The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  Afterwards we gyaffed beneath a peepal tree at the estate office. The yard was full. It was Friday: payday. Beyond the gates the Friday market was out in force, competing for the workers’ wages before they were spirited away at the rumshop, or deposited pragmatically in the two banks on the main road.

  And that is where, in mid-August, a fortnight before elections, which would be won comfortably by the Indian party, the hold-up occurred, an hour to noon. A group of bandits arrived with AK-47s, ordered the civilians to the side, shot at the glass facades, entered the banks, cleaned out the vaults and made off with sacks of loot into the backlands. It was a wonder that they hadn’t come on horses.

  For a week I followed the adventure every morning in the papers, the effect like a serialisation. The bandits hijacked at various stages a pastor’s car, a fisherman’s motorbike, two tractors, a boat. They had planned to head downriver and escape into the Atlantic. But a series of slapstick blunders – the first tractor bumping into a bike, the second tractor sticking in the mud – had allowed police to catch up. They managed to get away on the boat. But with police in pursuit, they could no longer expose themselves on the bare ocean. They crossed the river, dumped the hijacked boat and hoofed it.

  This was a mistake. It was good territory to lay low in, as bandits often did, but exactly the wrong terrain to be on the run. Beyond the elaborate Dutch artifices, the polders and the kokers, the land was the way it had always been: swamp, bush, wet grass, low jungle, inhospitable, empty.

  There was water at every step. The bandits were bogged down. There was little, if any, fruit to eat and weak overhead cover. Hungry, exhausted, they were forced to shed ammunition as they went along. Then the heavy AKs. Then sacks of wet cash.

  The manhunt continued over long days. Through the accumulation of details in reports, the untravelled, impenetrable landscape opened up vividly to the eye. I wondered how it was that the bandits kept going. Was it an ordeal or an adventure? What questions did they ask themselves? Did they?

  It was a good fifty hours before the killings were made. Every day another one or two men were found and executed, because dead men don’t tell tales. Their mugshots appeared in the papers, black-and-white squares, expressionless, depthless, defeated. And yet beneath the flatness there bubbled a kind of bravado that said: ‘My face flat now, but look, look how confident I was.’

  WHEN I thought back these days to my original visit to Guyana, that strange and alluring week in 2002, I no longer saw the flashes and moods that I used to. I only saw how much I did not see.

  It had passed me by in 2002 that six weeks before I had arrived, on the carnival of Mashramani, Mash Day, five prisoners had broken out of Georgetown prison. It changed the course of the country forever. Five! It said not so much of the enormity of those prisoners, as of the littleness of the nation, the size of Britain but holding a mere three-quarter million, and the domino trail of how one thing led to another in a small, hot place.

  It went back to how the society had been planted, civilisational seeds drawn from here and there and thrown together in a patch to grow. It went back to how the land had been settled, the country and agriculture by Indians, the towns and professions by Africans. From these beginnings emerged the inevitable politics of race, an African party and an Indian party. They were once the same party. Class held it together, workers against masters. And race split it in two, under leaders of charisma and ego, with names like in a movie, Jagan and Burnham.

  Cheddi Jagan was Indian, an America-trained dentist, handsome, firebrand, earnest, doggedly Marxist; Forbes Burnham, African, brilliant, suave, a London-educated lawyer, the silkiest of speakers. Together they had formed the party, and in 1953, when they swept to victory in elections, buoyant, America and Britain feared Guyana had gone red. It took just one hundred and thirty-three days for the crown to send in her troops, sack the government, arrest party members and suspend the constitution. The party began to strain; Jagan and Burnham’s was a case of ‘two man rat cyan live in one hole’; in two years the division was official, the components consolidating in time along race.

