Guyana

• 1. Introduction

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  Guyana sits on the northern coast of South America, the only country on the mainland that holds English as its official language. Its name comes from an Indigenous Amerindian language and means "land of many waters." For most of its modern history it was a poor place, where 41% of the population lived below the poverty line in 2017. Then, in 2015, a discovery offshore changed the arithmetic of the entire nation. By 2020 its economy grew by 49%, by some accounts the fastest-growing economy in the world. How did a country once run as a plantation colony become a name spoken in the rooms where global energy is traded? Why does a neighbour just to the west insist that two-thirds of Guyana belongs to it? And what survives, in the rainforest and in the people, of the many waters this land was named for?

• 2. Land Of Many Waters

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  Mount Roraima rises to 2772 metres at the point where Brazil, Guyana, and Venezuela meet, the highest mountain in the country and part of the Pakaraima range. Its flat summit and the table-top mountains called tepuis are said to have inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel The Lost World. The land beneath them is split into five natural regions, from a narrow marshy plain along the Atlantic where most people live, inland to a white sand belt holding the mineral deposits, then dense rain forests and drier savannah toward the Brazilian border.

  The Essequibo runs 1010 km, the longest of four great rivers, followed by the Courentyne at 724 km, the Berbice at 595 km, and the Demerara at 346 km. The Courentyne forms the border with Suriname. At the mouth of the Essequibo lie several large islands and the 145 km wide Shell Beach, a breeding ground for sea turtles, mainly leatherbacks. Kaieteur Falls, one of the world's most powerful waterfalls, drops within the same wild interior.

  The climate is tropical, hot and humid, eased along the coast by northeast trade winds. Two rainy seasons arrive each year, the first from May to mid-August and the second from mid-November to mid-January. The country lies between latitudes 1° and 9°N, among the most sparsely populated places on Earth. That emptiness left its forests almost untouched, and it is in those forests that the next story lives.

• 3. A Living Ark

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  More than 225 species of mammals share Guyana with 900 species of birds, 880 species of reptiles, and over 6,500 species of plants. The arapaima swims its rivers as the world's largest scaled freshwater fish. The giant otter, the world's largest and rarest river otter, hunts the same waters, while the giant anteater roams the land as the largest of its kind. Forests cover more than 80% of the country, holding over 1,000 species of trees, with 4,000 plant species found nowhere else.

  The Smithsonian Institution has identified nearly 2,700 species of plants from southern Guyana, representing 239 families, and expects more to be recorded. Over 70% of the natural habitat of the Guiana Shield remains pristine, unlike most of South America. In 2008 the BBC broadcast a three-part programme called Lost Land of the Jaguar, showing undiscovered species alongside rarities such as the giant otter and the harpy eagle. Earlier, naturalists Sir David Attenborough and Gerald Durrell had described this same rich natural history.

  In February 2004 the government granted title to more than a million acres in the Konashen Indigenous District, creating the Kanashen Community-Owned Conservation Area managed by the Wai Wai, the world's largest community-owned conservation area. Since 2009 Guyana and Norway have worked together to slow deforestation and promote green development. Yet the rate of net forest loss more than doubled, from 3,790 hectares a year in 1990 to 2000 up to 8,420 hectares a year in 2015 to 2025.

• 4. Plantations And Indenture

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  Christopher Columbus first sighted Guyana during his third voyage in 1498, and Sir Walter Raleigh wrote an account in 1596, but the Dutch built the first colonies: Pomeroon in 1581, Essequibo in 1616, Berbice in 1627, and Demerara in 1752. After France invaded the Dutch Republic in 1795, Britain took control in 1796, and the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 ceded the territory to Britain. In 1831 the colonies merged into a single colony called British Guiana.

  The Dutch found the climate suited to sugar cane and turned long stretches of the coast into plantations worked by people brought through the Atlantic slave trade. A small European planter elite ran the economy. Upon emancipation in 1838, almost all of the former enslaved people left the plantations, and Indians were brought under indenture contracts from 1838 until the system ended in 1917. This shaped a population of Indian, African, Amerindian, Chinese, Portuguese, and other European descent.

