The attack on schoolchildren travelling in a school-bus in West Coast Berbice on 6th March 2020 by People’s Progressive Party rioters was not without precedent. PPP terrorists had launched a similar, but deadly, attack on 23rd March 1964 during the ‘Disturbances’, almost exactly sixty years ago. Terrorists threw a bomb into a Bookers Sugar Estates school-bus in East Coast Demerara, killing 13-year-old Godfrey Teixeira and injuring others. That ‘school-bus bombing’ was only one of the most violent incidents in the most violent strike in this country’s history.
Former President David Granger, speaking on his weekly programme, The Public Interest, examined the causes for the large number of murders committed during ‘The hurricane of protest’ – the PPP’s name for its terrorist campaign. The PPP – at that time the Government of British Guiana – set out to obstruct general elections under the Proportional Representation electoral system which the British Government had imposed to replace the unbalanced ‘First-past-the-post’ system. The PPP’s aim was to remain in office up to 1965 and to obtain Independence without new elections by violently making the colony ungovernable.
The PPP-affiliated Guiana Agricultural Workers Union called a strike to demand the right to represent sugar workers, most of whom already belonged to a rival union — Man Power Citizens Association – that was recognised by the British Guiana Sugar Producers’ Association. GAWU initiated ‘wildcat’ strikes at Leonora and Uitvlugt estates but formally called a strike only on 3rd March 1964. The next day, the first two non-striking sugar workers were murdered. Some sugar workers who continued to work became victims of savage violence.
The Governor of British Guiana declared a ‘state of emergency’ after the ‘Werk-en-Rust Massacre’ of the Abraham family. Thirty-two PPP members were detained without trial at Sibley Hall in the Mazaruni Penal Settlement. The British Guiana Police Force deployed a riot unit following a wave of violence and cancelled leave for policemen. The British Guiana Volunteer Force was ‘called up’ for full-time service. The British Army sent out battalions of the Grenadier Guards and the Devon and Dorset Regiments to assist in maintaining law and order. The Governor, finally, issued an order for the establishment of a new force, the British Guiana Special Service Unit.
Mr. Granger cited Professor Clem Seecharan – an eminent Guyanese historian – who wrote of the GAWU strike that “sugar workers were the backbone” in the PPP’s campaign of violence. He stated that: “…Dr. Jagan exploited his considerable influence among Indian sugar workers to achieve political objectives which had more to do with his control of the state than with their conditions of work.” Seecharan described the GAWU strike as “an orgy of arson, bombing and personal attacks on people who refused to strike.” He wrote, soberly, that sugar workers were “…pawns in the politics of sugar throughout Cheddi Jagan’s political career – from the late 1940s to the late 1990s.”
The former president expressed the opinion that GAWU’s violent strike degenerated into a terrorist campaign against non-striking workers and spread to innocent non-supporters of the PPP. GAWU failed to gain recognition or to establish the validity of its case. Its resort to terror – including arson, assault, battery, murder, sabotage – was unsustainable in the face of the British military counter-offensive. GAWU alienated civil society, divided once-friendly communities, killed innocent villagers, triggered emigration, outraged public opinion and damaged social cohesion in ways which have not been repaired even after sixty years.
