The Middle Passage Part 7

The Jagans are the most energetic campaigning politicians in the West Indies. Every week-end they, or their ministerial colleagues, go to some part of the country. They were going this week-end to Berbice, Dr Jagan's home county, which many people had told me was the most 'progressive' in the country, and they invited me to go with them. Dr Jagan himself was going to call for me at the hotel.

And I was late. I had gone to the restaurant across the road for a 'quick' snack. Forty-five minutes waiting, three minutes eating (scrambled eggs). When I came back Dr Jagan was half-sitting on a bar stool. He wore a sports s.h.i.+rt and looked relaxed. Then I remembered my laundry. I raced up to my room and came down with an untied parcel of dirty clothes, which I gave to the barman together with a tip. (It didn't work. When I came back, two days later, the clothes were still below the bar, a puzzle, I was told, to subsequent barmen.) The Jagans live in an unpretentious one-floored wooden house standing, in the Guianese way, on tall stilts. It is open and unprotected.* There is a pet monkey downstairs, and there is nothing upstairs to distinguish the house from many other Guianese houses, apart from the packed bookcases and the magazine rack (the New Yorker among the magazines).

The trip to Berbice was a family affair. The two Jagan children, a boy and a girl, were going to spend the weekend with Dr Jagan's mother. They treated me with indifference; and considering what has been said and written about them, the boy in particular, I was not surprised. Presently Mrs Jagan arrived. She quickly made ready a they were to eat in the car a and spent a little time choosing a book. She chose The Vagabond by Colette (in Wakenaam she had been reading Doris Lessing). It was a squeeze in the car, but there were two more children to come: the children of Dr Jagan's brother, Sirpaul. We picked them up at a wooden house in another street. 'It's like a picnic,' Dr Jagan said. And, with oranges and bananas being pa.s.sed around to children, it was.

I learned that one of Dr Jagan's brothers was my namesake, and we talked about names. Mrs Jagan said that when Sirpaul was in New York he found himself being treated with exaggerated deference by the hotel staff. The bill explained why: it was addressed to Sir Paul and Lady Jagan.

We were not out of Georgetown yet. A Negro on a bicycle shouted, 'The coolies don't care if Jagan bury them!'

It was the casualness, rather than the abuse, which seemed strange: a small car packed with Jagans, and one of the territory's major political issues finding such simple utterance. One somehow expected something more formal.

'It's a thing you learn in England,' Dr Jagan said. 'To be polite to your opponents.'

We went on talking about names. Mrs Jagan said that another of Dr Jagan's brothers had changed his name from Chunilal to Derek; all but one of the sisters had taken English names.

Exactly one hundred years ago Trollope complained about the British Guiana coastal road a it was the only thing he disliked in British Guiana a and the road hasn't improved since then. The surface is of burnt earth, whose durability is only fractionally higher than that of unburnt earth, and the road is a succession of potholes so distributed that they cannot be avoided, however much a car weaves about. The short smooth 'experimental' stretches provide a brief but shattering contrast and complete one's sense of frustration. Yet taxis and buses regularly use this road, b.u.mping along in a slow, determined straight line when there is traffic, and weaving about like crazy ants as soon as the road is clear. Low-grade bauxite, in which British Guiana abounds, would make a more lasting surface; but burnt earth is a peasant industry and burnt earth has to be used.

We pa.s.sed many Negro settlements. The name of one, Buxton, hints at their story. Thomas Buxton was, with Wilberforce, one of the campaigners for the abolition of slavery; and these Negro villages were established after emanc.i.p.ation, on abandoned plantations co-operatively bought by former slaves who wished to work for no master. The first of these plantations was bought in 1839. It cost $10,000. Six thousand dollars was immediately subscribed in cash by eighty-three Negroes, and the money triumphantly transported in wheel-barrows; the remaining four thousand was paid off in three weeks. The village movement continued in spite of opposition from planters and government. The planters were losing their labour force. The government feared the collapse of the economy and, in order to create 'a free but landless labourer', limited grants of Crown land and imposed penalties on those who squatted on unoccupied land, which was plentiful in British Guiana.*

As it was, Indian immigration solved the labour problem. And the former slaves were defeated by the land, by the problems of drainage and irrigation which only the large estates could tackle. We pa.s.sed through one sad grey village, just like the villages Trollope had seen: grey, weatherbeaten wooden houses standing on stilts on islands of trampled grey mud in a grey swamp. Dr Jagan told me there was no sea-wall in this area, and the inhabitants didn't want one: they were not agriculturists now, but fishermen.

