Kirjahaku

The second volume of Hand-in-Hand History of Cricket in Guyana examines the stagnation of the game in colonial Guyana (British Guiana) in the decade and a half before the Great War. Guyanese cricket was stained with a stubborn mediocrity. The GCC remained enmeshed in the race, colour and class assumptions of the age. Social and natural forces, therefore, were instrumental in diminishing the potentiality of the local game in British Guiana. Still, throughout British Guiana among all races, the passion for cricket remained inviolable: the seed never died despite the unpropitious character of the soil.

This book is about Jock Campbell’s role in the shaping of British Guiana (Guyana) towards the end of Empire. Campbell, the head of the Booker Company which owned most of the sugar plantations in colonial Guyana was a reformer whose Fabian social beliefs drove him to secure major benifits for sugar workers in teh 1950s and 1960s. Clem Seecharan explores the fascinating interplay between Campbell’s programme of reforms and the doctrinaire Marxism of Guyana’s charismatic politician, Cheddi Jagan. Fed by his notion of `bitter sugar’ and an unrelenting hostility to Booker, Jagan exploited the loyalty of Indian sugar workers to foment instability on the plantations and thus undermined Campbell’s mission to alleviate the colony’s bitter plantation legacy. Seecharan provides a rigorous analysis of Campbell – a complex, progressive contradictory and passionate man – and his work in turbulent British Guiana, marked by nationalist stirrings, mobilisation doe decolonisation, the fragmenting of Jagan’s nationalist coalition and descent into racial hatred and violence.

This reissue of an 1894 pamphlet celebrates Joseph Ruhomon as the first Indian intellectual in British Guiana, now Guyana. He wrote at a time, Seecharan notes, "when self-deprecation was an instinct...and the construction of this essay was an admirable accomplishment".