Part 1
By Terence Roberts
Guyana Chronicle
April 22, 2001

WHAT is Guyanese culture? How do we recognise it? And ultimately, where is it?

Simply asking ourselves these three questions can bring into sharp focus a topic of unifying benefit to the entire population of Guyana. Questioning ourselves on this topic becomes even more meaningful when answers no longer seem as easy or obvious as we might have thought they were.

For instance, after we admit that Guyanese culture exists, then at what point in time in our national history did it first emerge? Our quickest answer is, no doubt, with the Amerindians since the pre-Colombian era. But even though an Amerindian dialect first gave the name Guyana to the landscape we inhabit today, Guyanese culture is no longer exclusively defined by our First Peoples alone.

The truth is that when the Dutch arrived in Guyana in the late 16th century and governed, with a few short periods of interruption until 1814, another dimension to Guyanese reality was introduced, and at this point began the evolution of our culture.

From this point onwards, the Guyanese cultural ball starts rolling, or, to use the proper term it deserves, - evolving.

In the early 17th century, the Dutch introduced Africans via slavery, then nearing the middle of the 18th century, they invited English and other European settlers from the Caribbean Islands to settle in Demerara. Near the end of their reign here, they sought the introduction of hundreds of Swedish immigrants skilled in dairy agriculture, only a handful of whom managed to arrive before the Dutch lost Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice to the British navy and army.

In the late 1830s, Guyana - then a British Empire possession - saw the introduction of a sizeable number of Orientals from India, and a lesser number from Canton, China, Hong Kong and Malaya; also thousands of Portuguese mostly from Madeira and indeed a diverse minority of immigrants from Syria, Malta and several non-English European countries.

Circumstances such as these made it an accepted fact that the specific identity of North and South American culture began to emerge when such diverse races and cultures settled permanently on both sides of the continent.

For the purpose of cultural development, it does not matter why or how such people got here. The fact that they are here now, on new soil, far from their original ancestral homelands, in close proximity to each other, and capable of partaking of each other's human and cultural attributes laid the foundation for the emergence of a new continental culture containing a number of distinct variations through national cultures.

The long and sometimes difficult road which demonstrates the evolution of Guyanese culture is a result of Guyana coming under the complete control of Britain since the early 19th century, a small yet extremely powerful European island culture, characteristically introverted, yet paradoxically successfully Imperialistic.

Where as North America, or the USA, under George Washington, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, proclaimed its independence from British Imperialism in the late 18th century, Guyana around that time, were subjected to the first British invasions, then fell completely under British rule that would come to establish leadership of the social and cultural values of local society for an indefinite future period.

This sort of social and cultural leadership did not insist on the creation of any specific national culture here. Guyana was simply called British Guiana, a mere physical entity joining the British West Indian islands' possessions.

Perhaps the logic behind such an official attitude was: `How could Guyana or any new American society, founded on a thirst for wealth, land and its natural resources, and crudely ruled exploitative human labour, ever create a culture of its own equal to, or as great as the old world cultures and nations of Britain, Africa, Asia, India, Continental Europe, or even pre-Colombian American?

This sort of self-centred reasoning projected unto Guyana was clearly not lost on many Guyanese generations, and may account for the continued splintered, haphazard or general lack of cohesion within the natural evolution of Guyanese culture today.

The evolution of Guyanese culture from an original Amerindian foundation, however, did not commence with the British in Guyana, but with the Dutch. The peculiar or unique significance of this fact later became buried, even lost, beneath the British rise to power in Guyana.

Furthermore, the entire European colonial history in Guyana later came to be evaluated as simply and nothing more than an enterprise of slavery, indentureship, exploitation, despotism, bigotry, etc., as though no local or national benefits whatsoever could be redeemable from a history of such hurtful proportions and experience.

But what therapeutic significance does the Dutch example hold for the evolution of Guyanese culture?

What is the difference between the Dutch and British colonial attitudes and experiences in Guyana, and what significance does this have for the evolving Guyanese society and culture?

