Gya: Guyana discovers creolité

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.

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