Yesu Persaud: From the logie to the pinnacle of business
When the great grandfather of iconic businessman Yesu Persaud, CCH, took the decision to escape poverty in Uttar Pradesh, India and come to British Guiana as an indentured labourer, he was placed on the Diamond Sugar Estate.
“Little could he have envisaged then that his great grandson, Yesu Persaud, was to become in 1975, the executive chairman of Demerara Liquors Limited (DLL) and managing director of Demerara Sugar Company,” said Major General (rtd) Joe Singh. DLL is one of two forerunners of Demerara Distillers Limited (DDL), manufacturers of the world famous El Dorado rums, established under Persaud leadership.
Singh was one of a number of Persaud’s colleagues and associates who paid tribute to him recently at the University of Guyana’s Philanthropy, Alumni and Civic Engagement (PACE) event: ‘Dr Yesu Persaud; A Life of Audacious Authenticity in Business, Entrepreneurship and Civic Life’ at the Pegasus Hotel to mark Persaud’s 90th birth anniversary and the start of a series of heritage lectures by PACE.
Diamond Sugar Estate was then owned by Sandbach Parker and Company, one of the original owners of sugar estates in Guyana.
And while much is known of Persaud’s work and the accolades he has received, including some 28 national and international awards and three honorary doctorates from the University of Warwick, University of the West Indies, and just last weekend, the University of Guyana, not much is known of his early life that led him to become the iconic figure he is in entrepreneurship and philanthropy.
Singh, in his tribute, noted that Persaud grew up in a logie controlled by the
plantocracy. His father was a cane harvester and his mother was in the weeding gang. His mother taught him how to cook and his father taught him how to use a grass knife, milk a cow and sell the milk, going from logie by logie before going off to Diamond Primary School. Much of his life is told in his autobiography, Reaching for the Stars – Volume 1,
which is already in Volume 2, circulation, and which is soon to be released. Singh took excerpts from the autobiography to tell of Persaud’s transition from childhood to youth and adulthood.
At Grove Primary School which he later attended, Singh related, Persaud became friends with a classmate in standard two by the name of Ovid Matthews, the son of the dispenser and bush doctor Albert Matthews.
Persaud wrote, “Ovid told me he loved roti and curry. I mentioned it to my mother who immediately told me I should invite Ovid for dinner. She personally welcomed him. She knew he had never visited an estate family in their logie dwellings and wanted him to feel at ease. By the end of the meal, he was laughing and joking with my mother.”
Two weeks later, Persaud was invited by Matthews’s mother to have dinner at their house.
“I sat between Mrs Matthews and Ovid and the food was served by a maid in full uniform. I was flabbergasted. It was my general belief that only the white expatriates in the overseas quarters had cooks and maids. Here was an Afro Guianese family, who not only had a maid but a cook also. In those days, Indian and African people lived peacefully together, often side by side in the same villages.”
Discrimination
His great grandfather, Persaud wrote, had adopted an African boy after both his father and mother had died.
At 15 years, Persaud was one of two students to pass the school-leaving exams. It was the first time that someone in his family had passed the examination and the family held a jhandi to celebrate as it was seen as a success for the entire estate. People visited the home to congratulate Singh and his parents.
He was placed at Central High School. On his first day at school, he was surrounded by a group of boys who wanted to know his background. When he told them his parents were sugar workers, Persaud related, one of the boys shouted, “Sugar workers are cane cutters. You are one of the estate people. What are you doing in high school?”
Persaud said he almost lost his temper and shouted back, “What is wrong with sugar workers? All of your parents came to this colony as sugar workers and all the people in this country, black, brown, yellow were brought to the colony to work on the sugar estates.” It was his first taste of discrimination and it began to shape his life along the path of human rights, Singh noted.
Persaud wrote that after that the boys kept away from him and he found it difficult to relate to them as they felt they were superior to him.
After two days he was transferred to Modern Academy, upstairs of a hardware store on the north side of Regent and Alexander streets. After many months, he realised his parents were making heavy sacrifices to send him to high school, so he decided to quit school and looked for a job.
