From Emancipation to Independence: An outline of riots and disturbances in Guyana
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“The people are not rioting. It’s the Government who are rioting and shooting down the people”
- Quote used in Walter Rodney’s
1881-1905
Guyana’s history is inundated with rebellions and riots of different levels of intensity, effect and impact. This article attempts to provide, in brief outline, the most prominent of these protest acts, whether major riots or ‘disturbances.’
The forms of protest during the period from Emancipation to Independence included strikes, petitions, inter-ethnic violence, vocal protests, riots, marches, sit-ins, “rowdyism”, sabotage (including fires), pilfering, absenteeism, contentious gatherings, desertion, and foot dragging. This was not all. There were hundreds of individual and minor collective acts of resistance and defiance and public disorder in the period.
Handbills, Governor’s dispatches, oral memory, and the most prevalent source of all, newspaper reports, were all rich sources of information on the origins, form and outcome of these social explosions. The period under review covers from emancipation (1838) to independence (1966). The antislavery rebellions in Guyana in 1731, 1762, 1763, 1795, 1814, and 1823, among other uprisings, are thus outside the remit of this piece.
Newspaper reports, written from the perspective of the “rational” and powerful people in the colony, usually referred to rebellion/or riots in very pejorative terms. Thus, newspaper editorials or on scene reports invariably described plantation or urban unrest, not as stemming from the human considerations of those protesting, but often deemed protesters as “hooligans” “mobs” or “discontented” thereby diminishing or dismissing, through public narratives, the agency of the aggrieved constituency. The British “Riot Act’ was first made into law in 1715. Universally applied subsequently to its many colonies, it allowed, inter alia, for any “local authorities to declare any group of 12 or more people to be unlawfully assembled and to disperse or face punitive action.”
Causes of Unrest
The long record of instances of unrest in Guyana must be seen in the wider context of colonialism, imperial policy, planter domination, socio-economic conditions and ethnic differences in urban centres and villages and towns in the period. The typical causes of unrest in Guyana included unemployment, unpaid wages, responses to scabs, unfair wages, racism, pass laws, breach of (labour) contract, brutality or mistreatment by overseers and managers or police, and sometimes the inability to use or access (as in the case of indentured Indians) the Immigration Agent General. Some of these uprisings/riots were racialized and characterised by inter–ethnic violence.
Many of the protests and riots discussed in this article did not initially spur social and political movements (except perhaps labour movements) but must have had a cumulative effect on the advent of later movements and organisations.
A deep scrutiny of every event would require the inclusion of cause(s); profiles of activists and/or leaders; a catalogue of grievances; and an outline of the collective action in each case. Such deep enquiry is not possible here.
A few of the riots/disturbances listed in the article have had the benefit of some research and exposure. The 1856 and 1889 riots, for example, and especially the 1905 and 1913 riots, at Georgetown and Rose Hall, respectively (and to some extent the 1924 Ruimveldt riots), have received some degree of published analysis. Not so with 1896, 1869, or the disturbances caused by Rev CN Smith.
Most of the rebellions/riots mentioned were followed by an official enquiry which, in almost all cases, sanctioned the use of official force. Colonel De Rinzy, InspectorGeneral of the Guyana Police Force, was a well-known repressor-in-chief of a few of the rebellions, and his repressive presence was especially felt at the Non Pariel (1896), Georgetown (1905) and Rose Hall (1913) riots. De Rinzy, who had arrived in the colony in 1891, even gave a public lecture on how to suppress riots. He died in 1916 and was buried in Georgetown’s St Sidwell churchyard after a huge funeral. Another policemen, Lushington, also gained notoriety for repression in the 1905 riots.
The 1896 Non Pariel riot for its part was very consequential for the British colonial project, coming in the wake of other Anglo Caribbean protests in places like Trinidad & Tobago, Grenada, St Kitts, St. Vincent and Dominica. The arrival of Maxim machine gun in the colony in 1896 was significant. This famous and efficient killing appliance was notorious for its widespread usage in the suppression and murder of civilians and anti-colonial fighters in almost every European colony around the world.
One historian described the resistance as emerging from a “depression strangled sugar proletariat.” At the base of all this instability was the sugar economy and its volatile local and global viability. In the 1880s, for example, European (mainly German) beet sugar began to challenge the planter monopoly and this led to dissension on the estates as planters tried to recover losses by anti-working class measures. It resulted in the creation of the influential 1897 Royal Commission.
The 1905 riots are perhaps the best chronicled of the Guyanese rebellions. For detailed assessments of the origins, course and outcome(s) of 1905 see the respective works of Walter Rodney and Kimani Nehusi, among others.
The 1913 riots at Rose Hall was one of the most violent in the colony’s history. During this riot, caused by the issue of workers leave and transfer of protesting labourers, a police corporal was killed along with 15 indentured labourers. The labourers killed were Bhoolay, Badri, Hulas, Motey Khan, Sohan, Juggai, Surjoo, Gafur, Sadulah, Roopan, Nibur, Jugai, Durga, Lalji, and Gobindi, the lone female among the fatalities.
The description in the press of the fatal wounds, as described by the Government Medical Officer, were graphic. Motey Khan, for example, was reportedly shot four times “on the lower side of the left blade bone above the right collar bone and under the left ear, all the result of rifle bullets…”.
For an incisive summary of the 1913 riots see Gaiutra Bahadur’s article in Stabroek News, March 13, 2013.
The 1924 Ruimveldt Riot
In the 1924 Ruimveldt rebellion, three to four thousand people had gathered to protest over wages and conditions of work. The British Guiana Labour Union was trying to expand its labour base into the East Bank and the British Guiana East Indian Association was also mobilising against conditions on sugar estates on the East Bank area. The combination of these two events provided the conditions for the mass labour rebellion which resembled a multi-racial constituency of the aggrieved. About 600 hundred protestors had actually “menaced” the La Penitence bridge before the police opened fire. Thirteen were killed and twenty-four wounded. After the shootings, Ann Spackman (1973) reports there were “four attempts at arson, all against whites, and on two homes which were attacked were pinned the following notice: ‘To All Europeans! Why We Have Done It, Because You Have Shot Our Fellow Men East Indians, And Negroes, And Throughout Demerara, We Are Not Satisfied With Shooting, And Are Seeking Revenge’”