Journey to Guyana

by Margaret Bacon

When the author's husband, a civil engineer, told her they were going to Guyana. she "Wonderful. I've always wanted to go to Africa", a self-critical comment she quotes to indicate how little is known about the countryShe spent two years there in Georgetown on the narrow coastal trip where 750,000 lived . As she emphasises, the population is multi-racial. Most of the original, inhabitants, known as the Amer-indians, live in the interior. When European settlers needed labour for their sugar plantations they imported slaves from Africa.With the abolition of slavery in 1833, the Europeans brought indentured labour from the East Indies and India itself. As free men they hoped to earn enough to return home but few did and they now form the largest single racial group.Bacon sympathetically analyses the two widely dissimilar races, the Africans endearing and child-like with a slapstick sense of humour even when very poor, and the East Indians reserved and less boisterous. She also gives a refreshingly frank picture of life for the British in Georgetown, especially the women who, insufficiently occupied, devoted most of their time to gossip and grumbling at cocktail parties.Poor, backward and with a humid climate, Guyana did not attract, she suggests, able administrators, although the country needed the services of men of exceptional quality. Sometimes they emerged by accident, like the first real cattle rancher, a Scot named Melville, who came prospecting at the end of last century and, ill with malaria, was deserted and later rescued by Amerindians and founded a powerful oligarchy.Bacon's expeditions into the interior, while explaining the nature of the sugar, rice and bauxite industries which are the mainstay of the economy, also give her book the liveliest human passages. Exploration by river, in impossibly small and unstable craft, also hold the menace of a quick death by piranha or anaconda or, on land, an invasion of primitive quarters by legions of cockroaches.Back in Georgetown, she wrote book reviews for a local paper which was a mass of misprints and pictures printed upside down, reflecting their attitude that "anything will do". A pompous article by a bishop concluded. "Life, my friends, is not all beer and skittles".Margaret Bacon has illumined by sensitive observation, gentle humour and intelligent interpretation one of the world's less well known corners. The photographs, her own, enrich the feeling of exploration she so subtly sustains.The author writes of the original Amerindians, "decimated by the first Europeans"; descendants of African slaves, whose restlessness she understands because of their history; reserved, more sophisticated East Indians; cheery West Indians, and Portuguese. She speaks of their poverty gaity, and talents.There was Singh, the sensitive East Indian gardener who "delighted in all living things"; cheerful Myra, the maid who, presented with an egg-timer, boiled it with the eggs; Miss Macatee a suspicious lodging-house keeper modelled on an English seaside landlady on the doorstep of the jungle; the East Indian wife of a quarry owner, whose conversation "came out of Cranford" and who took the author to "wash her hands" to a box-like structure intended for more primitive purposes and (conveniently?) overhanging a precipice.

Genres: Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Margaret Bacon was brought up in the Yorkshire Dales, and educated at The Mount School, York and at Oxford. She taught history before her marriage to a Civil Engineer whose profession entailed much travel and frequent moves of house. Her first book, 'Journey to Guyana', was an account of two years spent in South America. Her subsequent books, including one children's novel, have all been fiction. She has two daughters and is now settled in Wiltshire.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author is extremely racist. This is from the blurb written in 1988, the author found "the Africans endearing and child-like with a slapstick sense of humour even when very poor" and this is a woman who thought Guyana was in Africa, so knowledgeable was she. The blurb is not a blurb but a very long review and extremely sympathetic to the author and her nastiness. Right now we are all concerned with Black Lives Matter, so even reading a blurb like this where 'black lives' are judged as just not up to the intellectual standard or quality of the author's white one gets my hackles up.

On the island I live on, which is relatively wealthy before Irma and Maria and Coronavirus, very wealthy indeed most of the labour is imported. There are a lot of Guyanese people here and I have employed and have friends (and family) in both Indian and Black communities. (I rent my cafe to an Indian lady.) We are talking descendents of East Indian indentured labour here, not the Amerindian tribes. Whatever is true of Guyanese people is broadly true of Trinidadians too. Except that Trinidadians party on a scale that no one else in the world, except perhaps the Balinese, do. But the Balinese have it as part of their religion, the Trinidadians just party.

The Blacks, are not 'endearing and child-like' they are indistinguishable from all other Blacks in the West Indies. The culture is broadly similar, they are almost all Christian, and education is very important - this is the Caribbean way. The difference between West Indians of the English-speaking islands and the British isn't much different than that of the British and Americans, or Australians etc. In part, in the West Indies, it is because many of the islands and Guyana which isn't an island and isn't even Caribbean but South American, but still, it's actually Caribbean in all respects but geography education is very British with the same exams and university courses being offered.

Although the motto in Guyana is, ‘One People, One Nation, One Destiny' this is mostly in evidence at festivals, Hindu or Christian (I don't know about Muslim. I do know that Hindus, Christians and Jews all celebrate the Muslim ones in Trinidad though, anything for a party). The Indians, divided amongst Hindus and Muslims, have a distinctly different culture. There is a great deal of prejudice in that community against the Blacks, (and the Whites but it doesn't show so much). I have had problems time and again with the lady who rents my cafe not wanting my Black staff to use the toilet. And the rows have usually taken place in front of other Guyanese people who have verbally supported her as she wouldn't dare confront me on her own.

