As I was leaving Guyana, the X-ray machine at Georgetown airport revealed rectangular blocks in my luggage. The customs official assumed they were cocaine, since this is a major departure point for South American drugs en route to Europe. But the search only found books, including the first French biography of the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, with a distinctive image of him on the cover. The official was amazed: ‘How do you know about him? No one here’s interested in him anymore.’
Draining the land Georgetown is built on, and making it habitable, was a huge task as it lies below sea level. Ninety per cent of Guyana’s 780,000 inhabitants live within a few miles of the Atlantic.
By the 17th century, after the Spanish and Portuguese had divided up the rest of South America, all that remained was what sailors called the Wild Coast — the Guianas, a barrier of mangroves between the Orinoco to the north and the Amazon to the south, which Europeans had sailed past in the 16th century, stopping only to trade with local Amerindians. Its European colonisation began in the 17th century, and after two centuries of wars the region was carved up between the French (who held French Guiana in the east), the Dutch (Suriname in the centre) and the British (Guyana in the west).
We need such brilliant examples as Rodney of what it means to be a resolute intellectual who recognises that the ultimate significance of knowledge is its capacity to transform our social worlds Angela Davis
On arriving in central Georgetown, I started with a visit to the National Library of Guyana, an imposing wood-framed building funded by the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1909. None of Rodney’s works were on the open shelves, though according to the card index a few were held in the stacks, some accessible, others not; old typewriting on one card stated, ‘The author is Guyanese.’ A librarian asked if I meant Walter Roth, and other people I met (...)
