Continuity and change...

Frompage5) undercut those same wages But today, the boundaries between the eighty thousand freed Guyanese Africans and the sixty-nine newly introduced non-Indians also were disintegrated.

What that means is that groupidentitiesarenotfixed n o r b o u n d a r i e s impermeable:thesalienceof the Indian and Portuguese Guyanese identities must be interrogated. Are there, for instance, different values between them and African Guyanese towards the accumulation of wealth which help maintain a boundary? What studies in various disciplines have shown is that the simple “explanation” of “cultural” differences creating divisions is inadequate. As one theorist since the 1960s had posited, it is not the “stuff” of the different cultures that is necessarily the key, but the boundaries. During the colonial period under a “divide and rule” strategy, institutions such as government,theplantations, theCivilService,thePolice, the judiciary etc, were actuated by a hegemonic white-bias culture that reified and kept the boundariesinplace. At Independence one wouldhavethoughtthatnew institutionswouldbecreated to encourage a civic “Guyanese” identity in the nation-state we inherited. It is my thesis that the totalitarian regime between 1964-1985 that was instituted to keep Burnham in power - the exclusivist single-party led by ‘the dictator’; the official ideology; the system of terroristiccontrol;controlof mass communication, state coercive institutions, the economy and social organizations – also further reifiedthoseboundaries. We need new political, cultural, economic and social institutions to foster “Guyaneseness” in Guyanese citizens. Biology doesnothavetobedestiny

Sincerely,

RaviDev

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