The Middle Passage Part 6

The Brazilians arrived in the middle of the afternoon and at once overran the hotel. The women besieged the bathroom, twittering and squawking; and when, hours later, it seemed, they had all repaired the ravages of the drive from Boa Vista, the bathroom was littered with tangles of hair and tufts of cotton wool. In the corridor there was an empty green-and-white carton, Leite de Rosas a perfume, I imagine a and Industria Brasileira, needless to say.

I had heard that in the old days these frontier dances were rough affairs and sometimes ended in brawls. Things were quieter now and I felt that Lethem regretted its former reputation, though the dance was still not considered by some to be suitable for respectable women. The earliest dancers were Amerindian, with the respectable looking on with aloof indulgence, as though they didn't know why they had bothered with the long drive, the stay in the bathroom and the Leite de Rosas.

In the veranda, removed from the hubbub of the dance floor, I came upon a respectable Brazilian man and two respectable Brazilian women a Portuguese with a dash of Amerindian, like so many Brazilians in this part a sitting idly in Teddy Melville's leather chairs. We attempted to talk. Attempted: they spoke Portuguese and knew little English, and I had only some Spanish. The man was an engineer. His wife, who had a grave, fine beauty, was a civil servant; his sister, unfortunately still unmarried, came from Belem and was spending some time with them. We exchanged addresses. They pressed me to visit Brazil, a great country. When I did so I was to come and see them. We wandered back to the dance floor, and separated.

The Amerindian women danced dourly, looking down at the floor, concentrating on their steps, and seeming to ignore their partners. They brought their bare feet flat down on to the ground, in a slight stamping action. I did not find them attractive.

I had tried hard to feel interest in the Amerindians as a whole, but had failed. I couldn't read their faces; I couldn't understand their language, and could never gauge at what level communication was possible. Among more complex peoples there are certain individuals who have the power to transmit to you their sense of defeat and purposelessness: emotional parasites who flourish by draining you of the vitality you preserve with difficulty. The Amerindians had this effect on me.

My most depressing memory of the Rupununi is of the Amerindian village to which Franker took me one day. 'NOTICE', said a roughly written board outside. 'WE DO NOT WANT ANY STRANGERS TO BE TRESPa.s.sING ON THE VILLAGE, EXCEPTING THE PRIESTS, THE DOCTORS, AND THE DISTRICT COMMISSIONER, ORDERED BY THE VILLAGE CHIEF. FELIX.' The notice was not government-inspired; its purpose was to protect the villagers from the importuning of certain politicians they weren't going to vote for anyway. It was a small village of thatched huts and some rough wooden houses. The teacher, an Amerindian, lived in the largest wooden house, which was some distance from the village. And in another wooden house there was the school, empty now, but with maps and posters and time-tables on the walls, just like many other elementary schools. But this one led its pupils to nothing but confusion and self-contempt.

Father Quigly, the Roman Catholic missionary, was pa.s.sing through the village; he had spent the night in the school, and his hammock was still hung across the room. As he spoke to us, men and boys gathered around, some in the schoolroom, some in bright sunlight outside, the young interested and expectant, the old not looking, as though they felt they had to express their courtesy to the district commissioner and were doing so merely by being present.

'Faustino,' Father Quigly asked, 'you want to go to Georgetown?'

'Yes, Father,' said a boy in grey flannel trousers.

Yet what would Faustino, and others like him who were dissatisfied with their village and with their condition as Amerindians, do in Georgetown? There they would be objects of contempt; some might become traffic policemen; but that was all. Father Quigly thought they should be given more say in the country, some sort of semi-responsible protected employment by the government.

Felix, the village chief, in whose name the bold sign barring strangers had been written, didn't appear interested. While we spoke he sat slumped and round-shouldered on a bench, staring at the floor, his short legs, loosely trousered, dangling. Later in his trance-like way he took us to his hut. It was dark and dirty and dusty and disordered, like most Amerindians' huts. The sight of exposed food in the midst of dust and mud has the same effect on me as the screech of chalk on a board; I could scarcely stay to admire the Wai-Wai grater a sharp bits of stone stuck into a board a which I had been told was a rare and desirable souvenir. I felt then that reverence for food a rules for its handling, interdictions a was one of the essentials of civilization.