Firstly, the Dutch, as mostly young, single male adventurers arrived in a completely wild and natural Guyana inhabited only by native Amerindian tribes. By trading with these tribes for natural products (as opposed to looking for gold, which obsessed the Spaniards, bringing out excessive cruelty, and therefore alienating them from such tribes), then living precariously in lonely forts, surrounded by these peoples upon whom they were often dependent, the seeds of a new society in a new Guyana were first sown.

The significance of this seminal Dutch experience in Guyana is that, even as their settlements developed via the introduction of African slave labour, they, along with whatever culture they brought, gradually became absorbed or integrated so smoothly over the centuries into a majority non-white evolving Guyanese reality (via the adoption of local tropical, social customs, especially food consumption, recreation and procreation). Unlike any other peoples in Guyana today, no original or pure Dutch person is still visible among the sizeable amount of contemporary Guyanese bearing Dutch ancestry.

Today, we show respect for their contribution to the national heritage, as we do other immigrant peoples, by allowing Dutch names to remain on streets, estates, villages, etc.

The determining factor which resulted in this Dutch metamorphosis into Guyanese, lies in the effect Guyanese social circumstances, or reality, had on the Dutch colonial experience here. The evolution of Guyanese culture is the result of multi-functional mundane interactivity between a people and place.

In other words, it's a two-way historical relationship in the end, regardless of many initial abominable historical facts, not just the one-sided influence of immigrant Dutch, British, African, East Indian, Portuguese, Chinese people, etc., on Guyana's natural and social appearance, but the reverse or reciprocated influence of Guyana's diverse natural, or tropical qualities on immigrant races and cultures here. The evolution of Guyanese culture is the sum total result of this two-way process.

Such an evolutionary development in Guyana created by a society of diverse peoples, is not the result of any official decree proclaimed by anyone, least of all the Dutch during their reign here, but rather the result of an immediate everyday Guyanese social reality.

However, history books on Guyana written by British historians like Henry Dalton, Henry Bolingbroke, Dr George Pinchard, Stanton St.Clair, even Michael Swan, with their highly omniscient reasoning, blind to the biases guiding their opinions, are the clearest evidence we possess that the absorption of the Dutch into a local tropical society and lifestyle "with a Caribee indifference", (in the words of Bolingbroke) was regarded by such aloof representatives of British colonial values as a betrayal of European superiority as a race and culture, by the Dutch in Guyana.

Such smug historical analyses read uncritically by Guyanese over periods of time could very well assume the tempting role of leadership, or guidance, in defending an obsession with the preservation of each culture's original old world identity, fostering secret feelings of superiority, untouchable social cohabitation, and ultimately, strained everyday social relationships, as well as an inhibition to the evolution of Guyanese culture on the whole.

If culture is defined and accepted as "improvement by mental and physical training; intellectual development; a particular form, stage or type of intellectual development or civilisation", according to most dictionaries, why should all the circumstances of living in Guyana not give continual birth to such values?

There is no evidence of any supernatural or natural power preventing this. We should be careful, however, not to confuse religions in Guyana with Guyanese culture. Religious holidays and ethnic festivals, such as Christmas, Deepvali, Mashramani, Easter, etc, beautify and celebrate life in Guyana magnificently, also a variety of ethnic foods are consumed by anyone who appreciated their taste and health qualities, but these examples of diverse customs and products do not really represent examples of culture, if we accept its definition as intellectual development.

We should realise that most, or all of our religious practices, except the religious habits of indigenous Amerindians, do not originate here.

Their Holy books, Scriptures, teachings, saints, specific Gods and Goddesses, welcome and necessary as they are to Guyanese of all religious faiths, actually originate far away on specific landscapes and continents.

Religious faith and worship being a private and personal matter of choice, does not even obstruct some couples of different faiths from marrying or living together. What really constitutes an example of Guyanese culture is the expression of a locally made creative development, or creative form that has evolved out of the interactive social condition of living in Guyana.

Our Creole English and slang is an expression of collective Guyanese culture, but so too is the collective use of the modern influences, derived from a combination of numerous languages, such as Latin languages, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, even Amerindian dialects.

Perhaps Britain's greatest contribution to Guyanese culture, modern English Language, by evolving from a cosmopolitan linguistic foundation, acts as a unifying bond to the original diversity of Guyana's non-English tongues, while also complementing the cosmopolitan compositions of Guyana's population as it exists today. today.