The People’s Progressive Party’s (PPP’s) ‘Hurricane of Protest’ and the Guiana Agricultural Workers Union’s 165-day strike in the sugar industry in 1964 aimed to make British Guiana ‘ungovernable’. The purposes were to prevent the introduction of the Proportional Representation electoral system, to prevent the conduct of elections before Independence and to prevent the PPP’s removal from office. Members of the Progressive Youth Organisation had been trained as saboteurs in communist countries and some GAWU workers were recruited as warriors to wage the PPP’s battles. Automatic weapons, ammunition and explosives had been stockpiled.
Former President David Granger, who is also a historian, speaking on the programme – The Public Interest – explained that labour strikes started at Leonora and Uitvlugt estates in West Demerara (now Region No. 3) on 3rd March 1964. The ‘Protest and ‘Strike’ degenerated into sheer terror against non-supporters of the PPP and GAWU in a rampage of arson, assaults, bombing, carnage, murders, rape and sabotage. Some sugar workers who continued to work became victims of violence. Terrorist attacks became epidemic and ethnic in complexion. Persons of African descent were the majority of victims in West Demerara where 15,000 African-Guyanese were outnumbered by 42,000 Indian-Guyanese. A delegation from the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa tried, but failed, to meet the Governor on 28th April to call attention to the West Demerara carnage.
Mr. Granger recalled that Sir Richard Luyt – a South African WWII veteran – was appointed Governor on 7th March. He assumed responsibility for public security by declaring a ‘state of emergency’ twenty-four hours after the murders of the Sealeys in Buxton-Friendship on 21st May. He deployed units of the British Guiana Police Force to West Demerara and cancelled leave for policemen; called out the British Guiana Volunteer Force on full-time service and requested British Army reinforcements. The next month, he ordered the detention of thirty-two PPP members at Her Majesty’s Penal Settlement at Mazaruni and issued an order for the establishment of a new force, the British Guiana Special Service Unit, in his counter-terrorism campaign.
Mr. Granger recounted that the lives, homes and farms of African-Guyanese were targeted on the dangerous 12-kilometre corridor that included the villages of Blankenburg, De Kinderen, De Willem, Den Amstel, Hague, La Jalousie, Leonora, Meten-Meer-Zorg, Stewartville, Tuschen, Uitvlugt, Vergenoegen, Zeeburg and Zeelugt. Terrorists attacked sugar workers who refused to join GAWU’s strike; ‘cleansed’ Tuschen of several families; destroyed extensive Den Amstel farmlands; burnt or pushed houses off their blocks and assaulted passengers on the Vreed en Hoop-Parika West Demerara railway. Villagers were scared to go to their farms because terrorists would ambush them or shoot at their ballahoos.
The former president expressed the view that the PPP’s violent campaign in the West Demerara deliberately inflicted terror on unarmed and unresisting poor people who had nothing to do with the GAWU strike or with opposition parties. Terrorism destroyed lives, damaged social cohesion, divided communities; deepened divisions between persons of Indian and African descent and triggered emigration. The consequences of the PPP’s terrorist campaign cast a pall over West Demerara communities which persists to the present day.