The music went on all through the night. I awoke intermittently to it: it was comforting, like the sound of rain; but there were also curious grunting noises such as one hears in j.a.panese films. And in the morning there was silence. The Brazilians, band and dancers, civil servant and engineer, had got into their lorries and had gone back to Boa Vista. There were empty beer bottles around the dance floor, in the veranda, in the road; and little groups of Amerindians were contentedly regarding the chaos to which they had contributed.

In the dining room there was a new guest. He was a trader, Syrian by origin, who had come in by a small plane that morning, on the way to Georgetown. He tried over coffee to persuade me to become a trader and live in Brazil. I mentioned difficulties: with transport from Georgetown to Lethem at nine cents a pound, I said, trading couldn't be very easy.

'Whatsa trouble?' he said. 'You pay one dollar in Georgetown. So? So you pay another dollar for the transport. So you charge three dollars. Whatsa trouble?'

In Boa Vista that week there was a fair of some sort a cattle or agriculture a and the Lethem officials had been invited. Hewson, the young English agricultural officer who wore correct khaki but went about barefooted by preference, was going with two of his a.s.sistants, and he agreed to take me along. We didn't need pa.s.sports to get into Brazil but we had to ford the Takutu River. It was less than a hundred yards across at the fording point, and sticks marked the route over the treacherous little sandbanks in which the Land-Rover would be trapped if it halted at all. When the Land-Rover began to sink and the water level rose, I tried to remember that the river was forded twice a week by the big lorry from Boa Vista.

At last we made the bank. We were in Brazil. The ground carried no marks of difference, nothing to confirm that we were in Brazil. The savannah was as flat and bright and bare, the sky was as high, and the ground was as hard as on the other bank. The road stretched between bristling tussocks of coa.r.s.e brown-green gra.s.s: two parallel white tracks separated by a strip of low, cha.s.sis-brushed vegetation. And as we penetrated deeper into Brazil I felt as a fact, what the maps had already told me, that the savannah was really Brazilian and the British Guianese portion of it trifling.

We pa.s.sed small settlements of thatched houses and sometimes we were stopped by people, Amerindian with a dash of Portuguese, who sang out requests for pasagem a Boa Vista. 'No pa.s.sage, no pa.s.sage,' Hewson said; and they withdrew without showing rancour or disappointment, to wait for goodness knows how long for some vehicle that would take them to Boa Vista, whose lights, here in the savannah, must have seemed very bright indeed. One of those who stopped us was a very old, white-headed Negro. One is so used in the New World to hearing Negroes speak English that it is startling to hear them speak anything else; it is to see afresh the condition of the Negro, who in the New World has been made in so many images. In this savannah the old man was demonstrably an alien, an exotic who yet knew nothing else, neither of landscape nor language.

Suddenly, and incredibly, there was a large unpainted concrete building. It was marked POSTO MEDICO in clumsy blue letters, and on the walls there were election posters with photographs of well-dressed politicians with unreliable faces. This was a hospital. But it had no equipment, no doctors, no patients: Brazil, a great country, administering every section of its great area, on paper.

Wherever you look in the savannah you see a mountain range, low and faint and far away. Without these ranges the flatness would be insupportable, particularly when even the sandpaper trees disappear, and the twisted branches of one dead white tree at the side of the road, remarked long before you come to it, cinematically frame and give scale to the emptiness. And then you see, not a mountain range, but a single hill, neat, abrupt, isolated; you cannot take your eyes off it; it grows, it spreads; it is not neat at all. It isn't a hill which is known to people; its little slides of rock, the appearance and fading of its scant vegetation, do not matter; it has only this landmark existence.

The savannah landscape continually changes. In damp depressions there is bush which is like forest. But the pleasances are the creeks. The land around them is green, and palm trees are reflected in the clear water. We stopped at one to wet our faces and soak our feet; and while we were doing so a Land-Rover came around the greenery, shot across the shallow ford and raced away in a cloud of dust. This was Cesar Gorinsky of the Rupununi, bound like us for Boa Vista. We followed but couldn't catch up. Gorinsky knew the road, and the whorls of dust from his Land-Rover seemed to express his flamboyant skill.

The land grew greener. We pa.s.sed a fazenda: a whitewashed house with blue facings set between banana trees and an orange orchard. Children watched us from the yard, and a signboard gave the name of the place: Good Hope. And all at once we were on the bank of the Rio Branco, a tributary of the Amazon. Small islands barred a direct view across, and the awesome breadth of the river could be gauged only by the straggling line of unremarkable white and brown houses high on the other bank, tenderly lit by the setting sun: Boa Vista, city of adventure, with a whole street of brothels. Between our bank and the nearest island white sandbanks rose out of the muddy water, and for a moment one indulged the child-like fantasy that it was possible to hop from one sandbank to the other and so on to the island, which was low and flat.

