Vincent Roth: A Life In Guyana: Volume 1: A Young Man's Journey, 1889 -1923:
ed Michael Bennett (Peepal Tree Press, England, 2003)
Vincent Roth: A Life in Guyana: Volume 2: The Later Years, 1923 – 35: ed
Michael Bennett (Peepal Tree Press, England, 2003)
For today’s unwilling book reader or browser, the remarks on the back cover
of the 1st volume of these books more or less sum up the extraordinary life
of its subject:
"As an eighteen year old Vincent Roth arrived in British Guiana in 1907 to join
his father, who was a Government Medical Officer and Magistrate. By the time
he left for Barbados in 1964, Roth had spent thirty years in the interior working
as a surveyor and magistrate until blackwater fever nearly killed him.
Thereafter he contributed immensely to the development of Guyana as a
journalist, naturalist, historian, rebuilder of the national museum and founder
of the zoo in the Botanical Gardens.”
Flip through pages, and there is this: “Another of the farmers in the Coolie
Quarter of the Aruka River was Abdul Ghani. He was a Sikh and the mastermind
of all East Indians in the area. He used to lend money to the other East Indians
and close down on them when they could not meet their indebtedness. As a
result he gradually acquired several tracts of land all over the Aruka district.
"He also went by the name of Phagoo and once told me how this came about.
Phagoo was his shipmate’s name on the voyage from India, but he died shortly
after his arrival in the Colony. Ghani boasted that although he had come to
the Colony as an indentured labourer to a sugar estate, he had never done one
day’s work in the cane fields, having absconded as soon as he arrived and got
away to the North West where he took Phagoo’s name”. (Vol 1: p.185)
Further into the book you come across this: “During the morning, the distant
beating of drums was heard as the masqueraders went about the village,
arriving at the Government Compound at about ten o’clock. They consisted of
a group of some dozen and a half Negroes, dressed in gaudy yellow and red
costumes of every description, prancing and dancing about, and followed by
a party of interested but naked Caribs.” (Vol 1: p. 238)
The first volume of "A Life In Guyana" is not all about runaway East Indians and
prancing Negroes. In fact, in much of its 300+ pages Roth writes passages like
this: “Back in Bartica I met J.N. Humphreys, my predecessor at Christianburg
and Arakaka, who was now accountant at the Penal Settlement and Bartica
Magistrates’ Clerk. He invited me over to the Settlement and after Court we
went with Walter King, the Magistrate and Superintendent, in his launch. King
asked Humphreys to bring me along to tea later on. Humphreys took me to the
Public Officers quarters, the finest in the Colony, most luxuriously furnished,
with even a billiard table.” (Vol 1: p. 303)
Names of residents found in Guiana registries fill-to-overflow the pages of
Roth's journals ̶ Van Sluytman, McTurk, Fiedtkou, Phang, Griffiths, Drepaul,
Correia, Christiani, Van Sertima (“a dear old fussy Dutch lady”), Prem Das
(“an East Indian catechist”), The Zulu (“an enormous African lady who
washed and did other favours”).
Readers will need to be patient with Roth’s old-millennium words for
Guianese Africans and Indians, his dry, bush-clearing prose; the careful
delineation of features, accuracy of dates and measurements
Working through page after page of his reports could be mind-numbing, but
Roth provides ‘data’ that when analysed might add to Guyana’s understanding
of the early formations of nationhood, the partial ties and aversions taking
root in the colony.
Wherever they worked or settled, off the sugar plantations or in the gold fields,
Guianese were sinewy, resilient folk, alert to opportunity after emancipation
(though Roth’s recordings don’t pause often enough to underline these traits.)
He gives pure observations – on language, superstition, the management of
our land resources; polygamy among the Carib Indians, black/white race
relations in the 1920s, Indian/African relations in the 1930s.
He comes across in the first volume as a benign administrator; unique among
outsiders who come and go; driven less by a sense of ‘imperial’ mission, and
not hard to like.
Roth was at home among the governing elite (he was secretary of the Overseas
Club) dressing up “in the garb of civilization” for formal dinners; at the same
time he was prepared to cross boundaries, get frisky with the natives if the
occasion presented itself.
In Chapter XI he is in the Wape area of the Cuyuni. He’s drawn to the sound
of merriment at a dance hall where Carib Indians are dipping into huge jars of
liquor and dancing in the moonlight to the sounds of fiddlers and drums. He joins
them and in conga line fashion follows them to another camp to continue the
fete, the diarist in his head recording every move and shadow.
Readers might stop and ask, how did he balance his across-the-country
surveyance and his after-duty pursuit of exoticisms.
*
Volume I (1889-1923) contains most of young Roth’s discovery and mapping of
Guiana’s topography. It also details his first encounters with tuberculosis,
the healing powers of the piaiman, the Arawak language; and close encounters
with swarms of marubuntas and the land camoodi.
Volume 2 (1923-1935) begins on a reflective note. Roth admits to a little
‘cynicism’ about his journal keeping. He continues anyway, compiling his
observations, for like his father he has an eye on future publication.
The writing is more anecdotal and interspersed with amusing ‘yarns’. (If there
were rumblings of discontent among the colonized Roth remained tight-lipped.)
Still the tireless, well-meaning administrator, he has lost some of the Overseas
Club exclusivity of the 1st volume. He is thoroughly familiar with the landscape,
and he moves with smoother assurance among its diverse inhabitants.
These volumes will certainly find a place on library shelves – and perhaps
a few home shelves – but they're unlikely to attract many new readers willing
to be transported back 100+ years. Guyanese might protest there is too much
disorder, too many issues of majority control to measure or shed blood over.
For our heritage servers, keen to reinstall narratives of ethnic significance,
Roth leaves a footnote about the fate of ‘his old acquaintance’, the
entrepreneurial breakaway Abdul Ghani (Phagoo).
"The last place I visited was the storeroom where the storeroom’s convict
assistant turned out to be my old acquaintance, Abdul Ghani, once a
prosperous shopkeeper and coffee grower on the Aruka River. He earned his
sentence for stealing a sheep. This was, I believe, his third term in prison for
stealing.” (Vol 1: p. 304)
His books were written, Roth said, “for the possible interest and amusement
of surviving friends” and there are moments ̶ harrowing or entertaining, in
blocks of pages, whole chapters ̶ when the Guyanese reader might feel
distinctly like outsiders: written about, providing the stage for the enlargement
of an extraordinary young life, its colonial good times.
(A version of this article was published elsewhere in 2007)
– Wyck Williams
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 