The Small Islanders

THE SUNDAY ESSAY · MIGRATION & THE NEW GUYANA

The Small Islanders

Five presidents, one island, and the family histories our politics forgot

A veteran broadcaster says five of Guyana’s ten presidents trace their lineage to Barbados. The record supports part of that claim and leaves the rest to memory. Readers can help close the gap.

BY TERRENCE RICHARD BLACKMAN, PH.D. · SUNDAY, 15 NOVEMBER 2026

I. A Remembered Claim

Brooklyn, New York — Some facts live in archives. Others live in people, and leave the world when they do.

The veteran Guyanese broadcaster and journalist Enrico Woolford, who has covered the country’s politics for decades, has written that five of Guyana’s ten presidents can trace direct lineage to Barbados. They come from both major parties, and their roots run to one small island. Parts of the claim have surfaced before, from a president here and a columnist there. Very little of it has been documented, generation by generation, in records a student could check.

This weekend Guyana lays Eusi Kwayana to rest, a man who carried much of our history in his own memory. It is a fitting week to take a remembered claim seriously and to ask what it would mean. If presidents associated with both of our major political traditions came, in part, from the same small island, what does that say about the categories we have spent sixty years fighting inside?

II. The Small Islanders

The Barbadian stream is one of the oldest and least discussed currents in the making of Guyana. It began before emancipation. The historian Brian L. Moore told the Barbadian journalist Michelle Springer that Barbadian planters owned some of the estates opened in Essequibo and Demerara under the Dutch. The larger movement came after slavery ended.

Barbados was crowded, and the planter class held its land tight. Planters in British Guiana wanted labour and sent recruiters across. Springer reported that more than 20,000 Barbadians travelled to British Guiana between 1835 and 1863, most at their own expense, and she quoted Moore’s estimate of about 25,000 more under a planter-paid bounty system between 1864 and 1885. These are estimates, and the arrangements behind them varied. The historian Laurence Brown describes government-subsidised passages, recruitment schemes, contracts of different lengths, and people who simply paid their own fare. Moore added that many Barbadians came as families.

Walter Rodney studied this movement in an unpublished 1977 conference paper, Barbadian Immigration into British Guiana, 1863–1924. Springer quotes his judgment that Barbadian labour arrived seasoned in the cultivation of cane, and the scholar Nigel Westmaas has drawn on the same paper. Rodney’s 1981 book, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905, describes Barbadian cane cutters who came for the season and often went home again. Not everyone welcomed them. Springer, drawing on Moore, records an 1864 complaint in The Colonist, attributed to one Ned Hector, that the Bajans had come to fill up the country and leave everyone else to work all week and starve.

Many came for sugar work. Others found different livelihoods, in the villages, in Georgetown, in the goldfields. Springer records Barbadian families who remember relatives going to Guiana as teachers, policemen and civil servants, and the historians she interviewed spoke of artisans, mechanics and domestic workers. The Barbados-born A. A. Thorne founded Georgetown’s Middle School in 1894.

III. What the Record Says

How much of the claim can be checked? The public record offers different kinds of support: a scholarly biography, a president’s own description of his family, a reported search for ancestry, a columnist’s assertion. None of it is yet a family line documented generation by generation, and that limit applies to everything that follows.

Forbes Burnham. Burnham founded the People’s National Congress in 1957 and became independent Guyana’s first prime minister in 1966. His father, James Ethelbert Burnham, was head teacher at Kitty Methodist School for 37 years, by the account of Burnham’s sister Jessie. Linden F. Lewis’s 2024 biography, Forbes Burnham: The Life and Times of the Comrade Leader, traces the family’s Barbadian lineage through Burnham’s paternal grandfather. The columnist Shaun Michael Samaroo has written that the family descended from enslaved people in Barbados and kept the surname of the family that owned them, though his accounts differ on which generation crossed to British Guiana.

David Granger. On a visit to Barbados in July 2015, Granger traced his roots to the island through his grandfather, Prince Albert Granger, as Stabroek News reported, and told Guyanese residents there that he saw no difference between Bajans and Guyanese. That December, speaking in Linden, he said his grandfather was a Bajan. In 2017 Barbados’s then prime minister, Freundel Stuart, referred to Granger’s Barbadian ancestry. This is a president’s own account of his family, given more than once.

Samuel Hinds. Hinds was President of Guyana from March to December 1997, and Prime Minister almost continuously from 1992 to 2015. On a 2007 visit to Barbados he said he planned to use a free day to research his ancestry, and his host described that ancestry as Barbadian. Mr Hinds is the person best placed to say what he found.

Desmond Hoyte. Hoyte was born in Georgetown in 1929 to George Alphonso and Gladys Marietta Hoyte. Ravi Dev has written that Hoyte had Barbadian forbears, without naming an ancestor.

So, of these four, one has a scholarly biography behind his Barbadian line, one has described a Barbadian grandfather in his own words, one was reported to be researching his Barbadian ancestry, and one has a Barbadian line asserted in print. An unverified line is not a disproved one.

An unverified line is not a disproved one.

— T.R.B.

IV. The Fifth

The fifth name is Donald Ramotar, President from 2011 to 2015 after a long career in the PPP. Woolford places Ramotar’s Barbadian ancestry on his mother’s side. His account gives no ancestor, generation or document, and Mr Ramotar and his family are the people best placed to supply them.