New Amsterdam, British Guiana's second town, stands on the Berbice River. Dr Jagan had been told that the ferry left at five minutes past two. We got to the river in good time, and there we learned that the ferry left at 1.25 and 3.45. 'The inefficiency of people in this country,' Dr Jagan said. However, a launch of the Blairmont Estate was due to make the crossing soon; and to get the necessary permits we drove to the estate office, a low white building, the ditches around the well-kept lawn cool with the broad flushed discs of the Victoria Regia lily, which the explorer Schomburgk discovered on this very Berbice River. Mrs Jagan told me with a girlish giggle that they tried to keep their relations with the estates as correct as they could; and I felt, though she didn't say so, that this asking of a favour, and the promptness with which it was granted, was an embarra.s.sment.

As soon as we got to the other bank a man came up to Dr Jagan and gave him two dollars for the party, and we were met by an elderly Negro, a party-worker. New Amsterdam was a stronghold of the opposition, and we learned that Mr Burnham himself, the leader of the opposition, was in town (he had probably caught the 1.25 ferry) and was to make a speech that evening. Mrs Jagan said that sometimes on these campaigning tours government and opposition had to share the same government rest house. There was no danger of that here, however. We were staying at Government House.

Government House in New Amsterdam is the old Davson estate house, white and grand and elegant, two-storeyed, standing on tall pillars, the broad veranda wire-netted, the floors s.h.i.+ning, the rooms high and large, and everywhere the rich smell of old wood, the unmistakable smell of the tropical estate house. Something remained of the Davsons. In the drawing room, on walls otherwise unfurnished, there were two framed photographs of Dovedale; and in the room I was given there was a coloured print, bluish and faint and misty, of Eton. In the veranda, shadowed by wide eaves and protected from insects by wirenetting which nevertheless permitted one to see the garden and the tennis court, the party-worker and I talked. He sat on the wicker chair as one who entered the house now by right; but his hat was on his knees, and his talk was mostly of the Davsons. He spoke of them with more than affection, with relish; while Dr Jagan slept in one of the rooms upstairs, and the hot afternoon stillness was emphasized by the m.u.f.fled booming of a loudspeaker announcing Mr Burnham's speech that evening.

The loudspeaker went on and on. The party-worker turned to politics, reluctantly I fancied, for the party's prospects in New Amsterdam were not bright. It was the old issue of race: New Amsterdam was predominantly Negro and the Negroes were afraid of Indian dominance. He himself didn't see what dominance had to do with it. In B.G. it was open to anyone to 'progress' a in the West Indies to be progressive is to be determined and able to acquire a and there were Negroes who were as 'progressive' as the Indians. He just wished there were more progressive Negroes; and there could be, for though the Indian owned more, the Negro earned more.

I had heard this before in Georgetown, and from supporters of the other side. In their uncertainty, their fear of being twice overtaken, not as individuals but as a community, first by the Portuguese (between whom and the Negroes there were riots in 1856 and 1889) and now by the Indians, in their feeling that time was against them, many Guianese Negroes were in this mood of self-a.n.a.lysis. At Christmas there had been a campaign urging the Negroes to save, to buy only what was absolutely necessary. The campaign had failed, and the stores had complained of racialism.

In Georgetown a Negro woman of energy, charm and sensibility had spoken to me for an hour, with urgency and something like despair, about the shortcomings of the Guianese Negro. She wished the Negro to behave with dignity. It nauseated her to see Negro women jumping up in street bands at Carnival time: no Indian or Portuguese or white or Chinese woman did that. (But they do in Trinidad, where it is a sign of modernity and emanc.i.p.ation.) The Negro wasted his money on drink, which was for him a symbol of wealth and whiteness. (This is, of course, an over-simplification, though it should be said that Dr Jagan recognizes alcoholism as one of the country's problems.) She wished the Negro could have the thrift and determination of the Indian; many respected coloured families had wasted their substance and were completely in the hands of Indian money-lenders. Above all, the Negro lacked the family feeling of the Indian; this was the root of his vulnerability. Three hundred years of slavery had taught him only that he was an individual and that life was short.