And now we saw the reason for Gorinsky's speed. He had been hoping to catch the ferry, which took only two vehicles at a time; and he was second in the queue behind a brightly coloured w.i.l.l.ys jeep (Industria Brasileira, even down to its tyres). The ferry had just left and would not be back for at least an hour. The driver of the w.i.l.l.ys jeep, a Brazilian army officer, said with glum resignation that the service might even be suspended until the morning. We sat on the bank, eating oranges, the houses of Boa Vista growing mellower and mellower as the sun sank.

A small boat with an outboard motor came alongside, offering to take pa.s.sengers across, and Hewson decided to send me over with one of his a.s.sistants. As we left, messages were shouted to the boatman to remind the ferry to come back. We zigzagged across the river, between the islands and the sandbanks, and it was twenty minutes before we reached the other bank. A mult.i.tude of women and children were bathing close to the sh.o.r.e. It was now dusk. Trees and moored boats were silhouetted against the bright sky and river. We climbed up the steep bank and came into a dirt street which was as full of holes and b.u.mps as a construction site.

Boa Vista is a preposterous city: separate huddles of shabby houses along wide streets that have been marked out according to the design of a master town-planner. Only, the streets have not yet been built, except in short, abrupt and arbitrary stretches. The planners have planned for the year 2000, and what in that year will be magnificent avenues in the meantime connect nothing to nothing through red Brazilian dirt. One curious result is that though in terms of population Boa Vista is a small city, its distances are metropolitan, without the alleviation of a metropolitan bus service. Lamp standards line the well-planned desolation, part of the promise of the future, and a number of grand buildings, among them an abattoir and a hospital, both uncommissioned, have been put up, awaiting the future and an increase of population, which at present consists mainly of civil servants administering one another and smugglers who keep the civil servants supplied; the Brazilian Government, for reasons of economy and convenience, tolerating smuggling in this territory.

A taxi, an open w.i.l.l.ys jeep a only jeeps can operate on these streets a took me to the hotel, one of the impressive buildings put up for AD 2000. In that year, no doubt, it will occupy a commanding position in a splendid town centre, where smart and incorruptible policemen will control traffic through tree-lined avenues and fountains will play in well-kept gardens; but at the moment this town centre was an immense featureless dustbowl, across which gaily-coloured open jeeps packed with cheerful Brazilians regularly scuttled, whirling up clouds of red dust that blotted out the lamp standards and electric poles with which the town bristles and the houses, small in the distance, at the other end of the bowl. The hotel, new and pink, already felt like a ruin, like a relic of a retreating civilization. It smelt of disuse. Two barefooted children, dirty and shy, wearing clothes into which, following the Boa Vistan pattern, they had yet to grow, showed me to my room: a bed, a chair, a bulbless reading lamp, an ugly uns.h.i.+ning wardrobe, a hot-water tap that didn't run and had possibly never run, a window that overlooked a patch of wasteland where much garbage had been dumped. After this it seemed an impertinence when, on my way out, the man behind the desk asked for my pa.s.sport. Abandoning Spanish, which I had used previously with him, I said in English and with some annoyance that I had none. He shrugged his shoulders, withdrew the request and went on picking his teeth.

Darkness hid the dust and the absence of buildings. In all directions and as far as the eye could see Boa Vista blazed with electric lights that seemed to mark the boulevards, squares and crescents of a metropolis offering rich sensual pleasures. I wished to avoid the dustbowl, however, and was making for a short street of disintegrating wooden shacks to the right of the hotel, when Hewson's a.s.sistant, deflecting me slightly, said with embarra.s.sment, 'The women in that street are bad.'

'Bad?' I said.

He became extremely confused. 'Well, they are bad,' he said, and I thought disingenuously. Then, as though explaining matters to a child, he added, 'You see, bad men go to that street to meet these bad women.'

I didn't press the point. We walked across the dustbowl to an asphalted street. The flat surface, so rare in the city, had been put to extensive use; it was covered with enormous election slogans in white paint. After we had had a beer in a dingy bar that smelled of dog-dirt a all the bars, I later discovered, smelled of dog-dirt a Hewson's a.s.sistant left me, and I decided to call on the Brazilian engineer and his civil servant wife whom I had met in Lethem.