  Give them five minutes, it was said, and Cheddi could antagonise a friend while Forbes would convert an enemy. And it was Burnham who was helped to the premiership by America and Britain in 1964. In 1966, Guyana became independent, Burnham remained the leader. For twenty-one years, till his death, he ruled as a dictator, running the economy into the ground and alienating the Indians to such an extent that when Jimmy Carter came to assist in Guyana’s first free and fair elections in 1992, he declared it the most divided country he’d ever seen.

  An aged Jagan won the presidency at last; the Indian party stayed in power thereafter. In the years of its rule, Guyana remained the poorest nation on the continent and the second-poorest in the hemisphere. Eighty per cent of its graduates fled its shores, and of the rest whoever could did, leaving to clean toilets, sweep houses, cut cane, so that it is said with confidence there are more Guyanese living outside Guyana than in it. In a situation of such hopelessness the basest instincts burn; in Guyana it is race.

  Everything is linked. Every day you transacted with the world around you, and every day people you met in it knew something you didn’t. Looking at smithereens of a bank window on tarmac, they knew things I didn’t. It could be debilitating, mystifying, desperate; I wanted to scratch my way in.

  Though I came to it late, for me the jailbreak of 2002 was key. It was no more a criminal thing than a political or racial thing. It came in the wake of a disputed election. It was masterminded by extremist African activists. They hid the jailbreakers in a village on the coast. In that village’s backlands they set up a camp and tutored in it a posse of youth soldiers, some as young as twelve. Guns were put into their hands, ganja in their mouths, ideology in their minds, and they were let loose.

  For months the jailbreakers and their cohorts ravaged the Guyanese coast. Executions, robberies, abductions, arson. Broadly, there were two targets. One was the police. The police, like the army and the bureaucracy, was predominantly black. For this fact it was mistrusted by the Indians; for the same fact it was resented by the Africans. The other target was Indians. They had a special affection for the businessmen.

  From time to time the masterminds would circulate handbills as statements of mission. They were signed ‘Five Freedom Fighters’, or more catchy yet, ‘Five for Freedom’. Another name, ‘African Taliban’, was coined when one of the five captured the public imagination – combining terror and farce, an appealing mix in the Caribbean – by appearing in a video, bin Laden-style, wearing fatigues and holding an AK.

  The man in the video was the leader of the five, Andrew Douglas. He was a protégé of the bandit of whom I’d learned up at Kaieteur – Blackie. Such a small place!

  Like Blackie, Douglas was a former lawman – a policeman, an ace driver who did the chases. And like Blackie he was given a public funeral when he was killed, some six months after the jailbreak. It was endorsed by the black party, attended by thousands of Africans, his coffin was draped in the national flag, his journey from lawman to outlaw to martyr complete.

  The handbill at Douglas’s funeral was signed ‘One Thousand Black Men’.

  It began:

  African-Guyanese built this country over a period of 212 years of brutal unpaid laboured. Today, 164 years after the end of slavery, many of the descendents of these true Guyanese live on pavements, in abandoned buildings and in little square boxes barely large enough to qualify as a prison cell.

  It ended:

  The Company of black freedom fighters demand system of Government and distribution of the national wealth that ensure the protection of our human rights and provide equal opportunities for the development of Black business. We demand government expenditure not only in cricket and squash where Indians and Portuguese predominate but also in activities in which African-Guyanese predominate such as athletics, football, boxing, basketball, music and art. Until these basic human rights are eq
ually guaranteed to all African-Guyanese, the builders of Guyana, there will be no peace.

  Douglas’s death was shrouded in mystery. He had been found in a car, shot in the head. Nobody was sure who made the hit. As time passed more and more bandits, presumed bandits and innocents were taken out in similarly mysterious circumstances. The police claimed to be uninvolved. So did the army. Under pressure for answers, the government finally alluded to ‘some kind of phantom body out there’.

  And then one day, in late 2002, on the coastal highway, outside the village of Good Hope, an army patrol straying from its zone stumbled upon a bulletproof jeep containing hi-tech weapons and surveillance equipment the likes of which the state did not possess. Outside the vehicle – and on this technicality was release secured – were three men. One of them was of particular interest, a well-known tycoon. Shaheed Khan was his name, better known as Roger Khan.