And now, in the veranda of the Davson house, the party-worker was speaking of the same problem, less a.n.a.lytically, 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 a the children had been sent on to their grandmother's a 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 const.i.tuents 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 s.h.i.+ning shoes, ironed s.h.i.+rts 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 pa.s.sion contrasted with the pastoral scene and the placidity of his audience, separated from him by the road. Along this road there pa.s.sed 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 a the children in the shop gallery continually whispering, giggling and being hushed a 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 gra.s.s 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 a 'lands' had a startling legalistic ring a 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 pa.s.sing 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 jacka.s.s 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 doc.u.menting 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 a.s.sociate, as 'that little lady from Chicago, an alien to our sh.o.r.es'; 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 Const.i.tution 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 a in private a man of such charm that one almost regretted that he was a politician a 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 s.h.i.+rt, and his khaki trousers were folded above his ankles; he was barefooted. Mrs Jagan introduced me to her mother-in-law, a short, st.u.r.dy 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 a West happily blending with East a 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.

Immediately after the ceremony Dr Jagan was besieged by people talking about land. The rest of us put on our shoes and went to an old wooden shed that adjoined the temple, and there we were fed on halwa, chipped coconut, bananas and soft drinks. We went out to the car and waited in the hot sun for Dr Jagan. The crowd around him was growing, and his attempts to step backwards to the road were frustrated. The chauffeur was sent to get him away. The chauffeur, a small man, worked his way into the crowd and disappeared. Someone else was sent. 'Is always the biggest crooks who hold him back like that,' Dr Jagan's mother said. She had prepared lunch for him at home; she was impatient to take him off; and it was hot in the car. Eventually, after many minutes, Dr Jagan freed himself and came out to the road, some people still at his heels.

Dr Jagan's mother and the family of his brother Udit live in one of the workers' houses across the main road from the compound of the estate senior staff, which is fenced around with wire mesh and guarded at the gate by a watchman. The workers' houses, standing on stilts, and sheltered by many fruit trees, give the impression of being choked together. Each house, however, stands on a fair amount of land: the feeling of oppression is created by the maze of narrow, dusty, improperly drained tracks between the houses, the fences on either side of the tracks, and above all the trees, rustling in the wind which carries the smell of cesspits. Yet it was easy to see why the Jagan children are always eager to come down to Port Mourant to stay with their grandmother. For a city child there would be enchantment in the flat, well-swept dirt yard, cool with water-channels and low fruit trees.

The house was a simple one, roughly built; and inside bright with fresh paint that had been applied to old, unpainted wood. In the small drawing room there was a set of morris chairs on the uneven floor; a photograph alb.u.m and an untidy stack of old American pulp magazines rested on a small centre-table; the walls carried no decoration apart from some Roman Catholic calendars. There was no sink or running water; so we used pitchers to wash our hands out of the window of the dining-area. Constantly encouraged by Dr Jagan's mother, we ate. The food was good, indeed extravagant. It completed my exhaustion. I couldn't face the afternoon sports meeting, to which the Jagans were going, and asked whether I could rest. Udit showed me to a tiny bedroom that led off from the drawing room. The hairy wooden walls had been painted cobalt; and, below a picture of Christ, I went to sleep.

It was night when Udit awakened me. Mrs Jagan had gone back to Georgetown; Dr Jagan was in New Amsterdam. I was to spend the night in Port Mourant. Udit, a grave, kindly man, offered me a pitcher of water to refresh myself, and then took me for a long walk along the main road, bright with shops and new cafes and busy with the Sunday evening cinema crowd. We talked about the diversification of agriculture in the region; Udit told me that cocoa was being introduced. About the contrast between Udit and his brother there was nothing startling; it can be duplicated in many West Indian families who, with an imperfect understanding of the concept, comically described themselves as 'middle cla.s.s'.

After dinner Dr Jagan's mother showed me the photograph alb.u.m. It had been extensively rifled. The only photograph of interest was one Dr Jagan had sent back from America while he was a student: a studio portrait by an unimaginative photographer of a dazzlingly handsome young man looking over his shoulder, not unaware of his looks: not the face of a politician or a man who was to go to jail for plotting to burn down Georgetown. If she was proud of her son Mrs Jagan didn't show it. She scarcely spoke of him; and when we closed the photograph alb.u.m she became much more concerned about my family and about me. I smoked too much; I was damaging my health; wouldn't I like to try to stop? And drinking: that was another bad thing: she hoped I didn't do much of that. While we spoke, Udit's children brought out their school books and worked at the dining table by the light of the Petromax pressure lamp. The house was wired and had bulbs; but the electricity supply was in the hands of various entrepreneurs in the settlement who ran small generating plants; and it seemed there was some trouble about the arrangements. Earlier, someone else had told me about a field clerk who was too 'stuck up' to extend the services of his plant.

