The Country That Cannot Hear Itself

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One of Martin Carter’s most often quoted lines comes from the poem “You Are Involved”: all are involved! The phrase has done long duty in speeches and tributes, and it gave Stewart Brown the title for his critical collection on Carter’s art. It is usually heard as a statement about solidarity. I want to read it here as a claim about language rather than feeling. A people can only be involved together if they can speak to one another; on this reading the involvement Carter names is not a sentiment but a channel. A shared struggle needs somewhere to speak itself into existence. It needs words that can travel beyond the group that first utters them, and institutions through which one Guyanese can encounter another across the estate, the ward, the river and the racial line.

This essay is about those institutions — what they do, how Guyana built them, how they narrowed, and why their condition now matters more than at any point since independence.

What a channel does

Any body of people organized toward a common end — a department, a company, a nation — depends on communication for at least three things. It carries purpose: what we are for, what would count as success. It enables coordination: who does what, in what order, with what handoffs. And it permits correction: the capacity for someone to say “this is not working” and be heard before the failure compounds.

None of this is new. Chester Barnard, writing in 1938 from inside the American corporation, argued that an executive’s first function is to establish and maintain a system of communication, because authority itself exists only when a message is received and accepted. Remove the channel that carries purpose and you get motion without direction. Remove coordination and you get duplicated effort and dropped work. Remove correction and the organization loses the ability to learn, which on a long enough horizon is fatal.

Vibert C. Cambridge, the Guyanese-born media scholar and professor emeritus at Ohio University, adds a fourth question that Barnard’s corporations did not need to ask: who controls the channel? Cambridge’s Musical Life in Guyana: History and Politics of Controlling Creativity (2015) is nominally a history of music. It is also a history of who was permitted to be heard. Across the twentieth century, he concludes, the practices of governance — colonial and post-colonial alike — exerted disproportionate influence over who could create, who had access to instruction and to media, and therefore whose voice reached beyond their own community. He describes a society of discrete musical traditions, or “musical communities,” which could reflect, reinforce and — the third verb matters — challenge the identities of race, class, gender, faction and religion that divided the country.

Cambridge is writing about music. I am borrowing his architecture for civic life, and the borrowing is mine, not his. But the architecture holds. A channel is never neutral. It is built by someone, and it carries what its builders permit.

What Guyana built

Cambridge’s periodization is useful because it resists the comfortable story that Guyana was simply born divided. He treats three eras: 1900 to 1953, 1953 to 1966, and 1966 to 2000. The first was the period of mature colonial governance: channels that answered largely to the plantation and the Crown, radio arriving in the 1920s as a wired relay of the BBC over the Georgetown telephone system, and much of associational life running through bodies organized by ethnicity — the British Guiana East Indian Association, the Negro Progress Convention, the Chinese Association among them.

The second era is the one worth dwelling on. The 1953 election, the first under universal adult suffrage, brought a moment, brief and genuine, when Guianese spoke across the lines that had sorted them. The early People’s Progressive Party was a multiracial mass party, and I read it as one of the institutions through which a common political vocabulary could travel: a place where purpose was shared, coordination was negotiated, and correction was — for a while — possible. Cambridge finds a parallel movement in the music of the period, away from ethnic-centred expression toward something that could plausibly be called national. The word “Guyanese” was being built, and it was being built in conversation.

Then the opening began to close. The constitution was suspended in October 1953. The PPP split in 1955. In the aftermath of the violence of 1962 to 1964, political competition hardened along racial lines, and the reorganization that followed did not merely divide the country’s institutions; it divided its channels. Cambridge documents how, as independence approached, cultural expression fractured back along ethnic lines, and how protest reached for songs from the American labour and civil-rights movements. Those songs belonged to a transnational repertoire of solidarity, and half the world was singing them. Still, I cannot help noticing the timing: at the moment the country most needed a vocabulary of its own for speaking across its divide, it was singing someone else’s.

The great loss was not disagreement. It was translation. Public life came to be organized through two rival blocs, each fluent in its own grievance, each with a press and a party and a set of songs, each increasingly without the means to be understood by the other — and a country of more than two peoples was left with a politics of two.

The great loss was not disagreement. It was translation.

— T.R.B.

How the channel was narrowed

Cambridge’s third era is where his history becomes a history of the state; what follows carries the institutional story past the year 2000, where his book stops. The independent government inherited a divided society and a fragile mandate, and it took the channel. In 1968, two years after independence, it took over the British Guiana Broadcasting Service. Radio Demerara, the remaining private broadcaster, was sold to the government effective 1 January 1979, and the Guyana Broadcasting Corporation was inaugurated that May. On 1 July 1980 GBC adopted its “One Station, two Channels” policy, pairing the two old frequencies under one roof. The press went the same way: the state acquired the country’s leading daily in the 1970s, and the papers that remained outside its hands spent years pleading for newsprint.

Television is the instructive exception. It arrived privately, in 1980, as a subscription relay of American satellite signals; the state’s own station, Guyana Television, did not launch until 1988. On 1 March 2004 GBC and GTV were combined into the state-owned National Communications Network.

It would be convenient to file all of this under one party’s name. The record does not allow it. The state’s monopoly of radio outlived the change of government in 1992 by some two decades. In 2009 the Court of Appeal found that the government was maintaining an unlawful monopoly of the airwaves; private licences came only after that, and the manner of their award was itself contested. Whoever holds the channel tends to keep it. That is not a finding about the PNC or the PPP. It is a finding about channels.