They lived in a small white house in a street crammed with small white houses. Like all the houses in that street, and like most of the buildings in Boa Vista, it was marked with the letters P.N., which stood for National Patrimony, the Brazilian way of saying Government Property.

I surprised them enjoying the cool of the evening in their dusty yard below a mango tree, from one branch of which a pendent light bulb of powerful wattage burned fiercely. Never was a city so prodigal of light, so strung with electric wire. I called from the unpaved pavement and they, shading their eyes against the electric glare, uttered cries of disbelief rather than delight. The sister-in-law from Belem sat at a sewing-machine, working bits of material she had bought in Lethem. The engineer was wearing the clothes I had seen on him the night of the dance: white trousers and a striped green s.h.i.+rt. His wife, the civil servant, wore fluffy bedroom slippers. I thought these unsuitable for the dust, which was inches thick, a chaos of footprints, every one of which was thrown into black-and-white relief by the powerful light.

At their subdued cries of welcome a number of people came out of the small house of the National Patrimony: an entire and separate family, it seemed, but the civil servant, whose gravity I now interpreted as melancholy, introduced them as members of her husband's family. The husband himself was sent to get beer; and she, going into the front room a which instantly incandesced, dazzling rays leaping across the inchoate street and through the side window into the yard a returned presently with a bottle of white liquid, a special Brazilian drink, she said, that she had prepared herself. It turned out to be soursop, which grows in every backyard in the Caribbean islands and requires no care. We drank the soursop squash; when the engineer returned with the beer we drank it quickly, to prevent it going warm; and we talked as best we could.

None of them were natives of Boa Vista, which they told me was a joke among Brazilians, who looked upon it as somewhere behind the back of beyond. They feared I was getting a poor impression of Brazil; had I seen pictures of Brasilia? Then the engineer asked whether I had read Shakespeare. In the original? He regarded me with envy and wonder. He was fond of books himself. Yes, his wife said, he was a great reader. 'Camoens, Dante, Aristotle,' the engineer said, 'Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, Tolstoy.' And for a full minute we exchanged names of writers, the engineer greeting every name he recognized with an 'Ah!' Yes, he said at the end, reading was a great thing; it improved man.

Mangoes fell among us as we spoke; the resulting laughter bridged the gaps in the conversation and gave it animation. Before I left, the civil servant said she would be very glad to show me around the next day. I said this would be very nice, but what about her job? She smiled and shrugged; she would call for me at the hotel at nine.

On the way back through the dead, lunar-bright city, I walked down the street of brothels. Miniature black streams, glinting in the light, had cut deep channels through the hard dirt. In one or two decaying wooden shacks there was music, not loud, and a few people were dancing, not riotously. The women were fat, not young, and nondescript. They didn't look clean and had made so little attempt to look 'bad' that I couldn't be sure they were prost.i.tutes; the appearance and allure of prost.i.tutes vary so much from culture to culture. I went straight on to the hotel. When I turned the light on in my room c.o.c.kroaches ran off in all directions. The mosquitoes didn't move. I closed the window against the odours of the garbage in the empty lot and rubbed myself all over with insect repellent, adding another smell to the warm mustiness of the room. The label on the bottle promised me protection for at least four hours.

The dining room was large and high and lighted by many windows; it would have looked like a gymnasium if the enormous L-shaped table hadn't made it look like a partially dismantled college hall. I found one man there next morning. He welcomed me with the warmth of one made frantic by solitude. In Spanish he told me he came from Rio, was a trader (I suppose he meant smuggler) and had been three days in Boa Vista waiting for a plane. He had been to the single cinema, he had made the round of the bars; there was nothing else to do and he was going mad. I asked whether he had gone to the brothels. Yes, he said joylessly, he had; and was going to say more when there was a brisk metallic fluttering behind us. We turned and saw a bird, or so it seemed, beating its wings against a gla.s.s window. The man from Rio got up, walked to the window and put his hand over the creature, stilling its agitation. 'c.o.c.kroach,' he said, putting it in his trouser pocket. His bright eyes dimmed as soon as he got back to the table, and he spoke as one appealing for sympathy. Yes, he had been to the brothels; last night, in fact; but the women were viejas, feas y negras, old, ugly and black.

