FROM TRADING ALLIES TO COLONIAL SUBJECTS

'These laws were made by Colonial people in a language not fully understood by the Amerindians. As Amerindians learnt the English language, they realised that certain laws were not suited to Amerindian needs. Some of these laws make our living in our homelands very uncomfortable.'

Captain Lawrence Anselmo, Arekuna from Paruima

Approached from the sea, the coast of Guyana is not obviously welcoming. Muddy beaches extend along the forested coast where powerful silty rivers debouch through slack tidal mudflats. Westward the coast is heavily covered by mangrove swamps, behind which flooded wet savannahs and coastal forests are cut through by a maze of narrow channels as sluggish waters from the interior meander seawards. Protected only by the mangroves and beaches, the extensive inland forests and swamps are for much of the time below sea-level and for long were considered uncultivable wastelands. Inland from the swampy coastal forests, the interior is more open. Patches of savannah on famously infertile white sands alternate with forests whose tannin-rich leaves stain the clear river waters a brackish brown. Further inland again the ground rises slightly and here extensive rainforests cover the entire width of the country, stretching away in an almost continuous carpet to the Brazilian frontier 650 kilometres due south.

Yet it is only after travelling some 150 kilometres inland that the relief changes. Travellers voyaging up the lower rivers sooner or later run up against spectacular falls, where the rain-charged rivers spill over the outer edges of the Guiana Highlands. These are the outermost defences of the country's mountainous interior, a vast eroded tableland established on ancient rocks dating back to the continent's creation. Known by geologists as the Guiana Shield, the Pre-Cambrian crystalline rocks that underlie the hinterland are still capped in places by Cretaceous sandstones, the eroded remnants of which stand as spectacular mesas – huge cliff-edged massifs that rise into the clouds. Greatest of these, tucked into the corner of the country, is Mount Roraima, which at 2,700 metres is one of the continent's highest mountains east of the Andes and whose inaccessible heights gave rise to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's vision of the 'Lost World'.

Here, on the Brazilian and Venezuelan border, are large swathes of grassland which extend from the Gran Sabana in Venezuela, around the Pakaraima mountains, east into the Rupununi savannahs and south down to the Rio Branco in Brazil. Under a wide sky and across rolling hills and plains, the landscape offers sweeping vistas interrupted near and far by forested watercourses that wend their way down to the Amazon and the high sandstone mesas that tower over all.

When the Spanish sailor Vincente Yáñez Pinzón, blown off course on his way around Africa, first sighted the Guyana coast in 1500, almost nothing was known in Europe of this New World. But for all its wild and untamed aspect, the area was far from uninhabited. Indeed, recent estimates suggest that there were as many as 160,000 Amerindians living along the Guyana coast in the countries now known as French Guiana, Suriname and Guyana.

The Amerindian peoples were not only numerous, they were also diverse. The widely differing environments had stimulated the emergence of societies finely adapted to make the most of local resources. In the mangrove and swamp forests along the coast, the Warao nation had developed an economic and social order based on fishing and seafood, palm starch and tuber cultivation. Master boat-builders – their name means 'Boat People' – the Warao used to make adzes without metal and still today have an elaborate ritual and material culture. Much of their life is spent afloat in their dugouts, moving between their fisheries and the stands of palms which provide their daily bread. Little involved in agriculture, the Warao have traditionally relied principally on foraging and fishing and exploit their forests for fruits, palm cabbage, wild pineapples, honey and herbs as well as larvae, snails, crabs and the eggs of turtles and iguana.

Where the Warao have learnt to live from the flooded swamp forests, their neighbours, the Arawaks, favour the higher ground along the rivers flowing to the sea. Fragmentary archaeological finds suggest that the Arawaks have long practised agriculture based on cassava or manioc, a starchy and acidic tuber that grows well on the region's poor and sandy soils. Over the millenia the Amerindians have selected increasingly productive, yet toxic, varieties that require careful processing to eliminate their cyanide-bearing glucosides. But cassava is but one of a huge range of Amazonian crops that they cultivate, while their diet is balanced with the fish that come from the rivers. It seems likely that it was the ancestors of today's Arawak people who established elaborate raised fields in the interior lowlands, remains of an intensive form of agriculture that is no longer recalled today.

Further inland, are the territories of the Akawaio and Patamona nations, who live especially on the middle and upper reaches of the Mazaruni, Potaro and Ireng rivers, in the Pakaraima mountains and whose name for themselves, kapon, may mean appropriately 'sky people'. The Akawaio were renowned as traders, notably of cassava graters, laboriously made by inland tribes by hammering narrow chips of jasper into a wooden board. They also specialize in making 'wood-skins', delicate river craft made by cutting off the strong, curved bark of the 'purpleheart' tree. Heavier than water and thus perilous to the inexperienced if they ship water, the little boats are ideal for navigating the narrow creeks of their mountain territory. Akawaio also live down stream, at one time populating the upper reaches of the Berbice, Demerara and Cuyuni as well as the Middle Essequibo.

South, in the Rupununi savannahs, live the Carib-speaking Makushi, an eastern arm of the Pemon nation, whose other branch in Guyana, the Arekuna, live along the western border. Widely dispersed in small homesteads across an area sparse in resources, the Pemon peoples are renowned for their strongly egalitarian traditions. Still further south live the Wapishana, another Arawak people highly skilled in agriculture, fishing and hunting, and producing an abundance of cotton hammocks, while in the extreme south where only the forest-dwelling Wai Wai remain today, a number of groups once lived from trade in forest products and hunting.

All these societies were, and still are, woven together by an intimate network of trading alliances, in which foodstuffs, tools, poisons, drugs, resins, dyes and magical objects and a whole host of other forest products were exchanged. Communications were maintained along the maze of waterways and...