The Massacre of over fifty African-Guyanese at Hurudaia on 6th July 1964 was the most gruesome act of terrorism during the People’s Progressive Party’s ‘Hurricane of Protest’ and the Guiana Agricultural Workers’ Union 165-day strike in the sugar industry.
Former President David Granger, speaking on the programme – The Public Interest – recalled that the objectives of the PPP’s ‘Protest’ and the GAWU’s ‘Strike’ aimed simultaneously to make British Guiana ‘ungovernable’. They tried to prevent the introduction of the Proportional Representation electoral system; to prevent the conduct of elections before Independence and to prolong the PPP’s tenure in office. The PPP employed terror to convince the British Government that order could be restored only by complying with its demands.
The first acts of arson, intimidation and murder of non-striking workers occurred at the Leonora, Tain and Lusignan plantations in the sugar belt. The PPP, however, realising that its campaign of terror was faltering and failing to foment mayhem or frustrate the British Government’s plans – extended violence beyond the sugar belt. This led to three incidents – the Buxton murders, Wismar atrocity and Hurudaia Massacre.
The murder of two persons of African descent in Buxton-Friendship – the largest African rural community outside of the sugar belt but sandwiched between Indian villages – on their farm on 21st May was savage. Their bodies were mutilated and the woman appeared to have been raped.
The murder of two persons of Indian descent, the rape of several women and burning of buildings in the mining town comprising Mackenzie, Wismar and Christianburg forcing hundreds to flee was an atrocity.
Many residents who had their roots or relatives in the mainly African coastal villages, retaliated angrily against Indian residents after learning of the brutish Buxton murders.
The PPP Minister of Home Affairs theatrically resigned on 1st June in the wake of the Wismar atrocity. This act, ostensibly, was meant to protest the failure of the British Army, British Guiana Police Force and British Guiana Volunteer Force – all three of which were commanded by persons of European descent – to prevent the atrocity. Once responsibility for public security had been relinquished, retaliatory massacres occurred days later on 12th June in Werk-en-Rust and on 6th July at Hurudaia.
The massacre of over fifty persons of African descent at ‘Hurudaia’, therefore, was a calculated and cold-blooded barbarity. The Son Chapman launch transported passengers and cargo on the Mackenzie-Georgetown route on the Demerara River. After departing Stabroek Market stelling, the launch stopped at the Sussex Street fish-koker where five bags of paddy, in which a time-bomb had been placed, were loaded. It exploded about 16:30 hours after the vessel had left Hurudaia, approximately 22 km from Mackenzie.
Women were blown to bits by the bomb blast; some were pitched into the river; some perished instantly; some plunged into the water; some swam to the riverbanks, clinging to flotsam while some screamed for help as they drowned. Survivors described the scene as a ‘river of blood’.
The Massacre showed how the PPP administration abandoned its responsibility to protect the population from violent terror. The British Governor was obliged to impose a ‘state of emergency’, exercise executive authority for public security, deploy additional British troops and detain the masterminds of the terrorist campaign, including thirty-two PPP members, in order to curb the violence.
The ‘Hurudaia Massacre’, more than any other crime, has contaminated this country’s cultural, social and political relations for the last sixty years.
