A Mouth Is Always Muzzled by Natalie Hopkinson

Author:Natalie Hopkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620971253
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-12-13T05:00:00+00:00

It has been evident that the intrigues of Communists and their associates, some in Ministerial posts, threaten the welfare and good administration of the colony. If these processes were to continue unchecked an attempt might be made by methods which are familiar in some other parts of the world to set up a Communist-dominated state. This would lead to bloodshed. In view of these latest developments, Her Majesty’s Government has felt it necessary to send naval and military forces to Georgetown (capital of British Guiana) with the utmost dispatch, in order to preserve peace and the safety of all classes. Any reinforcements that may be necessary will be sent from the United Kingdom.32

Troops jailed Jagan, his wife, Janet, and nearly all of the People’s Progressive Party leadership. The Afro-Guyanese Forbes Burnham, also a co-founder of the PPP, was tellingly never jailed. Colonial authorities put a ban on socialist books, from the communist classics by Marx and Lenin to local books written by progressive Guyanese writers. Among the banned books was by one Martin Carter, a Guianese writer and PPP activist, titled Hill of Fire Grows Red. Published in 1951, it memorialized the Enmore Martyrs, five sugar workers who were shot dead by police while protesting at one of the Booker sugar estates in 1948.

The British hoped that the red cloud hovering over the tropical country would pass. When that didn’t happen, they spent most of the 1950s and 1960s stalling British Guiana’s independence. Burnham split from the PPP and started his own party, the People’s National Congress (PNC). After Cuba fell to Fidel Castro’s 1959 socialist revolution, nationalizing its massive sugar industry, the Americans took a renewed interest in British Guiana.

American president John F. Kennedy summoned Dr. Cheddi Jagan to the White House in October 1961.33 During the White House tête-à-tête, Jagan made no secret of his socialist beliefs. JFK, still humiliated by the Bay of Pigs fiasco that spring, emerged from the meeting resolved that, democracy or not, Jagan had to go. The young American president vowed that another socialist country would not rise in the Americas on his watch, and he demanded that the British help in this effort.

The United States flooded British Guiana with millions of dollars34 to sabotage Jagan’s leadership.35 The CIA seeded a Guianese opposition party and trained them in guerrilla tactics. They supported Burnham as he broke from the PPP to form his People’s National Congress, which drew away many supporters of African descent. And the CIA helped the PNC instigate racial violence between the two major ethnic groups: Africans and Indians. There were bombings, and stores were burned down. As in plantations in the early colonial era, raping women of other ethnicities became a tool of terror.

My mother remembers the mid-1960s vividly. She was boarding at St. Joseph High School, a convent school in the city. She had to return to her family’s simple country home in the Essequibo Coast on the Pomeroon River for six months until the violence simmered down. My mother had medium-dark skin and soft curls, sometimes blown straight.

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