Dr Jagan was to return to Port Mourant in the morning, to address a public meeting in the Roopmahal Cinema on the working of the land resettlement scheme. When I left for the cinema Udit's wife asked me to get Cheddi to 'come and take some tea'. The request had to be deferred, for Dr Jagan was already on the cinema stage, with a whole row of government officials, Negro, Portuguese and coloured, seated behind him on folding chairs. The administrators wore suits; the engineers khaki shorts and white s.h.i.+rts.

Questioners were being invited to speak from the stage, and over and over Dr Jagan explained to people who had applied unsuccessfully for land that applications had been carefully considered and preference given to the neediest. At last the landed started climbing up to the stage. They stood correctly, their s.h.i.+rt sleeves b.u.t.toned at the wrist, holding their hats behind their backs, and spoke softly, as though sensing the hostility of the landless, who made up most of the large audience. Some objected to government interference; some didn't like being told where to pasture their cattle; some objected to the proposed limitation of holdings.

Dr Jagan: How much land you have?

The Questioner mumbles. Whispers in the audience of 'You see him? You see him? You see how quiet he playing now?'

Dr Jagan: You have a hundred acres?

Gasps from the audience, of astonishment, genuine and simulated, mixed with delight at the uncovering in public of a secret long known. The questioner flicks his hat against the back of his thighs and stares straight at Dr Jagan.

Dr Jagan: And how much of this hundred acres you planting?

The Questioner mumbles.

Dr Jagan: Twelve acres. You have a hundred acres and you and your sons planting twelve. But I alone, man, with a cutla.s.s, could do better than that. (Dr Jagan's tone now changes from the conversational to the oratorical.) This is the curse of this country. So many people without land. And so much good land not being used, just going to waste. This is one of the things this government is going to put a stop to.

The Audience hums with approval, which turns slightly to derision as the questioner, squeezing his hat, makes his way down from the stage, looking at the steps. Another questioner goes up and speaks for some time. The audience is still derisive and Dr Jagan holds up his hand for silence.

Dr Jagan: Good. You plant your fifteen acres. You work hard on your land, you been keeping your wife and five children now and you don't see why the government or anybody else should come and tell you what to do or where to tie out your cow. Good. We know you work hard. But tell me. Who rice-land your cows does mash down? And where you does pump your water out? In the next man land, not so? So what about him?

The roar is one of approval for Dr Jagan's cleverness in demolis.h.i.+ng an argument which had at first seemed fair and una.s.sailable.

And so it went on, until the climax. This had been gigglingly prepared in the back seats by some of the landless who were perhaps also party-workers. A 'character', barefooted, in khaki trousers and s.h.i.+rt, his manner suggesting a slight drunkenness and also a comical hesitation, walked up to the stage, humorously applauded all the way. And once on the stage he delivered an impa.s.sioned and controlled oration on behalf of the landless. It was a performance of high finish, from the opening a 'A uneducated man like me don't know how to talk good' a to the well-known local jokes and the devastating denunciation of selfishness and greed which was at the root of the troubles of Guiana. After he had finished there was nothing more to say. The engineer in white shorts had only to hold up maps and explain some technical details.

Even so, Dr Jagan was surrounded after the meeting and made to go over points that had already been explained. One man had a special complaint: the authorities were making him pay an omnibus licence for his taxi, and he wanted Dr Jagan to correct this. The taxi was in the yard of the cinema: it was a van, capable of seating ten.

It was now past midday. We didn't have time to go and take tea with Udit's wife. Dr Jagan had to open a ca.s.sava factory in Georgetown at five; his son, waiting for us in New Amsterdam, wanted to get back in time for the matinee of a cowboy film. We started for New Amsterdam with some of the government officials, driving fast along the road, which was here asphalted and smooth. We heard a knocking. It persisted, increased; and the sound was familiar to me from an experience I had had just before leaving Trinidad. We stopped and examined the wheels. The front wheels were firm; those at the rear rocked at the push of a hand. Removing the left hub cap, we found all the nuts unscrewed, projecting evenly beyond the bolts with only a thread or so to go. It was very puzzling.

'You've been seeing politics in the raw this week-end,' Dr Jagan said to me over lunch at New Amsterdam Government House. 'If you want to think at all, you have to go abroad.'

Dr Jagan is all things to all men. For some he is to be distrusted because he is a communist; for others he is to be distrusted because he has ceased to be a communist and is just another colonial politician attracted by power. For some he is a racial leader. For some he is failing to be a racial leader. ('I hate Cheddi,' a well-placed Indian said to me. 'The more I see him the more I hate him. One morning the Indians of this country are going to wake up and find that Cheddi has sold them down the river.') And for others, as a Negro reminded me (it was a point one tended to forget), Dr Jagan represents a radical racial change: he is not white. The colonial system being what it is, many browns and blacks, brown and black but 'respectable', find this hard to forgive.