Being shown around by the civil servant meant missing the fair, which might have given me another view of Boa Vista; Hewson said later that it was impressive. The civil servant came for me shortly after nine, after she had finished her work for the day. Like most of the civil servants in Boa Vista, she said, she had little to do. So we started tramping through the hot dust. The smell of dog-dirt was inescapable, as was the sight of starved mongrels locked in copulation, their faces blank and foolish. Few of the thin children I saw were without some skin disease; one or two were deformed. We went to the primitive printery which produced the ragged government gazette; most of the people there appeared to be doing nothing. We went to a small insanitary market in which everything apart from some Amerindian straw fans had been imported; a maternity hospital, run by nuns, which was admirably ordered and clean; and lastly to the Government Palace, the nerve-centre of the administration.

The palace was a large, undistinguished concrete building, full of civil servants, typewriters, files and silence. In a carpeted room I was shown the governor's desk, huge and untenanted (I imagine he was at the fair). On the wall there was an enormous coloured map of Brazil, which revealed the size of the country a what a minute portion of it we had covered yesterday! a and the remoteness of Boa Vista. Two large white alb.u.ms lay on an occasional table. The civil servant urged me to open them. I expected charts and maps and photographs of industrial projects. I found beauty queens in high heels, from all the states and territories of Brazil: Miss Rio Branco, Miss Amazonas and so on. With the civil servant and a secretary smiling tolerantly at me, I turned over photograph after glossy photograph, beauty queen after beauty queen, proving my manhood, unwilling to offend Brazilian womanhood. Under a gla.s.s case in a corridor there was a model of a beautifully planned city, ideal in its simplicity and symmetry. This was the Boa Vista of the future. I couldn't recognise it and asked where on the model was the building in which we stood. No one could tell me.

We went back to the house of the National Patrimony for a drink. A pedlar called, offering contraband fabrics from British Guiana at a high price. Something was bought; the man was dismissed; and then the engineer came in. His clothes were stained with paint and his wife apologized for him, explaining that he had spent the morning repairing and painting their motor-car. We separated for lunch. Mine was unsatisfactory. No fish, because Boa Vista is a town of civil servants, ranchers and smugglers, and no one found it profitable to go fis.h.i.+ng in the Rio Branco. No vegetables, because the j.a.panese immigrants weren't producing enough or because there weren't enough j.a.panese.

In the afternoon we went with the engineer's sister to the shacklike office of the Brazilian airline to arrange for her flight to Belem: it seemed that civil servants and their families could fly all over Brazil without paying. After the airline office our sight-seeing was over. I was glad. I had had enough of sun and dust and starved mongrels. We turned into a street of small white houses. And there, before us, was the engineer.

He was on a ladder. A cigarette hung from his lips and in his right hand he held a paint brush. He was painting the wall of a house of the Brazilian National Patrimony. He was one of three painters. What was I to do? If his wife, the civil servant, hadn't told me that he had spent the morning on their car, I could have stopped and we could have exchanged smiles.

I didn't see the engineer. I walked on. The two women fell fractionally behind; I heard low words being exchanged. In a moment I had pa.s.sed the house; in another moment the women had caught up with me. We didn't speak of the engineer. Had I made a mistake? Had I been unforgivably rude? At the gate of their house we said good-bye. They didn't ask me in. I thanked them for their kindness. I wanted to make my words more than formal; but language lay between us. I was a complete stranger, and they had shown me much generosity. I walked wretchedly back through wide avenues of dust to the hotel, hoping I would never see them again.

I didn't. A strong wind started across the savannah and the city centre was lost in dust. People walked with handkerchiefs over their faces. For the rest of my stay in Boa Vista the wind never dropped and the man from Rio and myself, imprisoned in the hotel, ate oranges and watched the dust storm.

Cesar Gorinsky drove me back to Lethem. It was an admirable piece of driving. Night fell while we were still on the Brazilian savannah and we had to ford the Takutu by the headlamps of the Land-Rover. In the hotel next day there was quite a crowd waiting for the Georgetown plane: Rupununi children going back to school on the coast, a few holiday-makers who had been staying at various ranches, and some hollow-eyed Brazilian traders with their disreputable-looking suitcases.

