Guyana is at an uncomfortable intersection in its history. There remains a generation of Guyanese who, whether as children, teenagers or adults during the period stretching from the 1970s into the early 1990s, remember what they still describe as the “Dark Days.” Their memories include food shortages, electricity and water outages and the deterioration of everyday life. But Fr. Andrew Morrison SJ in Justice: The Struggle for Democracy in Guyana 1952-1992 chronicled something more consequential: repression and the progressive intrusion of political power into institutions that should have served the citizen independently of whichever party controlled the Government.
Guyana today is not the Guyana Fr. Morrison chronicled, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that distinction. But that is precisely why his record matters. History is useful not because it permits careless declarations that the present is identical to the past, but because it gives citizens a vocabulary with which to recognise tendencies before they mature into something more dangerous.
The most disturbing feature of Fr. Morrison’s chronology is the frequency with which political dissent and confrontation with authority became associated with violence.
University of Guyana lecturer Dr. Joshua Ramsammy survived an attempted assassination in 1971, against a background Fr. Morrison associates with Special Branch secrecy and the subsequent police investigation. In 1976, forty-two members of the Guyana Mine Workers Union were arrested and tear-gassed in overcrowded prison cells. In 1979 came the killing of Fr. Bernard Darke only metres from Brickdam Police Station. Fr. Morrison later records Ohene Koama as having been shot by police and describes the investigation into the murder of Minister of Education Vincent Teekah as having been covered up. In 1980, Edward Dublin was shot by police at Wismar and died the following morning after what Fr. Morrison describes as previous harassment.
In summary, these were not simply disconnected episodes of disorder. Fr. Morrison places them within a political environment in which criticism, opposition activity and confrontation with the State could carry consequences extending far beyond ordinary political disagreement. The lesson is not that every confrontation with authority constitutes repression; it is that democracy becomes endangered when political disagreement begins attracting the coercive attention of the State.
Dr. Walter Rodney’s presence looms over Fr. Morrison’s account. Rodney was drawing increasingly large crowds, including in areas considered strongholds of the governing People’s National Congress. Fr. Morrison records police and party members being present at events, including his killing, and raises questions about what may have been known beforehand. He also records that Fr. Malcolm Rodrigues, SJ, Mike James and himself were under Special Branch surveillance.
These details are important because repression is not always experienced only through arrests, beatings or killings. There is that other, quieter dimension: watching, following, gathering information and allowing individuals to understand that their political or civic activities had brought them within the gaze of the security apparatus. That distinction remains fundamental in any democracy. Governments inevitably have political opponents. The State should not.
In summary, surveillance carries political consequences even before an arrest is made. Its power lies partly in what everyone else observes. When citizens begin wondering whether association, criticism or political participation might attract the attention of institutions considerably more powerful than themselves, repression has already acquired a psychological dimension.
Fr. Morrison’s record demonstrates that the reach of State authority extended considerably further than prominent political personalities.
Between June and August 1980, against the background of transfers involving teachers and school administrators across Georgetown and Berbice, students engaged in protest action. Fr. Morrison records students being assaulted with batons on the streets of Georgetown and having machine guns pointed at them by members of the Guyana Defence Force and Guyana Police Force within the precincts of the National Assembly. Eight students, he records, were detained. One female student had to be hospitalised from injuries sustained from police brutality.
His account also describes the strange contradictions produced by the food shortages of the period. Police were deployed to seize smuggled flour and baked products from bakeries, yet he records allegations of protection payments facilitating the entry of flour and officers consuming baked products even while bakeries were being raided.
By 1985, even the churches were not beyond the State’s reach. Fr. Morrison chronicles police raids on the homes of the Roman Catholic and Anglican bishops, other church leaders and the Jesuit Presbytery. At the Presbytery, he records officers entering while the maid had gone to locate Frs. Morrison and Rodrigues, whom police had specifically named as persons of interest, and went searching for them. According to Fr. Morrison, these searches were conducted without the warrants required under the National Security Act.
The importance of these incidents lies in their breadth. Students, teachers, trade unionists, clergy, political activists and ordinary businesses appear within the same historical record. What began as the political management of opponents did gradually become something larger: a culture in which coercive institutions entered spaces that should ordinarily enjoy protection from arbitrary State intrusion.
Perhaps Fr. Morrison’s most revealing entry concerns neither an assassination nor a police raid. On June 13, 1982, the Catholic Standard editorial accused the State of undermining the proper functioning of the courts. Fr. Morrison’s notes invoked the Nuremberg Trials and the rejection of the defence by Nazi officials, military personnel and members of the Gestapo that they were merely carrying out orders.
The historical comparison is deliberately severe and should remain within the context in which Fr. Morrison employed it. The principle he drew from it, however, is universal: public servants, police officers, soldiers and other State officials do not surrender personal and constitutional responsibility merely because instructions descend from above. This may be the most important theme running through Fr. Morrison’s chronology.
In summary, the integrity of a democratic State ultimately depends upon officials understanding that their loyalty is to lawful authority and constitutional responsibility, not to the temporary political interests of those occupying office. Governments change. The obligations attached to public office do not.
Discussion