The West Indian colonial situation is unique because the West Indies, in all their racial and social complexity, are so completely a creation of Empire that the withdrawal of Empire is almost without meaning. In such a situation nationalism is the only revitalizing force. I believe that, below the ebullience and bravado, a positive nationalism existed in British Guiana in 1953. This was the achievement of the Jagans and Mr Burnham and their colleagues, and it was destroyed by the suspension of the const.i.tution in that year and a gratuitous humiliation a by the dispatch of troops. Colonial att.i.tudes, so recently overcome, easily rea.s.serted themselves. Under pressure, like the West Indians in London during the Notting Hill riots, the country split into its component parts; and the energy which, already gathered, ought to have gone towards an ordered and overdue social revolution was dissipated in racial rivalry, factional strife and simple fear, creating the confusion which is today more dangerous to Guiana than the alleged plot of 1953.

It is the waste, the futility which is depressing. For when one thinks of Guiana one thinks of a country whose inadequate resources are strained in every way, a country whose geography imposes on it an administration and a programme of public works out of all proportion to its revenue and population. One thinks of the sea-wall, for ever being breached and repaired; the dikes made of mud for want of money; the dirt roads and their occasional experimental surfacing; the roads that are necessary but not yet made; the decadent railways ('Three-fourths of the pa.s.senger rolling stock,' says a matter-of-fact little note in the government paper on the Development Programme, 'is old and nearing the point beyond which further repairs will be impossible'); the three overworked Dakotas and two Grumman seaplanes of British Guiana Airways. And one thinks of the streets of Albouystown, as crowded with children as a schoolyard during recess.

The middle-aged American with the surly rustic face was leaning against one of the gallery pillars of the ramshackle British Guiana Airways building at Atkinson Field. I guessed he was American because of his clothes. The straw hat and tight khaki trousers were distinctive; so were the spectacles. He also carried a camera and was chewing. His baggage lay around him in polythene sacks; whenever he moved he took the sacks with him. The precaution seemed excessive, for there were few people about, and we were all pa.s.sengers for the Interior: half a dozen diamond prospectors, Doctor Talbot and myself. Dr Talbot was an old Interior 'hand' who was never so happy as when he was in the bush, drawing Amerindian teeth. His two or three pieces of baggage were tied with rope; he carried an umbrella a odd with his white panama hat a and a parcel of books which were mainly about doctors.

We were going to Kamarang, in the south-west, near Mount Roraima, where the boundaries of British Guiana, Brazil and Venezuela meet. Kamarang was an Amerindian reservation which had recently been opened up. You still needed government permission to go there, though; and the prospectors were being allowed only to pa.s.s through on their way to the diamond fields.

The Dakota flew in from the Rupununi, unloaded its cargo of sacked beef, and we went aboard. The American, refusing all a.s.sistance from the loader, strung and hung his various parcels and bags about himself and made his way shakily to the aircraft. Then with slow care he unstrung and unhung his parcels, stowed them at the back of the plane, chose a seat, dusted it with a handkerchief, sat down and concentrated on fastening his safety belt, chewing all the while, his deliberateness interrupted by abrupt little pouncing actions, like a man trying to swat a fly after eyeing it for some time.

Within minutes we had cleared the coastal strip. We flew over Bartica and had a glimpse of the red road to the Potaro goldfields. We saw the innumerable forested islands which choked the Mazaruni River. And then it was forest, and forest. We ceased to look through the small oblong windows and just listened to the noise of the aircraft. The Negro prospector beside me was reading the Georgetown Chronicle. He caught me looking over his shoulder and pa.s.sed the paper to me. The headline story on the front page was about the chaotic conditions in the Cuyuni mining area. The prospectors there were apparently without a doctor or an administrator and had to depend on the Venezuelan authorities. The story had been given to the Chronicle by a prospector called Agrippa, who was quoted as saying, 'When a man gets chopped in a fight there is no doctor or police to look for him.'

As abruptly as on the ride to the Rupununi, the mountains began. But here they were flat-topped, suggesting a plateau that had in parts subsided and crumbled, leaving sheer walls of grey stone like those of a giant's castle, with neat excisions and neat towers, one quite square, many perfectly round; and down these walls ran thin lines of white water dissolving to spray. 'Wondrous is this wallstone; broken by fate, the castles have decayed; the work of giants is crumbling.' The academic text returned, unsummoned, after many years; but the Anglo-Saxon poet was speaking of the abandoned city of Bath, and this was the lost world of Conan Doyle.

