The monstrous rape-murder of a woman and the satanic mutilation of her husband was the single most despicable and inexplicable crime of the People’s Progressive Party’s ‘Hurricane of Protest’ and the Guiana Agricultural Workers Union’s 165-day strike in the sugar industry in British Guiana in 1964. Terrorism against unoffending and unprotected non-supporters of the PPP was the trademark of the rampage of arson, assaults, bombings, disappearances, massacres, murders, rapes and sabotage.
Former President David Granger, speaking on the programme – The Public Interest – recounted that George and Clothide Sealey left their Friendship Middle-walk home to reap produce from their family farm located eight km south of the village at 08:30 hours on Thursday 21st May 1964. Later, after a lunch of metem-gee, they loaded ground provisions and plantains in their balahoo to be sold in the Friday market but did not return home. Their murdered and mutilated bodies were found in a gutter on their farm on 22nd May. Both had been shot dead; the wife seemed to have been raped and the husband was mutilated.
Mr. Granger recalled that the Sealeys’ bloody corpses were brought from the backdam to the frontlands in their balahoo and viewed by a shocked, sombre but sullen crowd. Available evidence indicated that the murderers had entered the backdam from Non Pareil village. Residents, thereafter, were terrified by the nightly gunfire from Enterprise Village and became afraid to go to their farms even in daytime except in groups.
The British Governor proclaimed a state of emergency the morning after the Sealeys’ murder on 22nd May and requested additional British Army reinforcements. The British Guiana Police Force, a month earlier on 27th April, had unearthed a large cache of sub-machine guns, rifles, shotguns, pistols, magazines, ammunition, gelignite and other components for manufacturing incendiary devices in a cane-field in Triumph Village – a PPP political stronghold only four kilometres from Buxton-Friendship.
In this regard, Mr. Granger recalled that Buxton-Friendship was the country’s largest African-Guyanese community but was wedged between large Indian-Guyanese villages on the east and west. Buxton-Friendship was a sanctuary of security and serenity in the strife of the ‘Hurricane of Protest’ up to the murder of the Sealeys. Terror was central to the PPP’s ‘Protest’ and the GAWU’s ‘strike’. Both aimed at making British Guiana ‘ungovernable’ in order to prevent the British Government from introducing the Proportional Representation electoral system; to prevent the holding of elections before Independence and to prevent the truncating of the PPP’s tenure of office.
Granger reminded that the murders and massacres – in East and West Demerara, East and West Berbice, Upper Demerara and Georgetown – during the PPP’s ‘Protest’ were not random incidents of racial conflict. Rather, they comprised a coordinated, centrally-directed campaign of political terror that was executed by acting violently, attacking innocent victims and attracting public attention to achieve political objectives.
The former President expressed the opinion that, as Guyana commemorates the 60th anniversary of the PPP’s 1964 campaign of terror this year, the murder of the Sealeys, more than any other single crime, stands out as having had the unanticipated and unintended consequences of dividing society deeply. Terror taught people to be aggressive by observing others acting aggressively to achieve some goal or of being rewarded as a result of committing violent acts. The ‘Hurricane of Protest’ undermined social cohesion and retarded the country and the community over the last sixty years. 󠄀