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Small Axe 5.2 (2001) 21-40



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Guerrillas, Games and Governmentality

Nalini Persram


Britain has handled us and the question of our independence not in our interest, but in hers.

--Cheddi Jagan, The West on Trial

Introduction

The period 1953 to 1963 in the history of colonialism in British Guiana is remarkable. For the British Empire, the year 1953 was a disaster. During that year, a radical, class-based nationalist movement led by a group of indigenous professionals and a Jewish-American Marxist woman was swept to power in the colony. The event was like poetry in motion for proponents of international socialism, yet it caught the British government almost totally by surprise; within the frigid anticommunist climate of Western world politics, the victory left behind an imprint of British absent-mindedness and colonial impotence. Indeed, less than six months later, colonial authority felt itself sufficiently threatened by the party it had once denied was unacceptable to the British government 1 as to be forced to declare a colonial emergency, suspend the constitution, and remove Cheddi Jagan and his socialist party from power. The suspension was a move that, for the British Colonial Office, was considered to be deeply damaging to the liberal ideology that buttressed empire with benevolent images of enlightening paternalism. [End Page 21] As an unprecedented act of colonial force, it was to have major ramifications throughout the British colonial world.

Yet the eventual demise of Jagan and the People's Progressive Party (PPP) in the era of anticolonial politics was to take another decade to complete. During that time, a new era in the struggle against colonialism was initiated, an era that would witness Jagan's reelection and, for one very crucial period, contain the strong possibility that Jagan would lead British Guiana to socialist independence. What followed was nothing less than political disaster for Jagan and the PPP. In 1962 another colonial emergency occurred--but this time, so it appeared, by virtue of Jagan's own initiative. By the following year, the political events following the emergency would provoke Jagan's allies to denounce his final move--transferring to the British Colonial Office the complete decision-making authority over electoral reform to be implemented before the next pre-independence election--as nothing less than a gift to his Western-backed opponent and a spectacular fall into the jaws of neocolonialism. For the people of British Guiana what had been a uniquely successful indigenous anticolonial force operative in defiance of colonial history's self-declared trajectory ended up as another casualty of the imperial and liberal-capitalist containment of democracy's radical potential.

The following discussion investigates the ten-year period spanning Jagan's rise to power and his retreat from it in order to critically interrogate some of the now mythologized events that have produced the profoundly debilitating politics, coalesced around the discourse of "race relations," that characterises contemporary Guyanese life. 2 In seeking to understand the role of colonialism in this process, the avenue of inquiry known as "governmentality" will be taken. Pursued alongside those of Guyanese history and politics, it can illuminate both the rationalities of colonial rule and the conditions under which resistance to it is organized--and, by extension, the ways in which resistance can be made either successful or unsuccessful.

Political Imperatives in Caribbean Thought

Recently, Raymond Smith has written resignedly about the prevalence of race conceived as a fundamental feature of Guyanese society in even the most sophisticated sociological, cultural and political analyses. 3 Curiously, the recognition that race was not a "natural" [End Page 22] or autonomous presence that operated as a dormant feature waiting to erupt nevertheless is often contradicted in the same breath by a resort to the assumptions of the pluralist thesis. The result is that the crucial identification of politicization as a fundamental aspect in the history of Guyanese social conflict is undermined by deference to an ontology of racial antagonism. The concept of "race relations" seems to stymie critical thought. As Smith insists, "The question is not whether cultural constructions of race continue to exist in the modern world...

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