We prepared to land. I returned the Chronicle to its owner, who said, 'So you remembered it, eh? I am Agrippa. Give the papers the story, man. Don't play with these things.'

Bill Seggar, the district commissioner, met us when we got off the plane. Dr Talbot was to spend the night in his house. The American and myself were to share a room in the rest house. Some Amerindian boys took our baggage there, and the American dutifully tipped each of them. While I arranged my parcels the American went out to the veranda; when I left the room he went in. We did not speak.

The settlement at Kamarang Mouth lies about the airstrip, which is at the confluence of the Kamarang and Mazaruni rivers. From the rest-house veranda the view was of the black gla.s.sy Mazaruni just at the foot of the cliff, still water between walls of trees, reflected clearly on one side, darkly on the other, with blue flat-topped Mount Roraima far away at the end of the river. I walked down the cliff to the water's edge. Three Amerindian girls sat whispering and giggling on a rock, the first smiling Amerindians I saw. Two giggling boys paddled past in a woodskin, which seemed to skid over the smooth dark water. It was like an ill.u.s.tration in a child's book about children with difficult skills in remote lands.

Below one of the unfinished wooden houses of the settlement I came upon three of the prospectors who had travelled with us on the plane. One was Indian; the other two were Negroes, one brown, one black. The Indian a I spotted a bottle of yellow peppersauce among his few belongings a was instantly loquacious; the brown Negro also spoke; but the black Negro remained silent and scarcely looked at me. Everyone knows about the prospectors or 'pork-knockers' of Guiana, and these men, recognizing me as an informed tourist, behaved like men with a reputation to live up to. The Indian told me he was a diver. I expressed the awe which I felt was expected. 'Best way for a poor man to make a living,' the speaking Negro said. The Indian talked about diving. Sometimes, he said, you could stay below water for half a day. 'It depends on your consecution,' the speaking Negro said. 'A man with no consecution will have to come up after half an hour.' I asked the speaking Negro whether he came from Georgetown. He became embarra.s.sed; he said he came from 'another territory'. This meant he was a small islander; I did not inquire further. Something flew to one of the rough wooden pillars and rested above my hand: it was a spider, carrying its large white disc of eggs below its abdomen. I said goodbye to the prospectors, while they settled down in their hammocks for the evening, the Mazaruni black below them, Roraima faint in the distance.

Bill Seggar had invited me to dinner. He had invited the American as well, but the American, muttering something about not using up other people's rations, had declined; and when I pa.s.sed the rest house I had a glimpse of him in the kitchen veranda carefully opening tins from one of his polythene sacks. In Bill Seggar's plain wooden house, well-stocked with books and magazines, and with Amerindian artifacts on the unpainted walls, Dr Talbot was reading. He had already drawn a number of teeth. Seggar called to me from the shower to have a drink. I took a lager from the refrigerator a everything, I reminded myself guiltily, flown in from the coast a and Dr Talbot explained the Amerindian blowpipe, the black-tipped arrows and the bead-pouches, 'worn today, alas, under their clothes'. Dr Talbot was a romantic. He distrusted mechanical progress of every sort and regretted the days when a journey to the Interior was indeed a journey to the Interior and not a joy-ride on a Dakota. He didn't even care for outboard motors; we were going up the Kamarang next morning to the mission station at Paruima, on the Venezuelan border, in the mission launch, and he would have preferred to make the journey on horseback.

We were joined by the tall, slim Portuguese pilot who on the next day was to fly out the prospectors to the diamond fields, in the cerise-coloured single-engined plane I had seen on the landing strip. The pilot didn't like the prospectors staying in an Amerindian settlement longer than was necessary, and he told me that Dionysus, the Indian who had spoken to me about diving, had no chance of being taken to the diamond area. The very Dakota that had brought Dionysus from Georgetown had brought a message that he was not to be employed.

Bill Seggar came out of the shower, and our dinner party was complete when Mr Europe, the Negro dispenser, came over from his dispensary across the landing strip. (Agrippa, Dionysus, Mr Europe: I didn't believe these Kamarang names.) At Seggar's large plain wooden table we talked, the bats squawking in the roof, of the problems of Guiana. Mr Europe spoke of race and slavery; he reminded us without rancour, that Amerindians hunted down runaway slaves; and we spoke of Amerindians.