He was 16 years old when he landed his first job in 1944 during World War II at Atkinson Airfield as a KP. He said he did not know what KP meant until he was sent to the canteen and bar where he was told he was the kitchen police. After leaving the job in March 1945 because of malaria, he helped out in a grocery store in Stabroek
Market. “It was my first experience in dealing with the public, and the experience did me a world of good in the years to come,” Persaud wrote.
In the 1940s and still job hunting, he said, “Employment policies at the banks and insurance companies and expatriate and industrial companies in Guiana were largely based on skin colour. The first to be employed were the Europeans, followed by the Portuguese, Mulattoes (red people), and then in very rare cases Indians and Africans.”
If Indians and African were employed, he said, they were never at the front of the organization, “They were kept in the storeroom or the warehouse.”
He had been warned of the futility of trying to get a job in the “colour-conscious organisations” but he felt he needed to try. The exposure to discriminatory employment requisites influenced him in later life to be an advocate for the dignity of labour, Singh said. These experiences and attributes provided him with the foundation on which to survive and excel in London when he went there in his 20s to continue his studies.
After failing to get a job in one of the colour-conscious organisations, he secured one with an Indian national who owned Parsram store in Water Street. The owner told Persaud that he looked honest and bright and once he proved himself he would teach him the trade.
When he got the job, he said, his parents told him “to always give of my best in this and in all other jobs in the future.”
He left Parsram in 1947 and worked as a sanitation assistant at Diamond Estate, which meant spraying a chemical, ‘baraweed’ to kill tannia bush and to inspect drains and culverts leading to the river. His superiors, impressed with his diligence, sent him to Leonora Estate for a week to learn how to use a new rat bait laced with poison to exterminate rats that destroyed the sugar cane.
He found rat extermination “boring”, to which Singh quipped, “I agree” (drawing laughter from the audience) and Persaud switched to the spray gang. Ten months later, the estate manager George Greenfield, for whom Greenfield Park on the East Bank Demerara was named, gave him the job as assistant to the punt captain; Greenfield said that transportation of cane was important to productivity.
In 1954, he became supervisor of the gang of men who were clearing the bush at Garden of Eden and later that year, punt captain.
Seeking opportunity
Analysing Persaud’s life on the estate, Singh said that he humbled himself without losing his dignity to earn the admiration and respect of his functional superiors who then presented him with other opportunities and higher responsibilities. “He understood the concept of justice, fair play, the dignity of labour, respect for diversity of ethnicity, religion and culture and he actively embraced and practiced these values in his interpersonal relations and in his management styles,” he noted.
After seven years in a variety of jobs on the Diamond Estate, Persaud decided he had to review his life and his situation.
He realized he was one of 3,000 workers on the estate most of whom would slave away for the rest of their lives and he had to escape from “the tentacles of cane sugar.” Opportunities were limited in Guyana since the colour bar was a major feature of the employment in Georgetown by the larger firms and he decided to work and study in the United Kingdom and make a new life for his family.
At age 27, he was “fully grounded in the estate system, its culture and dynamics,” Singh said, “and he had already benefited from his parental upbringing and the attention and support from the extended family. He took his education seriously. His friendship extended to other ethnic groups. He was unafraid of diverse placement opportunities on the estate in small family-run businesses and in the large and complex military base at Atkinson Field. He spoke up for what he knew was right and demonstrated at an early age his interest in a system of approach to management which favoured people-centered human resources style of interpersonal relations.”
In London and away from the family structure, he became depressed and wanted to return to British Guiana, but remembered the teachings of Buddha, to wit: “The greatest of conquest is the conquest of self. If a man conquers a trillion things in the world, he is no conqueror unless he conquers the self within him.”
Many of his generation would have given up and
considered their station in life bound to the estate and rose to the highest station possible, that of field supervisor, Singh said, but instead Persaud seized every opportunity that presented itself to learn and mastered his trade or portfolio of responsibilities to reach the zenith of business.
Persaud’s personal example of integrity, forthrightness, lack of an ostentatious lifestyle and deficiency of arrogance, Singh said, “makes him a revere exemplar of all those who had an opportunity to interact with him and benefited from his mentoring, counselling and guidance.”