By Geoff Burrowes
I was born in colonial British Guiana (now Guyana) into a white, middle class, Anglican family in Kitty Village in 1942. I mention white because BG, as British Guiana was called, was a multicultural society and although our family didn’t discuss race it was easy to see that not everybody looked the same as we did!
Middle class because we never missed a meal and had a maid, a cook and a gardener. Our food was plain but tasty and nourishing: breakfast was normally plantain porridge and cocoa, lunch was generally rice, meat or fish with sides of cassava, fried or green plantain and occasionally, ugh, ochro (slippery, slimy ochro). And we called lunch breakfast or brekfuss. Our maid Nanny Cleo and our cook, Ina Murray were unfailingly kind and along with our parents made sure we behaved properly. My mum and dad made sure that we treated them with respect and listened to them. Continue reading
– By Geoff Burrowes
The British Guiana stamp was owned by du Pont chemical empire heir John du Pont
GUYANA: History: Summarising the 1856 ‘Angel Gabriel’ Guyana Riots – By Nigel Westmaas
The so called ‘Angel Gabriel’ riots in British Guiana (Guyana) in 1856 has generally been passed over as another of many local riots in the colony. This in spite of the immensity of its size as a riot, its reception at a global level, its layered origins, and of course the international footprint and character of the riot’s main protagonist, John Sayers Orr, whose nom de guerre ‘angel Gabriel’ stuck as an attractive descriptive. But the radical footprint of Orr is no exaggeration. If he had lived in the present, Orr might have be deemed an intercontinental ‘ballistic’ missile.
There are only two known published articles on the 1856 riots in Guyana, namely VO Chan’s “The Riots of 1856 in British Guiana,”(1970) and Mark Doyle’s more updated, “The Angel Gabriel in the Tropics: British Guiana 1856” (2016). These and other assessments have focused both on Orr, his apparent aberrant interventions and hold on the masses, and the wider context and undercurrents and conditions prevailing in Guyana that allowed Orr to almost seamlessly intervene. Continue reading →
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