The Small Islanders
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.
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.
THE SUNDAY ESSAY · MIGRATION & THE NEW GUYANA Many Waters, One River? The streams of Black migration to Guyana, and what they mean for Afro-Guyanese unity now Four streams…
Since 2006 the AmericasBarometer has asked Guyanese whether they trust the courts and the police, whether they are better off than a year ago, and whether democracy is worth the trouble. This first instalment of a GBJ polling initiative reads that twenty-year record, sets out what it cannot tell us, and proposes a Guyanese public opinion series built on its foundations.
Food prices in Georgetown rose 6.7 per cent in the first half of 2026, and the government is already reaching for the old instrument — chicken and eggs at advertised prices, farmers’ markets, talk of buffer stocks — without naming it. This essay traces the Guyana Marketing Corporation from its wartime birth to the day in 1985 it stopped trading, and proposes the narrow, limited, publicly accountable mandate that would make reviving it worthwhile.
The Sunday Essay · In Memory of Eusi Kwayana, 1925–2026 From Cubana to Barima: Memory and the Duty to Account Two mass deaths of Guyanese in transit, half a century…
The Mighty Sparrow died in New York on 27 September at ninety-one. In 1956 he won his first Calypso King title in Port of Spain, the same year my great uncle Winston “Uncle Charlie” Lewis carried the Invaders to victory at Georgetown’s Astor Cinema. An appreciation of the Caribbean’s auditor in verse, and a question for Guyana: who is singing the audit now?
Nearly seventy-five years after Martin Carter first refused to still his voice, the closing line of “Looking at Your Hands” has become a national slogan. This Sunday Essay asks what it would mean to treat it instead as a standard, and to hold the M/V Barima inquiry, the closure of Stabroek News, and the institutions of the oil era answerable to the poem.
A boy in Form 1A looked out of a classroom window on the Thomas Road side and saw the light coming off the Atlantic. That west wing is gone, and the building that replaced it satisfies eight directives and answers no question. A Sunday essay on the enduring importance of the aesthetic, and on what a school teaches when nobody is teaching.