They told me of the effect of alcohol on the Amerindian: he vividly remembers insults and injustices many years old, which he had forgotten, and becomes homicidal. And I heard of the kanaima, the hired killer, the dread of all Amerindians. The kanaima is a dedicated person; he lives apart; he fasts before a murder, which is carried out in a horrible manner and involves a knotting of the victim's intestines. The kanaima loses his power if he is ever known. He reveals himself therefore only to his victim. This is why in lonely places Amerindians prefer not to be alone, though even this is not safe, since a who knows? a your companion might be the kanaima. For the Amerindian, however, there is no escape from the kanaima, because kanaima is more than a killer: he is Death. Amerindians never die naturally: they are always killed by kanaima.

There was a dog at the station, a powerful, beautiful animal that lived in constant terror. It was afraid of the dark, of insects and of every sudden movement. When the pilot and myself left Seggar's house and made our way by the light of an electric torch to the rest house, the dog walked ahead, always keeping within the wavering light-ray, like an actor edging into an unsteady spotlight. In the rest house the dog rubbed against our legs for rea.s.surance. The lights blinked three times a Seggar's warning that he was turning off the current a and soon darkness fell over the station, and, with the running down of the motor, silence. Reluctantly, I left the dog; he had been frightened by a beetle and was lying between my feet.

My American was sleeping under a mosquito net, which he had hung up on hoops and brackets brought in one of his polythene sacks. My bed had no mosquito net and I had only Seggar's word that there were no mosquitoes. I was about to get into bed when I remembered that during the afternoon the American had opened his bed and examined it thoroughly. This memory of American caution now alarmed me. With unnecessary violence I pulled the bed open; and, creeping about as silently as I could, examined it with my torch.

At seven in the morning the Paruima boatmen clomped up in their gumboots. The American, dressed, packed, his mosquito net dismantled, was still tying one of his polythene sacks, and he apologized to the boatmen for not being ready: he had got up only at half past six. I too was going on the boat. 'If I hadda known you was going,' the American said, speaking to me for the first time, 'I would a woke you up.' I jumped out of bed, threw some water over myself in the wash-room, had a cup of Nescafe, lukewarm because of my haste, and ran over to Seggar's to get Dr Talbot. He was just sitting down to an elaborate breakfast, appeared to be in no hurry, and expressed strong disapproval of the American. I idled down to the river. The American was in the launch, quite alone, surrounded by his polythene sacks. I went back to the rest house and had a cup of cocoa, and then wandered over to the dispensary, where Mr Europe, who was also the postmaster, was dispensing Kamarang postmarks. Agrippa was with him and another prospector, elderly, bespectacled, schoolmasterly, who took out a gla.s.s vial and showed me the diamonds a lucky man might get: they were like bits of stone and gla.s.s and broken pencil points, and of the size of pencil points.

At last we were ready. But the boat was leaving from the Kamarang side, and the American had to get out of the launch, where he had steadfastly remained all the while, and, without his parcels, make his way up the hill, across the landing strip and down to the Kamarang bank.

We started. An Amerindian stood in the bow: later he sat on a paddle across the bow, and never moved. His stillness fascinated me and the fascination was made almost unendurable by the tedium of the boat journey: unchanging noise, unchanging river. For hour after hour I was to see that broad blue-jerseyed back directly in front of me, those unmoving gumboots, those hands pressing on the paddle. I took photographs of him; I sketched him; and I took more photographs. His duty was to warn of obstacles, particularly submerged tree trunks with which the river banks were littered. Either he or we were lucky: for the whole of the day he uttered not a single warning cry.

The smooth water was black with warm brown undertones; the narrow river, with forest on either side, felt enclosed. Sometimes we pa.s.sed Amerindians in their boats, fairer and more handsome than the Amerindians of the Rupununi. A moored woodskin or dug-out, and a rough path up the bank worn into brown dirt steps, indicated a home. A low goalpost-like structure made of tree branches marked a camping site. Birds, always in pairs, played about our boat: large grey birds and small ones with blue-black wings and white b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Dr Talbot said that when he first went up the Kamarang the grey birds stayed with the boat all the way. Now they flew a hundred yards or more ahead because the Amerindians shot them for sport. And, indeed, an Amerindian came from the stern with a rifle, his friends sighing and chattering with expectation, and the boat slowed down for him to take his position in the bow, in front of the unmoving lookout. He turned and smiled at us. 'Pay no attention to him,' Dr Talbot said irritably, turning away. 'He is only doing it to show off.'

