Racial Divide in Guyana: Colonialism 2.0 and the Empire’s Legacy

Colonialism 2.0 – Part IV The Empire Never Ended
The Divide That The Empire Drew

The empire fueled and fanned the racial divide and they conquered.

They didn’t just break bodies. They broke solidarity. They broke spirit. They broke us. And that, perhaps, was the genius of empire. Because it wasn’t just the violence, but the ability to rewrite the terms of suffering and by doing so, they turned the oppressed against one another—and called it order, they created a separation, a racial divide in Guyana.

I felt the echoes of this firsthand in my own homeland. It was done with precision in British Guiana. When the British abolished slavery in 1834, it wasn’t out of conscience, and the stories that followed abolition are just as horrific. What they faced was a labor crisis. Sugar was too profitable to abandon, and plantations were too large to leave unmanned. So they reached halfway around the world—to another colony, India.

They called it indentured servitude. A contract. A choice. A lie. A story so vast it could fill volumes. In fact from 1838 to 1917, more than 238,000 Indians were brought to Guyana under this new system (National Trust of Guyana). Over two million were scattered globally. Bound by paper but shackled by design—but tell me, how could the illiterate sign contracts? How could those unfamiliar with English understand what they were agreeing to? Promised land and wages, they received punishment, surveillance, and debt. Historian Hugh Tinker called it a “new form of slavery.”

And then came the cruelest twist.
The British replaced slave labor with indentured labor not just because sugar was profitable—but because unity among the oppressed would have been dangerous. In other words, it was never about healing; it was about control. It was a masterstroke. By design, the oppressed would now compete for survival. Squabble. Distrust. Divide.

At the same time, the newly emancipated struggled to stand in a rigged economy, still nursing generational wounds. The newly indentured arrived—confused, displaced, and dropped into a system engineered to divide them.

This wasn’t benevolence. It was strategy. Draw racial lines. Let resentment fester. Let hierarchy replace unity. Bring in the church. Tie education and opportunity to conversion. Make sure no one looked too far upward to find the real oppressor. And it worked.

Divided we fell—and we are still falling. The racial divide in Guyana metastasized into a national wound. And still, that was not enough.

When the nation found a way to unite, empire struck again. By the 1950s, a multi-ethnic political alliance formed—the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), led by Indo-Guyanese Cheddi Jagan and Afro-Guyanese Forbes Burnham. Solidarity terrified them. Two major ethnic groups, once divided by design, now reaching for a shared future. Trying to bridge that racial divide in Guyana.

So the U.S. and U.K. intervened. They:

Exploited ideological tensions between Jagan and Burnham
Pressured Burnham to break away and form the People’s National Congress (PNC)
Funded anti-Jagan propaganda, branding him a communist threat

Restructured the electoral system to racialize politics

The CIA directly intervened to destabilize what it saw as a Marxist threat. They enabled Burnham—who had broken from Jagan—to claim leadership in a coalition, despite winning fewer votes. They rigged an election in a sovereign nation. These are not conspiracy theories. These are documented facts. (U.S. State Dept. documents, declassified in the 1990s).

What followed was not liberation. It was empire in new clothes. They reduced it to two days of riots. The lived stories tell a different tale.

Burnham, praised by some for socialist ideals, deepened the racial divide in Guyana. Afro-Guyanese were favored. Indo-Guyanese were marginalized. They fled, they struggled. And the old British playbook endured. No longer under the Union Jack, but still under its shadow.

That fracture still breathes today—for example, showing up in elections split by race and in neighborhoods thick with distrust. The trauma wasn’t healed; it was woven in. As a result, today’s Guyanese politics sits atop those cracks, held in place by economic imbalance, educational disparity, and the frictions of diaspora.

As Guyana nears another election, the ghosts of 1838 and 1964 stir. Who belongs? Who leads? Whose story is honored—and whose erased? Because my friends, that racial divide in Guyana still exists.

This was not organic. This was not inevitable. This was by design. And this was not an isolated incident – follow the trail here: Colonialism Part III

The empire never ended. It simply stepped back—and let the fractures do its work.