TODAY is the time of the calendar year when the country observes the arrival of labourers from India that came as indentured workers to toil on the sugar plantations. So much has been written about Indians, a mere newspaper column cannot contribute anything. I will attempt here an analysis of a sociological dimension which maybe has not been visited before. This is a comparison between the snobbery, petit bourgeois mind, and psychic make-up of the African middle class and the petit bourgeois Indians.

Complicating the analysis is the fact that the African middle class is a one-dimensional construct. They live in Georgetown and are Christians who practise Western culture. The Indian petit bourgeoisie is a multi-class, multi-cultural formation. Well-to-do Indians are divided into the commercial Georgetown class and the rural Kulaks (upper stratum of the peasantry).

Because of the urban-rural divide, the urban Indian petit bourgeoisie practised class snobbery and colour prejudice that were almost absent in the Kulaks. I witnessed the difference in the psychological make-up of the privileged Indian class and the well-to-do African people in Guyana from very close quarter. It is fascinating to see how the Indian petit bourgeois psyche differed from the psychological make-up of the African middle class.

A newspaper column cannot do justice to the comparison. What I am about to undertake here is best left to an academic forum. Hazel Woolford, head of the Guyana Historical and Research Institute, has requested I do a paper at the forthcoming conference of the institute and I may do that. But the theme of the conference is on the labour movement and not the class structure of Guyana which is my field, but I hope I can be accommodated.

Here now are brief notes in a comparison between the privileged world of Guyanese Indians and that of their African counterparts.

I went to UG at a time when I was perhaps the only poor, south Georgetown citizen to attend that institution. Long standing PPP big-wig, Hydar Ally, surprised me on the Freddie Kissoon Show when he said that one of the things, he remembers about me whenever people talk to him about me was that I used a common pin to hold together my rubber slippers that has broken up and he remembers me at UG walking in such footwear.

I encountered two different types of attitudes among the privileged Indians and well-to-do Africans. Both looked down on me and wondered all the time where I came from and why I was at UG and not in jail. I found less tolerance for people like me from urban-based Indians than the children from the rural, rich Indian class. They accepted me fully. I found no acceptance whatsoever from the urban petit bourgeois Indians who moved aside when I walked pass them on the corridors at UG.

The majority of the African middle class resented my presence on campus. The daughter of a high-ranking judicial officer would walk aside as in apartheid South Africa when I walked past her. Another former student who is now a Black Power advocate, was the leading Black middle-class personality on campus. She would move away from the table in the library if I sat down at the same table.

Middle class African Guyanese see themselves as the embodiment of Western culture and they carry that belief at a deep ideological level. Like clear-complexioned Indians they are obsessed with skin colour. But while the Indian petit bourgeois Indians and African middle class put a high premium on skin colour, the rich rural peasants do not.

The reason for this has to do with village life in the countryside and the role of the temples and mosques in rural Guyana. In the villages, even though you are the big, rich rice farmer, you are not a product of Western culture, so the tendency to behave like a big-shot is less pronounced. I have always found that of all the political parties, and I mean every one of them, in Guyana, the PPP leaders are less pompous, less arrogant and the least snobbish. I believe this is because of the absence of emphasis on class and colour in the rural ambience. I found out during my discriminated days at UG that the Indian petit bourgeoisie placed emphasis on caste and from there I think the skin colour thing arose.

All that I discovered about class and culture in Guyana as a UG student I saw replicated in the Working People’s Alliance and the Alliance For Change. The PNC, like the PPP is not a class elitist entity. So why was I part of both of these elite formations –WPA and AFC? That is a long, tragic story best left to my memoir if I ever write it.