Just as the bush had begun at Atkinson Field, so the coast now seemed to begin in the hotel. Even its politics were with us, in copies of a newspaper called the Sun, whose slogan was 'A place in the sun for everyone'. The Sun was the organ of the United Force ('Have Foresight a be a Forcite'), a political party that had been formed earlier that year by Mr Peter D'Aguiar, a Georgetown businessman of Portuguese extraction. The United Force was anti-Jagan, anti-Burnham, anti-left. It offered 'unity and integration for the six races' (Indian, African, Portuguese, white, mixed, Amerindian); and to these races it offered 'more work more wages more industries more land more learning more money'. Something for everyone: 'more money', one imagines, for those threatened by 'more wages'.

On the front page of the Sun I saw a Vol. 1, No. 8 a 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 hards.h.i.+p 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? a 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 a.s.sets. 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d and out to the cause of all mankind, your own personal problems will seem incidental, and will be more easily solved.

Among the pa.s.sengers 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 a '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 cla.s.s, 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 cafes serve cold drinks only; the hotels, instant coffee. You telephone a friend, who recommends a cafe 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 cafe is hot and unventilated, and you find yourself saying pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sionate for independence, and for him independence is not so much an a.s.sertion 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 cl.u.s.ters 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' a long rooms cut up into a number of tiny rooms, each occupied by a family a 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 gra.s.sy 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 a soft drinks downstairs, whisky upstairs a 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 a 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 a 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Hamps.h.i.+re 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 a 'from her three high-cla.s.s 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 binoculars 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 a the flat red bricks one has seen individually delineated in so many Dutch paintings a which came from Holland as ballast in Dutch s.h.i.+ps, and which, because of their a.s.sociation 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 l.u.s.treless green whose reflection in the black water is like tapestry-work.

It all seems to await discovery. But the emptiness is an illusion. The river banks are dotted with small settlements and camps, of Amerindians, miners, woodcutters. Trails and even roads run through the bush in improbable places. The road to Brazil begins at Bartica. Concrete at first (an experimental surfacing), it soon turns to clay and runs broad and red through the bush, with experimental gra.s.s verges stuck unconvincingly on the white sand on which the forest rests. The exposed trees look like prehistoric animals with enormous bodies and tiny heads; the sand is in parts as white as snow, suggesting a snowfall in high summer; and the claypits have the colours and brightness of crumpled rust-coloured tinfoil. Orange trees can grow in this soil, and the Honduras pine; as yet the hardwood trees cannot be made to grow again. Soon the broad red road dwindles to a track, and as a track it continues to the Potaro River, where it stops, eighty miles from Brazil. It is easy to feel in the Interior that British Guiana is a land of temporary forest clearings, experimental road surfacings, and roads that peter out or, like the cattle trail from the Rupununi, go back to bush.

One's ideas of numbers alter. Twenty people are a crowd; a hundred make a city. To go back to Georgetown is not only to move from past to present, but to move from the empty to the grossly overcrowded. For on the coast, where malaria has been eradicated, there is a population explosion. And there is land hunger. The number of children in Georgetown is frightening. In the afternoons the streets of the Albouystown district look like a schoolyard during break. Even now there is unemployment. Land resettlement on the coast, where much land is unused, is expensive; to open up the Interior is even more expensive. And from British Guiana, with 600,000 people in 80,000 square miles, migration is increasing. One cannot help feeling that the situation is curiously Guianese.

From the Guiana Graphic, 18 January 1961: Graphic Opinion

USE THE JOBS THAT ARE THERE.

We came across an interesting advertis.e.m.e.nt yesterday. It reads, 'Domestics Wanted'. It stated that good wages would be paid and free accommodation provided.

These jobs are available at Mackenzie, the mining town of the Demerara Bauxite Company Ltd.

Not only at Mackenzie are cooks and maids wanted. There are opportunities offering in many places in the City and its environs.

Cooks and maids are valuable helpers in homes. They should be accepted and appreciated.

On account of the great amount of unemployment in B.G. this is an avenue which women and girls should not despise. There is nothing inferior, in the eyes of really decent people, in this grade of employment. For if helpers are not available then the mistress of the home will have to do all the ch.o.r.es herself.

Could anybody say that a housewife becomes degraded because she has to do the housework? That would be an absurd line of thinking. There is nothing intrinsically degrading in any kind of work.

It would be a splendid thing if more of the unemployed women and girls of this country realized this and used such opportunities to enable them to earn a livelihood rather than elect to remain unemployed and open to attack by all sorts of evil influences.