  ROGER Khan. In the Guyanese enunciation it sounded like Raja Khan: King Khan. I knew his face well – dopey eyes, thick eyebrows, black beard, blank arrogance. Boyo the newspaper vendor told me that its appearance on the front page could hike the day’s sales by twenty per cent.

  Like every good don, Roger Khan was self-made and his life of crime began early. He went young to the United States, and by the age of twenty-two he notched up a number of offences, including drug- and gun-running. In 1994, while on probation, he fled to Guyana. He was a wanted man in the USA ever since.

  Back in Guyana he made a phenomenal rise. He took risks, greased palms. He’d had some training as a civil engineer. He hustled a big contract on the university campus. He came into some money, and his next project was to build low-cost cement houses. His business interests multiplied, lumber, a laundromat. He bought an island in the Essequibo.

  But his principal business was cocaine. This was a huge trade in Guyana. Itself Guyana produced no cocaine, but perched on the Atlantic, with its proximity to cocaine nations, it was an ideal transhipment point. The joke on the street was about ‘value-added’ exports. No item was above cocaine. It was stuffed in fish, timber, fruit, greeting cards, cases of skin cream, intestines of humans, cartons of pepper sauce, drums of molasses, shells of coconuts. Estimates put the trade at anywhere between twenty and sixty per cent of the whole Guyanese economy. And the drug barons were thought to be predominantly Indian businessmen.

  All understanding of the Caribbean is available in its music. There is a brilliant satire from fifty years ago, No Crime, No Law, by the calypsonian Commander. It rings open with the striking lines I want the government of every country / Pay a criminal a big salary. The logic is established early on. If somebody don’t lick out somebody eye / The magistrate won’t have nobody to try. The fast-powering lines keep rolling out, each funnier, more visual, women parting men’s faces with poui, boring out their eyes with saws. Through the humour the essential truths behind the comedy gather a terrific force. The entire rapidfire exposé is done inside three minutes. So when a man kill, instead of swinging he head, Commander concludes, They should make him Governor General instead.

  Roger Khan, basically, was made Governor General. He governed over what came to be known as the Phantom Squad, or simply Phantom. Phantom was abstract. It was a loose association. It did hits and melted into the night. Phantom was a response to the African Taliban. The mercenaries were ex-convicts and ex-lawmen and gunmen imported from neighbouring countries, most of them black. The financiers were believed to be Indian businessmen, some of them druglords, chief among them Roger Khan.

  On the street this was suspected a long time, but confirmation came in 2004 when a cattle farmer named Shafeek Bacchus was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. ‘Wrong man,’ one of the perpetrators was heard shouting as the vehicle drove away. The right man soon came to the fore.

  He was the brother, George Bacchus, a chubby balding chap, known about Georgetown as a shady hustler. He claimed to have been the intended target. He confessed to being part of Phantom. He was an informer. But Phantom had turned ugly and he had cut out. Drug scores were being settled every day, people were killing as part of gang wars; the operation had spun out of control. He made affidavits recounting intimate details of Phantom operations – where the captives were tortured, where the bodies were dumped. The most sensational disclosures were about the involvement of the home minister. He claimed to routinely meet the minister in his office, where, surrounded by weapons, the minister would collaborate on hits.

  Two days before George Bacchus was to testify in court, he was found dead in his bed.

  There was a limited inquiry into Phantom operations; the minister was cleared. He was moved to India as high commissioner. He had stamped my passport. How much I didn’t know!

  But now, in 2006, four years after he was found outside his crime-busting vehicle, Roger Khan’s luck was out. He had fallen out with the police chief (with whom, everybody in Georgetown gossiped, he shared a mother-daughter pair of mistresses). He was out of favour with the government. He was on the run. He put out desperate advertisements in the papers boasting of his patriotic support to the government in crime-fighting at his own cost. He bragged about the help he’d given the Americans when an embassy employee was kidnapped by the African Taliban.

