits had come into Georgetown one night and shuffled it all around.

  Several times I asked the way. ‘Excuse me, where do I find Cheddi Jagan’s surgery?’ This was like wandering around London and asking for Number 10. Everybody knew Cheddi, and people often talked about him as though he was still alive. In a sense he still was. ‘Jaganism’ was everywhere. To Africans it just meant being Indian and Marxist. But to Indians it meant being free of imperialism and free from Africans. Inspirational it may not have been but – to them – it was predictable, professional and reassuringly painful, a bit like dentistry itself.

  Eventually I found the surgery. After fifty years of Jaganism I’d expected something dynastic, perhaps with a drawbridge and minarets. Instead, it was a low concrete box with a grille across the front. Cheddi’s name was still painted up on a sun-bleached sign. He’d never had much money. His father, I’d read, had been a labourer, who’d married as a child, had ten children himself and then died in his fifties when his leg turned green. Cheddi was one of the only offspring not to emigrate. During his few years in America, at dental college, he’d survived by washing dishes and selling patent cures. This place was all he could afford when he returned in 1946, at the age of twenty-eight.

  ‘You want something, mister?’

  A woman had appeared at the bars. I explained my curiosity.

  ‘You better come in, see Dr Jagan’.

  I must have looked puzzled.

  ‘Dr Jagan,’ she said, ‘is Dr Jagan’s son.’

  She ushered me in and then heaved herself back to her desk. We were in a long, narrow room that felt like a pipe. There was a large tank of fish and some brittle foliage, and everything was painted dark blue as though we were on the seabed. I was surprised to find Jagans still here. In his lofty autobiography, The West on Trial, Cheddi had never mentioned any children. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed them. I wondered what it did for a son to be ranked in his father’s memory somewhere below the price of rice, a meeting with British trade unionists (1951), and his thoughts on cricket and Cuba.

  Then Joey appeared, angry from the start. It was an alarming sight: a big man with hands like haunches of boiled beef and a beefy head topped with silvery bristles, breathing smoke. He wore a pale blue military shirt and seemed to barge around as though there were people always in his way. For a moment his gaze settled on me, and I wondered what I’d done wrong. But it soon passed, and he gave a dragon-like huff and agreed to a two-minute talk. I followed as he barged off down his strange undersea hall into a submarine study.

  ‘This is where my dad practised,’ snarled Joey, ‘all his life.’

  ‘What, even when he was the president?’

  Joey sat down behind an empty desk. ‘Yup, needed the money.’

  Around the walls were photographs of his father: Cheddi with generals and other presidents; Cheddi in knitted ties; Cheddi receiving honours, or handing them out to Marxist rebels. Among these pictures Joey had added a few touches of his own: a mail order collection of the classics, a life of Pol Pot and a boom box with tiny, flashing lights. Strangely there was nothing here of his mother.

  Joey shrugged. ‘I don’t see her that much.’

  I had, however, seen her picture before. She was famously white and Jewish, and notoriously waspish. Cheddi had met Janet Rosenberg during his Illinois days, and the day they married her father had threatened to shoot her. Janet herself was one of those rare creatures, an American communist, but she was also fiercely loyal to her dental hero. She served Cheddi here, as his hygienist, for the rest of his life. She even took ministerial posts in his governments, and then – when he died in 1997 – she took over his job and became the head of state. That made Joey one of the few people in the world both of whose parents had held presidential office.

  I asked him if that had ever made him feel excluded.

  Joey crushed out his cigarette. ‘They were married to politics. Communism. That’s why I was called Joey – after Joseph Stalin. Jesus! I was even
a communist myself for a while. I had a beret, and was arrested for rioting in Montreal …’

  ‘But not now?’

  ‘Hell, no!’ snorted Joey. ‘You know what? If I was running this place, I’d kick out all the communists. I’d hold a panel of inquiry and ask everyone a simple question: are you a communist? If so, I’d throw them! Send them to Cuba.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit like McCarthyism …?’ I ventured.

  ‘Nope. McCarthy picked out people who’d done nothing wrong. These people are communists.’

  ‘So you’d send your mother to Cuba?’

  ‘She’s a communist, yes.’

  ‘And do you want to run the country?’

  Joey said he did. Although he’d spent all his life as a dentist, he still had a vision of power. He said that Africans would vote for him, and so all he needed was 10 per cent of the Indian vote. He’d already formed the Unity Party of Guyana. It stood for clean streets, no crime and an ambitious policy abroad. He told me he’d happily take out not only Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez (‘a fascist’) but also Syria and Iran. ‘In my view,’ he said, ‘we should implement a limited nuclear strike.’

  I said I’d follow his progress with interest.

  ‘I got to build a website,’ said Joey, ‘I’m not ready yet.’

  Guyana, it seems, still has some time to wait before a return to dental rule.

  A previous generation of tooth-pullers had fought a much bloodier fight.

  To begin with, no one could find the enemy. During the colonial elections of 1953 the Africans and Indians had united under Cheddi and won. There wasn’t even a struggle for independence. Britain couldn’t wait to get shot of Guiana, and the only thing that worried it – and its ally, the United States – was Marxism. Cheddi could never see this and soon started spouting Soviet policy. London reacted by suspending the constitution, imposing an interim government and dispatching two destroyers, an aircraft carrier and an army of occupation. For the British, this would be one of the biggest wars they’d ever fought with an enemy that didn’t exist. The troops had been told they were here to suppress a dangerous coup. Instead, they found nothing. Even now, they’re remembered wandering the streets, asking ‘Where’s the fighting? Anyone seen the war?’