Vincent Roth, A Life in Guyana, Volume 1: A Young Man's Journey, 1889-1923 [Paperback]

I was about nine when my father took me to the zoo of the Botanical Gardens in Georgetown, capital of the then British Guiana. Near the entrance and the bullocks' paddock stood a slim, grey-haired man who my father told me was "my old friend Vincent Roth", the founder of the Zoo. My father told me that he had worked with Roth when, a quarter of a century previously in the late 1920s, they had been surveyors in the Bush, also known as "the interior". Born in Australia in 1889 and arriving in B.G. at the age of 18, Roth was the only son of W.E. Roth, Protector of Aboriginals in north-eastern Australia. Vincent Roth had a succession of jobs: newspaper reporter, land surveyor, mining expert, geologist, district administrator, manager of a coffee and rubber estate.
Described by Arthur and Elma Seymour in their Dictionary of Guyanese Biography as "one of the great facilitators of culture", Roth eventually wrote and had published several books on British Guiana, and around 1964, when he and his wife left Georgetown to live in Barbados, he began to write his memoirs, based on journals kept up to 1935. Unfortunately, he was only able to elaborate from these his life in Queensland, Australia, before he became too frail to carry on. It was left to his son-in-law, Michael Bennett, to edit the journals and bring the memoirs up to the time of Roth's resignation from Government service in 1936. The result, despite a number of typos, is highly readable and full of information about the Guyana and especially, the interior, of those days. Standard fare in the Bush was salt pork (hence the word `porknocker') but there was - apart from the abundant fauna - a plethora of fish, as well as such delicacies as the maam bird and labba pepperpot. Bush lore there is aplenty, such as how to split a 15-ton boulder (keep a fire going under it for a few days then tackle it with a sledgehammer) and many beautiful images, as that of a swarm of pale yellow butterflies of well-nigh a quarter of a mile wide fluttering westwards that Roth says must have been between 40 and fifty miles in length. There is little scandal or sensationalism, for Roth was after all a Victorian and in fact writes that he generally tried to steer a course that would gives as little offence as possible to old friends and acquaintances. However, the astute reader will gain much of the information that has been left out. No account of life in Guyana would be complete without the abundant humour and Obeah (a form of magic known colloquially as `jumbi') stories to be found there, and there is some of both in these books. An Obeah man, in front of the local parson, challenges a villager to pick up the little stick that he has thrown to the ground if he doesn't believe in Obeah. The villager is adamant that he does not beieve in Obeah, but says that he will not pick up the stick. Roth, who comes across as a man with few illusions, himself has a story to tell that will raise the hair on the back of your neck.

› Go to Amazon.com to see the review  4.0 out of 5 stars