My Guyanese Indian employees have generally been short-lived. None of them have had any respect for me at all. I'm White and they know for a fact and tell me so that their Indian heritage which goes back thousands of years is far superior to mine. It might be, but lol, they aren't shining examples of it. One told me a beautiful illustrated The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana I had was fake. That Hindus didn't do that stuff. If they had her parents would have told her about it. This is someone with an English degree and had been a teacher's aide.

I get on much better with Black Guyanese people, probably because their culture and my adopted one is so similar. One of my ex-employees she used to sing at the top of her voice all day stopped singing. I asked her why, she'd worked for me for 3.5 years and I'd put her through her Assoc. degree. A few days later she said she was bored and was giving me three months notice and would train a new manager. She works in insurance now. is a good friend and we go to lunch - I have an ex-employee lunch for those who became friends and still live on the island - about every three months.

Black women are no more subservient to their husbands and boyfriends than any other women, but Indian women are, very much so. They speak in high-pitched voices to them, not at all the same accent as the Blacks and the men have. They are often married off young, aged 16-20, to men of their families choosing and boyfriends are not allowed. It doesn't actually seem to stop them though and luckily for them, abortions are easy to get. (I have a friend who had 6 at last count which I thought was appalling but she said it was easier than fighting her husband about contraception which he hated).

They rejoice much more in the birth of a son than a daughter to whom they give very long, more or less unpronounceable Hindi names (unless Muslim), but they are always known by a nickname that bears no relationship to their real multisyllabic one. The main ambition in life for the Guyanese, as for so many people from the poorer English-speaking countries of the Caribbean seems to be to get a Green Card and live in the US. It is very difficult for them to get visas though.

I have a brother-in-law who is a Guyanese Hindu and emigrated to the US. But he has a degree and also married one of my ex-husband's sisters (Methodist) who had a firm of accountants in New York. Sadly, she died of stomach cancer. She was one of my favourite sisters-in-law too (I had 17 of them). He managed a chain of furniture shops.

Although politically both Trinidad and Guyana have their battles which are always racially dominated, everyone votes either Black or Indian, Guyana is probably the least anti-Semitic country in the entire world. A very popular prime minister and then president, the widow of President Cheddi Jagan was Janet Rosenberg Jagan. Their battles are Indian v Black. Chinese, Whites - Christian or Jewish are too few for them to be bothered with.

There is a long literary tradition in Guyana, they are not a bunch of child-like people with a slapstick sense of humour, what rot is that? Think To Sir, With Love by E.R. Brathwaite, the children's Poet Laureate in the UK, the wonderful John Agard. Going back, after slavery, the first newspapers in the Caribbean (which the British wanted to suppress) were from Guyana and Trinidad.

This wasn't a review. It was a rant. It seems I have become West Indian to the core and don't like to see its people, my people, put down. I've lived here half my life, it is my home, part of my identity now, no matter where I came from.

I've always wanted to go to Guyana, I'd like to go up the Demerara by riverboat (recreo) as close to the source of the Amazon or Peru or somewhere interesting as possible. I probably never will, but then I never thought I'd go up the Amazon, sail the Atlantic, drive in Daytona, fly a plane or any of the other things I've been in the right place at the right time and got to do.

[Daren · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book description above is excellent - it covers the circumstances, the extent and the intent of the book perfectly - so well that there is little left to say on the content of the book.
The writing is very good. It is well balanced - the right amount of history, of humour and of anecdotal details. Two years is a good length of time to spend in a small country, and to be able to take in enough, and reflect on the experiences sufficiently to write a book with sufficient depth and understanding of a people and a place. This is a book well worth a read.
Just a quick quote to show a little of the authors type of humour. Having been upriver at a quarry and a timber yard, investigating sources of materials for the bulk sugar terminal her husband was in charge of building, they were returning downriver, and it happened to be their honeymoon. (P100)
In silence we lay and watched the full moon, yellow and huge, as befitted its vast surroundings. Never, I thought as I looked across the waters of the Mazaruni and Essequibo, wide here like the sea, and gazed at the full moon and infinity of stars and smelled the sweet soft smell of frangipani and night orchids, never would there be another night like this; never, if we lived to be a joint two hundred, could we have such a perfect wedding anniversary.
I turned from the stars and looked instead at the profile beside me, which was also gazing intently at the sky, and breaking the silence at last, I murmured, 'what are you thinking?'
'Well,' he said slowly and thoughtfully, 'I was wondering how they got that Fergusson tractor up to the timber reserve.'
The book is packed with lots of this sort of thing.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memoir of an Englishwoman who goes out to newly independent Guyana in the late 60s with her civil engineer husband on a two year assignment. A candid and refreshing description of the author's everyday life with the Guyanese and her trips into the interior of the country. A very entertaining view of the country during that period, coupled with some interesting observations on cultures and cultural attitudes.

[Nmdb22 · Rating 4 out of 5]

quite a fetching memoir, sometimes quaint language, description of Guyana in the 60's