So I paid no attention and tried instead to make some cocoa, using river water, which Dr Talbot said with almost proprietorial pride was quite pure. The American, who sat behind us, declined briefly: he didn't want to use other people's rations. Dr Talbot lost his cup while trying to scoop up some water from the river. However, cold cocoa was made a the river water was, one might say, vin arrose in colour a and I was lifting my cup to my mouth when I heard the report of the rifle and spilled the cocoa down my s.h.i.+rt and trousers. The Amerindians sighed with disappointment: the bird had not been hit. Attempting to rinse out my cup afterwards, I lost it. At my back I heard the American blowing and sucking at a cup of hot coffee, from the Thermos he had prepared that morning. He was also eating dainty sandwiches from airsealed cellophane packets.

At midday we stopped at a village which, deflating to one's pretensions as a traveller, had neat houses of wood and corrugated iron. It was a branch of the Paruima Mission. The American took photographs, and with elaborate deviousness, which attracted a good deal of puzzled interest, attended to certain natural functions. The Amerindians bought ca.s.sava bread, white curling discs about two feet wide and half an inch thick, which they handled with extreme casualness, folding it and stuffing it into the corners of baskets. Dr Talbot bought a disc himself; it was brought down to the boat by a very small boy whom it half concealed. I tried a piece. It was hard and coa.r.s.e, with a sour smell and almost no taste. The blue-jerseyed lookout had some meat between two of these bread boards. Delight was all over his face. He settled down on the paddle; someone pa.s.sed him an enamel plate of red-spotted rice, and with every mouthful of rice he ate a shard of ca.s.sava bread.

Great brown and grey rocks, great broken boulders, rounded and carved, appeared now on the river banks. Sometimes they were square and huge and cracked: ruins, they seemed, of the fortifications of giants. And on these rocks, on soil just inches deep, the great trees of the forest grew, their roots spreading laterally, so that the soil seemed made of roots and the trees appeared to be growing out of nothing. Many trees had toppled into the river, their green and white and black trunks forming perfect Vs with their reflections, reflections which also created intricate patterns out of broken branches and the occasional isolated bare white stump. Lianas hung on the forest wall like a tangle of white cables, sometimes falling straight and continuing in their reflection. This was not the landscape for the camera: the tropical forest cannot be better suggested than by the steel engravings in the travel books of the last century.

Presently we were lulled, Dr Talbot read a paperback novel I had never heard of. I took out my book, the Penguin edition of The Immoralist a it served me right, reading out of a sense of duty a and was immediately concerned about the possible impropriety of the t.i.tle. For Dr Talbot had told me earlier of the prohibitions at the mission, in whose boat we were travelling: no cigarettes, no alcohol, no coffee, no tea, no pepper, no meat, no skin-fish, no singing or whistling of anything except hymns. We had already broken a few rules. The American had been taking coffee and I had steadily been taking whisky to offset the discomfort of my cocoa-damp clothes. I had also been smoking.

Moving always now between rocks, messages being shouted out from the boat to Amerindians on the banks, we came to the portage. We heard the roar of the falls. The sun lit up one bank and the water, which in shadow was black, was like red wine held up to the light, with dancing luminous webs. The launch was unloaded. Dr Talbot and myself entrusted all our baggage to the Amerindians and with difficulty made our way through the mud between tall straight white trees of varying girths. Once or twice we slipped. The American didn't allow anyone to touch his polythene sacks; he strung them all on himself and slowly, very slowly, and more shakily than when approaching the Dakota at Atkinson Field, he picked his way through the thick squelching mud. We waited for him at the other side; and when, many minutes later, he appeared, there was no sign of achievement or sacrifice on his crumpled, fatigued face.

Our journey was nearly over. Within minutes we were at Paruima. The village lay on our left; on the other bank a landing field had been cleared. Palmer, the English agricultural officer, a slightly-built man in his early twenties, wearing khaki trousers, canvas shoes and a large straw hat, was at the river bank to welcome us. He especially welcomed Dr Talbot: there had been much sickness in the mission and even the pastor and his family had been affected. Dr Talbot got out with his books and umbrella; he was staying at the house of the village captain. We went on a few hundred yards to the mission proper. And there on the bank, in bathing trunks, were two children, white and blond and freckled, altogether startling after a day of river and forest and Amerindian faces.

'Who are you?' the bigger boy asked, taking the words out of my mouth. His American accent added to the unreality of the encounter, and gave a touch of impertinence to a simple and legitimate inquiry.

His father, the pastor, youngish, tall, slim and with spectacles, came down the high bank to the edge of the black water.