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Before the
arrival of Europeans, the region was inhabited
by both Carib and Arawak tribes, who named it
Guiana, which means land of many waters. The Dutch
settled in Guyana in the late 16th century, but
their control ended when the British became the
de facto rulers in 1796. In 1815, the colonies
of Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice were officially
ceded to Great Britain at the Congress of Vienna
and, in 1831, were consolidated as British Guiana.
Following the abolition of slavery in 1834, thousands
of indentured laborers were brought to Guyana
to replace the slaves on the sugarcane plantations,
primarily from India but also from Portugal and
China. The British stopped the practice in 1917.
Many of the Afro-Guyanese former slaves moved
to the towns and became the majority urban population,
whereas the Indo-Guyanese remained predominantly
rural. A scheme in 1862 to bring black workers
from the United States was unsuccessful. The small
Amerindian population lives in the country's interior.
The people
drawn from these diverse origins have coexisted
peacefully for the most part. Slave revolts, such
as the one in 1763 led by Guyana's national hero,
Cuffy, demonstrated the desire for basic rights
but also a willingness to compromise. Politically
inspired racial disturbances between Indo-Guyanese
and Afro-Guyanese erupted in 1962-64, and again
following elections in 1997 and 2001. The basically
conservative and cooperative nature of Guyanese
society has usually contributed to a cooling of
racial tensions. Racial tensions, however, do
constitute Guyana's greatest ongoing social stress
point.
Guyanese
politics, nevertheless, occasionally has been
turbulent. The first modern political party in
Guyana was the People's Progressive Party (PPP),
established on January 1, 1950, with Forbes Burnham,
a British-educated Afro-Guyanese, as chairman;
Dr. Cheddi Jagan, a U.S.-educated Indo-Guyanese,
as second vice chairman; and his American-born
wife, Janet Jagan, as secretary general. The PPP
won 18 out of 24 seats in the first popular elections
permitted by the colonial government in 1953,
and Dr. Jagan became leader of the house and minister
of agriculture in the colonial government. Five
months later, on October 9, 1953, the British
suspended the constitution and landed troops because,
they said, the Jagans and the PPP were planning
to make Guyana a communist state. These events
led to a split in the PPP, in which Burnham broke
away and founded what eventually became the People's
National Congress (PNC).
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