Figure 4: On the way to the farm
Work is part of the formation of family-friendships and community that becomes Surama. When talking about the establishment of Surama, people often brought up stories of the work they did
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with family-friends to form the community. Work continues to this day, and the community is always changing along with that work. In Surama, these changes have come to be known as development. Part of conceiving development in passing time is the Road. The Road attracted people from across the region to work. Some of these workers then became part of Surama. In this way, the Road is a kind of metaphor for Surama, for the coming together of many people in development-time. People reference the state of the Road to elucidate the way things were different in the past. When talking about their time in boarding school in St. Ignatius, my friends and hosts often prefaced with explanations, “Those days, the road wasn’t like now.” When I asked Vitus, “When did you come to Surama?” He spoke about the state of the road (and did not otherwise mention a temporal period). These descriptions highlight the difficulty travelling, the kind of equipment necessary to get through the mud, and the time it took to travel from one place to the next. Similarly, when I asked Uncle Dan about the early days of Surama, he told me of the narrow road when he used to drive cattle on horseback to sell in Lethem.
Just as the road is a marker for memories of travel, it is also integral to the beginning of Surama. As Sir Scipio points out in Amerindian Testimonies, “[Surama] was started by the workers on the Road to Brazil operation who saw the possibilities for farming...either originally from Annai or had worked on the road project…. There are eleven families in Surama now: here you will find the Allicocks, Captains, Rolands and Salvadors,” (Forte and Melville 1989: 60-61).
Sir Scipio mentions that he worked on the road, first as a labourer and then as a heavy machine operator, and many people in his generation worked on the Road as well.31 I was told the worst part
of the Road was north of Annai (towards Surama), past the “bush-mouth” (the start of the forest), and beyond. Surama is in a patch of savanna in that forest, such that Road-work would have drawn people closer to the area that is now Surama, but what role did the Road-work have in drawing people together?
Once, while taking-a-five from farm-work with Uncle Dan, he told me a bit about the work he had done with his father, Fred, monitoring the Buro-Buro river “It’s he clear the road you know? He push it right through down there. Before, it used to just be a small road passing till at the back so,” he
31 Like Scipio’s explanation, Ronald Salvador told me that he came in large part because of the road work in
the early 1970s. Kurt, Milner, Ronald, and I were having ‘kari with Uncle Sammy after a machruman. We were talking about politics and the upcoming elections, and Ronald told me, “I come here first in 1971, then it wasn’t like this. The Road didn’t go through so,” he pointed towards the highway, hidden behind the forest, “I was from that side, Karasabai, Tiger Pond area. I went there when it was just building up, just putting up them buildings… I come here first, then I went to work on the Road, then I come back in 1973,” (18/04/2015).
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pointed South East towards the farm mountain. I asked If Fred cleared the road before they started Surama.
“He push the road in 1972. Then it did have one cap, no land cruiser couldn’t pass through, sheer tractor and bull-dozer. Any land-cruiser try and pass through it’s sheer,” he spun his arms in a circle,
“sheer mud. ‘Til to Kurupukari, even 10km passed that. Then when PNC lose the election, them want to close the road. Sheer plane flyin’ out then. They want plane go, carry beef. But its best we have at least the road, to have it,” 32(10/04/2015).
As another quote from Sir Scipio in Amerindian Testimonies attests, the Road-work in the 1970s did not have any lasting change on accessibility to the area, and was more of a public relations campaign on the part of the government to demonstrate control of the area. Still, Road-work was an
opportunity for movement, earning money, and learning new skills. It wasn’t until the mid to late 1990s, however, that the Road would become readily navigable. As the Road improved, bus services started connecting Georgetown and Lethem. Nowadays, the road tends to flood in the rainy season, but bus services are not interrupted for extended periods of time, as in the past. With improvements to the Road, the cost and danger of moving goods has lessened such that more shops have opened in the North Rupununi. Most, including the shops in Surama, bring their goods from Lethem, and do some occasional restocking by buying goods in nearby Annai (larger shops which themselves bring in goods from Lethem). This Road development, and the access to goods, has accompanied a wider
‘opening up’ of Guyana after the change in national government in 1992. This change in government also brought renewed interest in international investments from development organizations. This contrasts with policy in the preceding twenty years, which was largely about self-sufficiency. The lodge was also built and founded in the early 1990s, originally as an extra stop for researchers visiting the Iwokrama nature reserve, which shares a boarder with Surama on the burro-burro river. Along with small-scale logging, the lodge became the largest source of income for the community. With this income, Surama residents have been able to purchase more goods, which has led to mixed subsistence from shop-bought food, fishing, farming, and occasionally, game. As Paulette once told me on one of her check-ups on me while I was writing notes, “Back then [in the 1980s] there was no work at all in Surama. In those days, Sydney used to go Annai, and them people [Surama residents] would all give him money. He was always kind hearted. He used to go with horse and donkey, so he
32 Though Uncle Dan cited a specific year for the road work, I was never able to get a consistent specific year
for the time when people made the permanent move to form Surama (or for the roadwork). This is perhaps because the Allicocks and Jameses already had farms in the area and would come to stay in camps while they worked their farms. Different families moving at different times, and the fact that Surama wasn’t officially recognized until the mid-late 70s probably also contributes to the range of years.