  Yet, the Americans, having no use for him anymore, wanted him for trafficking cocaine. And if the Americans wanted him, the Americans got him. As the June rains fell over Georgetown, he was picked up from Suriname with 213 kilos of cocaine, transferred to Trinidad, and whisked away to the USA. Guyana was circumvented altogether.

  The front pages still showed Roger Khan, in a humiliated position, cross-legged on the floor, hands tied, shorn of his beard, in vest and boxers: a fallen don.

  Fallen, but in the eyes of much of the Indian population, as Andrew Douglas had been for the Africans, a folkhero, a demigod. When Indians were being butchered and robbed, Roger Khan had stepped up for them. He had changed the very self-image of the community. Our reputation had been for internalising violence, a man told me: slash the wife, chop the neighbour, hang self. But after Roger Khan he could see that the black man was at last afraid of Indians. ‘Watch there, man be Phantom,’ he heard them whisper.

  African Taliban, Phantom; it was an absurd manifestation of the racial confrontation, self-defeating of course. African Taliban had not only attacked Indians, but left in its wake dead black policemen, dead black bandits, made criminals out of able black youth. Phantom had not just attacked Africans, but further criminalised a dubious section of the business class, and cast a pall on the conduct of the Indian party. And between them, African Taliban and Phantom had sprouted scores of new criminals, new gangs, set new standards for violence, a free for all, and driven a vulnerable citizenry, divided by race always, out to the far edges.

  CONSIDER the Singhs of La Bonne Intention; a terrible condition of anxiety has choked the Singhs. Their vast property, gated, fenced and electronically secured many times over, is by the main road, but the house has been built deep inside, away from the noise of the vehicles and, crucially, the coveting eyes of passers-by.

  Mr Singh lives in borderline paranoia, more so after the minister of agriculture was assassinated in the village some months ago. He is a thin, drooping man with a boomerang for an Adam’s apple. He despises the blackman. He is himself going on ebony. The problem in Guyana, he will tell you unprompted – it is the first thing he will tell you – ‘Black people don’t like work, they like killing people.’

  Ask Mr Singh about Roger Khan. He’s got a problem with the thing, a serious serious problem. ‘The problem is there was only one Roger Khan. You need one hundred.’ He likes this numbers game. His solution to kick Guyana into shape is to import fifty thousand Indians. (This is a different figure from the Sindhi trader, who suggests a hundred thousand, or the Chinese pig farmer and bakery owner, who recommends a half million Chinese.)

  Mr Singh’s routine, you sense, has been developed and perfected over time. ‘You ever see a sign sayin Made in Africa? Lik
e you see a sign, Made in India, Made in USA, you ever see any sign which says Ma-de in Af-ri-ca? Cause they ain’t make nothing in Africa.’ He does not wait for a response, instead masterfully segueing the final syllables into a lingering suck-teeth, before adding: ‘Actually, is AIDS they made in Africa.’

  Every day dawns fresh with prejudice, with a fresh urge to get the juices going. With an early morning breakfast of sada roti and baigan choka, in boxers still, he chances upon the television a black man. Boom! the day comes alive. ‘Shut you stinkmouth, nigger! Lock up the man. Arrest he for ugliness.’

  Turning to you he asks, ‘You know what happen with blackman? God burn them. They skin burn, they hair burn, and with that they brain burn too. They want to talk like whiteman, look like whiteman. Cause they got no culture of they own. They don’t like Indians cause Indians got they own culture, right.’

  ‘Well, I feel they have an inferiority complex,’ Mrs Singh, up since dawn, monitoring the housework, cooking a variety of food, adds sympathetically.

  You begin to think that it is merely Mr Singh’s way of talking. For people of various races have appeared on the television, each denounced spectacularly. ‘The man so ugly,’ he remarks of an Indian presenter, ‘he mother push he out after four month.’