The Middle Passage (19 page)

And now, in the veranda of the Davson house, the party-worker was speaking of the same problem, less analytically, 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 – the children had been sent on to their grandmother’s – 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 constituents 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 shining shoes, ironed shirts 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 passion contrasted with the pastoral scene and the placidity of his audience, separated from him by the road. Along this road there passed 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 – the children in the shop gallery continually whispering, giggling and being hushed – 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 grass 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 – ‘lands’ had a startling legalistic ring – 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 passion. 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 passion 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 shirt, 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 passing 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 jackass 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 documenting 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 associate, as ‘that little lady from Chicago, an alien to our shores’; 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 Constitution 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 – in private a man of such charm that one almost regretted that he was a politician – 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 shirt, and his khaki trousers were folded above his ankles; he was barefooted. Mrs Jagan introduced me to her mother-in-law, a short, sturdy 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 – West happily blending with East – 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.