Cambridge knows this history from the inside. He joined GBC in the early 1980s and served as Programme Director (Culture) during the radio monopoly. What he did with that position is instructive: he designed and managed the inaugural Guyana Folk Festival, a cultural channel built within the official one and answerable to a different logic. He then spent twenty-four years at Ohio University teaching communication for social change and directing its Communication and Development Studies programme, and for a decade he served as president of the Guyana Cultural Association of New York. Official channel; cultural channel alongside it; diaspora channel outside it. The pattern of his life is the pattern of the country’s communicative history, and the fact that one of Guyana’s most sustained scholars of communication has done so much of that work from abroad is itself suggestive.

The common channel is thinning

There was one great reopening. In November 1986 David de Caires founded Stabroek News, and for nearly forty years it was the nearest thing Guyana had to a common newspaper. Its letters columns were the one place where a Guyanese was routinely obliged to read a Guyanese from the other side of the line — often furious, frequently wrong, but there, in the same pages, under a name.

On 15 March 2026 the Stabroek News and Sunday Stabroek titles published their final editions. The closure had been announced on 13 February, in a statement by Isabelle and Brendan de Caires which left it to others to measure the paper’s contribution to “the nation’s ability to talk and listen to itself.” A month later their farewell reached for Arthur Miller’s description of a good newspaper as a nation talking to itself. Miller’s newspaper talks. Theirs, by their own account, had also to listen. The website remains online while a permanent home is sought for the archive. The institution understood its function in much the way this essay does.

That function deserves a name. Cambridge organizes his social history around three concepts: encounter, interaction and exchange. A common newspaper is an encounter channel, and encounter is what makes correction possible. It is where the produced-water figures are printed, where the procurement award is questioned, where the minister’s statement is set beside the document it contradicts — and where all of that lands in front of readers who did not already agree. A correction that reaches only the already persuaded is not correction. It is complaint.

A correction that reaches only the already persuaded is not correction. It is complaint.

— T.R.B.

Stabroek’s end should not be reduced to a censorship story. Management attributed the closure principally to falling circulation and dwindling revenues in the face of global digital platforms, and the chairman said the company chose voluntary liquidation while it was still solvent and able to pay its debts. But neither was the relationship between press and state irrelevant. The paper reported that the state’s Department of Public Information owed it G$87,056,431 for advertisements as of 28 February, and its final editorial recalled the seventeen-month state-advertising boycott that began in 2006. The record does not show that the arrears caused the closure; the closure was announced before the state’s last advertising was withdrawn. It shows something quieter. A common channel can disappear without anyone formally closing it.

And Guyana is not without news. Kaieteur News remains vigorous, publishing investigations, editorials and oil-sector coverage every day, and Village Voice News carries its own reporting and commentary. News Room and other digital outlets publish continuously. Citizens have more means of transmitting information than at any earlier point in the country’s history. The paradox is that abundance of transmission does not produce a common conversation.

What has replaced the newspaper is not silence but circulation: screenshots, clips, voice notes, forwarded stories, Facebook lives, WhatsApp groups. Information moves faster than it ever did. But much of it moves through networks assembled by kinship, politics, geography and affinity, and it rarely obliges anyone to encounter an account they did not already hold. The technology has solved transmission. It has not solved encounter. Cambridge’s discrete communities have not disappeared. They have acquired smartphones.

The technology has solved transmission. It has not solved encounter.

— T.R.B.

The danger is not a silenced polity. It is one in which purpose becomes announcement, coordination becomes instruction, and correction becomes noise — present everywhere, and reaching power only intermittently. That is not a description of authoritarianism. It is a description of an organization losing its common channel, and it applies with equal force to a government that means well.

Why now

Gold, bauxite and timber gave Guyana rehearsals for resource wealth. Oil raises the cost of forgetting what those rehearsals taught. But lessons cannot be applied by a society that cannot discuss them. The Natural Resource Fund, the local-content regime, a deep-water port in Berbice, the Eagle Mountain mineral agreement signed earlier this month — each bears on the next fifty years, and each is being settled in a country whose means of deliberating across its divisions are weaker than its means of transmitting within them.

The part of the resource curse that concerns us here is not geological. It is communicative and institutional. It is the failure of correction: a society’s inability to notice, say and act upon the fact that the money is not becoming the institutions it was supposed to become. Wealth does not cause that failure. It raises its price: every error now compounds at the scale of the revenue behind it. Correction requires encounter. Encounter requires a common channel. And Guyana’s common channels are thinning in the very years in which its mistakes are becoming most expensive.

Communication is not a soft precondition for avoiding that failure. It is the mechanism by which it is or is not avoided.

And it cannot be bought back. A ministry can be reorganized, a fund created, a law passed in a single sitting. The habit of speaking across difference — and the expectation that someone on the other side is obliged to listen — takes generations to build, and no appropriation can restore it once it has been casually spent.

The two of them

Return to Carter, and put Cambridge beside him.

Carter wrote the line in the early 1950s, in the years when the opening came and went. He lived through the split, the violence and the long monopoly; he lived to see the election of 1992; he died in December 1997, before oil and before the smartphone. What is less often remembered is that he, too, held the channel. In 1967 he became Minister of Information in the Burnham government, and within a few years he had resigned. Cambridge ran culture for the state broadcaster and built a folk festival inside it. Both men worked within the official channel. Both left it, and neither stopped speaking.

The practical test I draw from placing them side by side is a simple one, and every Guyanese institution could ask it of itself this week — the ministry, the party, the newsroom, this Journal, the university, the church, the family. What can be said here? To whom? And what happens to the one who says it?

There is a part of Carter’s line we have tended to leave out. The poem does not stop at involvement; its very next breath is about being consumed. Involvement, for Carter, is not an invitation. It is a condition from which no one is excused. all are involved! does not only mean that everyone has standing to speak. It means that no one is exempt from hearing the others.

The national question, then, is not only who gets to speak.

It is who is required to listen.

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