Guyana: Governance and Patterns of Ethnic Conflict

• Author: Ralph Premdas
• Pages: 317-347

Guyana: Governance and Patterns of Ethic Conflicts 317

INTRODUCTION

Cultural pluralism tends to throw up persistent problems in stable inter-

sectional coexistence.1 In this paper, an attempt will be made to abstract the

patterns of communal conflict that were generated by one case, Guyana, with

the view towards constructing a framework of ethnic conflict regulation. As

such, the effort will be both analytic and prescriptive. It is important to

underscore the point that our interest is not in eliminating conflict as such

since, in the nature of things that is impossible, but in offering insights into its

management. Professor John Darby puts this idea nicely as follows:

. . . it is as pointless to attack conflict as it is to attack the aging process.

Conflict is neither good nor bad, but intrinsic in every social relationship

from marriage to international diplomacy. Wherever two or more people are

gathered, there is conflict or potential conflict. The real issue is not the

existence of conflict but how to handle it.2

In the case that I have chosen, the state is characterised by a predominant

ethnic bipolarity in its demographic structure; small population size and physical

land space; a common ex-colonial master; and its multi-ethnicity has been

created mainly by the importation of immigrants from other countries to meet

the demands for labour on plantations.3 It is argued that the bipolar structure

establishes a particularly virulent context of communal relations and that this

imposes its own peculiarities in crisis management. In game theory, the metaphor

of two spiders sealed in the same bottle and locked inescapably in face to face

rivalry for space resulting in intensely intransigent struggle and inevitable death

is taken as illustrative of bipolar conflicts.

In approaching the problem of making prescriptions in relation to ethnic

conflict resolution, it is important that analysis of the case in question be

Guyana: GovernanCe and

PatternS of ethniC ConfliCt

RALPH PREMDAS

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

318 STATE, ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

systematic. In effect, proposals that seek to regulate an ethnic conflict should be

stated in terms of a causal model. Professor Richard Rose underscored this point

arguing that a policy lesson does not emerge from

a disjointed set of ideas about what to do. It requires a cause and effect model

showing how a program designed on the basis of experience elsewhere can

achieve a desired goal if adopted in the advocate’s own jurisdiction.4

In Part I of the presentation, an attempt was made to situate solutions within

the historical circumstances which provided a causal empirical background to

the prescriptions that would be offered in Part II. To be sure, the causal sequences

that I have depicted are not rigorously quantified and tested by the protocols of

the so-called scientific method. However, they do emerge from empirical data

derived from extended field observation. As a whole, the exercise moves away

from the quest for “pure theory” into the realm of practical knowledge.

PART I: THE MAKING OF A MULTI-ETHNIC STATE IN CRISIS

The Ethnic Segments

Guyana is a multi-ethnic Third World state situated on the north-coast

shoulder of South America. Although geographically part of the South American

land mass, culturally it falls within the Caribbean insular sphere marked by

plantations, monocrop economies, immigrant settlers and a colour-class system

of stratification.5 The country is populated by six ethnic solidarity clusters –

Africans, East Indians, Amerindians, Portuguese, Chinese and Europeans. A

significant “mixed” category also exists, consisting of persons who have any

combination of the major groups. Racial and ethnic categories are apprehended

in a rather peculiar way among Guyanese. In the popular imagination, everyone

is placed within a communal category which, as anthropologist Raymond Smith

has noted, “is believed to be a distinct physical type, an entity symbolized by a

particular kind of ‘blood’”.6

Hence, even though objectively there is a wide array of racial mixtures, a

person is soon stereotyped into one of the existing social categories to which

both “blood” and “culture” are assigned a defining role. In a “we-they” dynamic,

each person accepts his/her assignment to a communal category which in turn

separates and establishes individual and collective identity from other similar

groupings. From this, a society of ethno-cultural compartments has emerged

with various forms of intercommunal antagonisms of which the African-Indian

dichotomy dominates all dimensions of daily life.

Nearly all of Guyana’s 850,000 people are concentrated on a 5 to 10 mile

belt along the country’s 270 mile Atlantic coast. The multi-ethnic population is