What makes the claim interesting is less the island than what the story around it says about our categories. Reuters, reporting his election in 2011, called Ramotar “ethnic Indian.” Days later his wife told Stabroek News that he was not of one ethnicity, describing an Indian father and a mother of African and Amerindian heritage. Both descriptions can be true at once. A president was described one way by the world’s press and another way by his own family.

The party question does not hang on Ramotar either. Burnham, Hoyte and Granger came from the PNC. Hinds, an Afro-Guyanese chemical engineer and a leading representative of the Civic component, became President of Guyana in a PPP/Civic administration. If his Barbadian line is confirmed, the stream reached the presidency through both major political traditions.

A mathematician has to be careful here. An existence proof proves only what it proves. A Barbadian ancestor would not, by itself, show African and Indian ancestry meeting in one family, because Barbados too has people of many origins. And one mixed family would not tell us how common such families are, or how the people in them choose to identify.

The larger point does not depend on any one president. Guyanese families have long included people with both African and Indian ancestry, and the writer Gaiutra Bahadur has documented how uneasily that reality sits inside our politics. How common are such families? The surveys cannot say. In 2014, LAPOP’s Guyana sample found 24.5 percent of respondents identifying as mixed, and the 2012 census put mixed heritage at 19.9 percent. Both figures count every combination of Guyana’s peoples, so neither measures African and Indian families in particular. Nor do the two show a change between 2012 and 2014, because they asked different questions of different populations. In an interview reported in 2015, the political scientist Mitchell Seligson, founder of LAPOP, suggested that ethnic identification can depend on the context of the interview, while cautioning that Guyana’s history might make identities comparatively rigid. Ancestry and identity are different things. Our politics has often treated them as one.

Ancestry and identity are different things. Our politics has often treated them as one.

— T.R.B.

V. What It Does Not Mean

There are two easy ways to misread all this, and both should be refused.

The first is to treat it as trivia: famous men, one island, a tally for the dinner table. Ancestry alone cannot explain political leadership. A grandfather from Barbados did not make anyone a president.

The second is darker: to read the pattern as one stream capturing the state. That is the old colonial habit of sorting people into blocs and assigning them motives. It turned the Barbadian migrant of 1864 into a threat in print, and it should not be revived against anyone’s descendants.

What can be said, carefully, is that access shaped opportunity. Colonial secondary schooling was largely the preserve of upper- and middle-class families, with few scholarships. Burnham’s route ran through Queen’s College and legal training in London. Others took different roads: Hinds studied engineering at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, and Cheddi Jagan trained in dentistry in the United States. Access to schooling and professional training helped decide who could become a leader. How particular family migration histories fed into that access is a question we cannot yet answer. It is worth asking because it directs attention to institutions, where the old habit directs it to blood.

VI. Yesterday’s Newcomers

Some Barbadians who arrived in the nineteenth century met hostility in print and in the labour market. Their descendants are now simply Guyanese. That history is worth holding in mind as Guyana once again receives newcomers.

Oil-fuelled growth has created opportunities for some of them, but people come for different reasons: some for work, some for refuge, some passing through on the way to other countries. Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, Jamaicans and West Africans each have their own story. Neglect of and discrimination against some Venezuelan migrants have been reported. The 1864 complaint in The Colonist shows how such resentment reads a century and a half later.

The current has never run one way. In 2020, receiving the Order of Roraima in Georgetown, Barbados’s Prime Minister Mia Mottley noted that her father’s grandfather was born in Guyana, and that the blood of our two peoples is mingled in families. Guyanese have long gone to Barbados and contributed there, and the region is still working out, through CARICOM, how freely its people may move.

Indigenous peoples lived here before colonisation. Later arrivals came under very different conditions, including enslavement and indenture. Their descendants, often with intersecting ancestries, are Guyanese. New arrivals have sometimes faced hostility. A richer Guyana can choose to remember that.

VII. The Archive and the Memory

This essay draws on documents, public statements and remembered histories. That mix is a common condition of Caribbean history, and no cause for apology.

The colonial record often measured labour and cost more readily than it preserved a family’s full story. Some records name individuals and places of origin, but they are uneven, and they rarely tell us why a family left or how it remembered its past. Oral history can fill those gaps, provided we keep clear the difference between what is remembered, what is asserted and what is confirmed. This weekend we bury one of the great carriers of our memory. We should take the hint.

So here is the challenge, and it is addressed to readers rather than to presidents.

First, help us finish this story. If you know the Barbadian line of any of the five, whether Burnham, Hoyte, Hinds, Granger or Ramotar, write to the Journal. Tell us the ancestor’s name, the generation, the parish or estate if you know it, and how you know: a family Bible, a baptismal record, a grandmother’s account. We will check what comes in against the records, publish what holds up, and say plainly what remains a family memory. Nothing personal will be printed without permission.

Second, do the same for your own people. Ask the oldest person in your family which island, which estate, which ship, which year, and write down how they know. Keep the documents, if there are any. If you want to share them, the Journal will take them too.

Political categories have often been shaped by power and hardened in use. Families have crossed them in many ways.

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