Creole culture
Editorial
Stabroek News
May 11, 2004
The culture that has been developed here over the centuries is an amalgam of several cultures though there was for a long time a dominant European culture which left behind a language, an educational system and a legal and governmental system. This is sometimes called a Creole culture but as Mr Abu Bakr pointed out in a recent letter there are composite, creole cultures all over the world, the legacies of conquest and social and cultural hegemony, though our historical inheritance was more brutal than most.
It would be a big step forward as a nation to deconstruct the self-contempt inherited from the plantation and the anger and to try to come to terms with our current social and cultural reality. The horrors of slavery and indenture were real but that is not the reality now. That is a past that must be recognised but put behind us. After living here for 150 years or more we are Guyanese or nothing. African or Indian revivalism is an escape from reality, though perhaps harmless if seen in a purely cultural sense and given no social or political overtones. We are certainly not African, Indian, Portuguese or Chinese. The Amerindians have always been here and have increasingly entered the cultural mainstream.
By the average standards prevailing in Africa and Asia today we are as a nation literate and educated, despite recent declines. The beginning of wisdom and development has to be the ending of that corrosive contempt that runs in the society from the elites down, and some recognition of our worth.
Seen in this context the most negative and dangerous tendency in the society is to foster or pander to ethnic differences and division. After all these years we know a lot about each other. There are some differences in culture and lifestyle, but these exist in all societies and with progressive and imaginative leadership they can be overcome or contained.
Part of the problem is the stagnation and poverty that have become our lot as a nation. This has led to frustration and the finding of scapegoats. We have imagined ourselves to be the victims of conspiracies by others, and some have unfortunately used this as a basis for aggression, leading to a setback in ethnic relations.
Even the most ardent advocates of Guyanese nationalism (do such persons any longer exist in this age of mass emigration?) would not claim that we have a high or developed culture. But that is a long way from saying that our 'creole' culture is degenerate or irreversibly in decline. There have been several achievements ranging from the rebellions of the past to the post-independence reckoning. We need a change of mindset, a becoming modesty perhaps but some sense of pride and hope. No one can develop where the prevailing attitude is despair.