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would write down what people give he, because those times it had no shops here. Well, he would go and bring back all them people things. He was always helping people,”(31/05/2015).
She said that they would buy the most basic things, salt, oil, and soap, and that her brother worked at the government shop in Annai and would always save her ‘a little something’ he would send with Sydney. The rest of subsistence, in those times, did not include store-bought food. This change in subsistence came with the improvements to the Road, change in government, and new job opportunities created locally.
People in Surama thereby use the Road to mark changes in time. These changes in time are closely linked to development such that the increased use of purchased goods including store-bought food, chainsaws and other machinery, and (especially) zinc roofs for households—all facilitated by improvements to the road—are part of development. People in Surama have seen these changes in their own community, and in other nearby communities, and view these changes as part of the passing of time. To phrase it differently, Suramans understand that in time, all communities will develop as Surama has. This was evident when people in Surama visit other communities in the Region. On a trip to Taoshida Village with the Surama youth church choir, Ovid (Daniel’s cousin), Roy (a family-friend), and I were resting while the children played.
“Quiet, na?” Ovid asked (11/04/2015).
“The children gone and play over by the field,” I replied.
“No, it get no music playing, no generator, nothing.”
“Yeah for real. In Surama it always get somebody at least playing a little music. Then they have to play the music louder than the generator, haha”
“Yeah. Once the road build-up, then you would start to get that kind of thing in here, but all like how the road is now. How them going to bring that in?”
“Yeah, you can’t carry it over [the mountain].”
“Once that road, them build it up, you would get all kind of thing coming in here. But that is how a place like this build-up. Only thing is you don’t really get farming ground nearby.”
“Yeah,” Roy joined the conversation, “Or hunting ground.” “Or water,” they said at the same time.
“The way you seeing it now, Sabba, is how it starts, when a place like this builds up. You might get a group like us come in and see, then one person come, start to build it up. Sometime, you might get a
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idea for a business, you see something and say you could get money here.” Ovid said this would draw people in and make the place grow, “All like you know Crash Water? It’s people from Yakarinta go and build that place up. Yeah, only thing Yakarinta got that river you have to get across. Anyways, now Crash Water must get like 400, 500 people living there.”
Similar to Ovid’s expectation of Taoshida’s development, many family-friends in the field noted how villages were changing in appearance. Thomas, a Wapishana man who came to Surama with his family in the 1990s spoke about roofs in Sand Creek (in the South Rupununi), which used ité palm rather than kukrit palm leaves. He said they lasted longer, and that if I were to go to Sand Creek I would only see ité roofs, though, he was told, now all the roofs were zinc. Similarly, on a school sports trip to Rewa Village, Caroline explained that, “It had a time when all the houses here was sheer mud and thatch roof. Now people living upstairs with zinc and brick and I don’t know what more. From the way I see it, Rewa people getting a little bit of money.”33
Because similar changes are seen throughout the Rupununi, “development” is understood as inevitable. One evening at dinner in Paulette’s kitchen, Vitus reflected on a flight over Karasabai Village, “All them roofs zinc now. I wonder if Gunns would be like that someday,” (28/06/2015). Gunns is a Waiwai Village at the headwaters of the Essequibo in Region 9. Vitus had been there often for his work, and referenced it as a very “traditional” place. He thought of the Waiwai as more
“indigenous” or “real Amerindian”, in part because they shared their food and ate communally.34
Linking the idea of zinc to development more explicitly, Uncle Dan was once telling me of his plans to remake the back-dam camp. He was explaining how he wanted to redo the roof, which was half zinc and half kukrit, when I asked him,
“Uncle Dan, this wasn’t all kukrit leaf before?”
“No, it did both. This is tradition and development,” (13/04/2015).
Recognition from the government, the increase of population, move to zinc roofs and other economic growth are all seen as development. Development brings people and money to new places, and is generally seen as a positive thing. Paulette told me that after surveys done in Surama, most people said that development “was good”, because they could have new goods, such as TVs and motorcycles. Paulette was more cautious and thought it could be possibly damaging as drugs
33“little bit” here was a kind of sarcastic pun. Often in conversations people flipped verbs sarcastically for
humorous effect. Hot days referred to as “coldest.”
34 As Forte notes in her review of Rivière’s Individual and Society, the image of “the ‘exotic’ Waiwai”
contributed to them being one of the few Indigenous peoples in Guyana that have received anthropological attention since the 1950s (1987: 77).
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could also come into the community. She further cited a well-being survey a researcher had done in Surama in which both the visiting researcher and Paulette had independently found that the households with a higher degree of well-being were also the households with fewer outside goods; less motorcycles, no motor-powered cassava-grater, and lived more “traditionally”. Still, most people, especially from my generation, looked favourably upon development.
On a fishing and hunting trip downriver with Frank, Birthlan, and Devon, we were on the boat heading to a camp a few hours away when Devon asked us, “You think you could make your own Village?” (01/06/2015). He said that if he asked Granger (the newly elected Guyanese president) for five wives he would have a primary school in ten years. He chuckled and added, “Then they goh need five maids to look after them children, and even more children coming.” He said that then he could go to the president and show him how he was developing Guyana. Building Schools, and making a new Village.
This was meant as a joke, and drew a lot of laughs, but it also highlights the way development is about the expansion of people to new places, the influx of goods from the outside, and gifts from the government or development agencies. Often when political parties campaign in the region, they promise construction equipment or other goods. At a People’s Progressive Party campaign rally, Paulette requested (on behalf of the Village) and was granted the bus that takes the students to secondary school daily. These requests work on larger scales. In the CDP meeting (described in Chapter Two), Sydney was asking for a large amount of money from the development agencies. Sydney downplayed the financial aspect while highlighting local development. He foregrounded Amerindian’s right to have the airstrip, which would allow them to demonstrate the knowledge and ability to effectively run it. In this way, Sydney hoped local development would overcome wider negative stereotypes of Amerindians in Guyana as part of the past or unable to be a part of the contemporary world. By bringing markers of development to a new place, first people, a school, and a church; and later zinc, machinery and paved roads, Amerindians bring “development” to parts of Guyana that are otherwise regarded as dangerous, and “uncivilized” (explored further in Part II). They thus demonstrate their ability to handle environments which they know non-Amerindians cannot. This is best brought together in Devon’s joke. The president of Guyana himself was giving Devon the wives, which he would effectively repay with the development of Guyana. Though it was a joke boasting his own virility, it takes as given that non-Amerindians cannot handle the terrain in which Amerindians lived. Through his (infamous) knowledge of the forest, he will be able to populate—through his own family—a new area, and bring a government school. This is not dissimilar from the stories he heard about the early days of Surama. In this way, family-friend development, it’s growth and kinship ties, are linked to regional and national development.
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While changes are associated with development, development is not the goal or motivation for changes. For example, zinc roofs, often associated in hindsight with development, are not chosen because they mark the household as development. While everyone knows that zinc roofs make households hotter in the Rupununi sun, people select them out of convenience, and a concern for sustainability. Kukrit roofs require “damag[ing]” several trees, and sometimes costs money, as work is not solely through machrumani, but also with payments to family-friends to help rethatch. With an increasing number of households in Surama, harvestable kukrit trees get “further away”; closer trees have already been harvested, and the plant takes fourteen years to regrow to a harvestable state. As kukrit trees get farther away, thatched roofs require more money for gas and diesel to cut and transport the leaves to the building site.
Ron, Sydney’s son, explained that zinc was not only chosen out of sustainability, but out of a concern for fellow community members, as well as for the benefit of tourism in the Village. Ron says that the influx of money has created monetary disparities in the community such that some families cannot afford zinc. Thereby, families who can afford and choose to use zinc are indirectly helping families without monetary income by allowing those families to use the available kukrit leaves. Furthermore, Ron said that Surama villagers’ use of zinc roofs for households allows the eco-lodge to use natural materials for their guest accommodations, benabs and bungalows. This is important for guests as they are looking for an ‘authentic’ experience in a sustainable ecolodge.35 So long as households use
zinc, the Ecolodge can use kukrit without trees getting farther away.
This resonates with what Uncle Clifford said while we were working on uncle Bertrand’s benab. Clifford said that Sydney had recommended that everybody build a benab, so that researchers and guests looking to stay in an Amerindian community would have somewhere to visit. Bertrand, for his part built a benab to have a place to entertain guests when they come to visit him; not necessarily tourists, but friends and extended family in the region. While Bertrand, through his work as a
mechanic and driver at the Ecolodge had enough money for gas for the tractors and chainsaws to cut and transport the kukrit, (and a family-friend relationship with Sydney, his brother, who lent him the tractor), other families that rely on kukrit for their benabs may not have these funds available. As such, though they would have access to the tractor through their own ties to community members,