  Balatá, a natural latex, was once big business, bled from trees in the foothills of the Kanuku Mountains in the Rupununi savannah. It was made into cricket balls, temporary dental fillings, and figurines crafted especially by the Macushi people. After independence, Forbes Burnham nationalised large industries, taking foreign-owned bauxite mining and the sugar operations of GuySuCo into government hands. The policy was meant to undo colonial inequities, but instability drove skilled workers away and the country's debt grew.

• 5. Race And The Ballot

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  Guyana achieved independence from the United Kingdom as a dominion on the 26th of May 1966 and became a republic on the 23rd of February 1970. Forbes Burnham of the People's National Congress soon rose to power and became a repressive authoritarian leader. Politics split along race, with Afro-Guyanese backing Burnham and Indo-Guyanese backing Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party, a contest known as aapan jaat, loosely meaning "for your own kind."

  Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited to press for free elections. On the 5th of October 1992, a new National Assembly was elected in the first Guyanese poll since 1964 to be recognised internationally as free and fair, though it was marred by violence. Cheddi Jagan was sworn in as president on the 9th of October 1992, ending the monopoly Afro-Guyanese had long held over politics.

  In 1978 a total of 918 people died at the Jonestown mass murder-suicide led by American cult leader Jim Jones, at a remote settlement in northwest Guyana. The country was elected three times to the UN Security Council, in 1975 to 1976-1982 to 1983, and 2024 to 2025. In March 2020, President David A. Granger narrowly lost a snap election and refused to accept the result. Five months later, amid allegations of fraud, Irfaan Ali of the People's Progressive Party/Civic was sworn in, and in September 2025 Ali was re-elected for a second term.

• 6. The Line On The Map

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  Venezuela has claimed the land west of the Essequibo River since its own independence in 1824, asserting it as heir to Spanish claims dating to the 16th century. Simón Bolívar warned the British government against settlers in Berbice and Demerara. When Britain surveyed British Guiana in 1840, it drew the entire Cuyuni River basin inside the colony. In 1899 a tribunal issued the Paris Arbitral Award, granting most of the disputed territory to British Guiana, and a joint commission later marked the border.

  In 1962 Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt declared the 1899 award null and void, leading to the Treaty of Geneva of 1966. Five months after Guyana's independence, in October 1966, Venezuelan troops crossed the border and seized Ankoko Island, which has stayed under occupation, where they built military installations and an airstrip. Venezuela calls the area "Zona en Reclamación" and draws it on its maps in dashed lines.

  Guyana took the case to the International Court of Justice in 2018, asking judges to confirm the 1899 decision as valid and binding. On Sunday the 3rd of December 2023, President Nicolás Maduro held a referendum asking voters whether to create a Venezuelan state in Essequibo. The vote passed with a 95% majority on a low turnout, with analysts saying the results were falsified. Brazil sent troops to its border with the region, and US Southern Command held air exercises with Guyana Defence Forces in December 2023.

• 7. Oil Changes Everything

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  In 2015 ExxonMobil discovered major oil reserves off Guyana's Atlantic coast, and commercial drilling began in 2019. Since 2017, over 11 billion barrels of reserves have been found offshore, the largest addition to global oil reserves since the 1970s. Crude petroleum made up 85.9% of exports in 2022, worth 15.9 billion US dollars, dwarfing gold at 7.36% and rice at 2.32%. The country is poised to become one of the world's largest per capita oil producers by 2025.

  The scale of the shift shows in the numbers. Guyana now ranks fourth in GDP per capita in the Americas, after the United States, Canada, and the Bahamas. GDP was estimated at 25.822 billion US dollars in 2025, or 32,326 dollars per person. Yet according to the World Bank in 2023, abject poverty still exists, and the country faces real risks in managing this growth structurally.

  Before oil, the main activities were agriculture, with rice and Demerara sugar, alongside bauxite and gold mining, timber, and seafood. Gold production reached 14 tonnes in 2015. Debt relief had been arriving for years, with about 611 million US dollars written off in 2006 and 2007 by the IMF, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Now the export ledger is led by Panama, the Netherlands, and the United States as the largest buyers.

• 8. Many Peoples One Coast

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  About 90% of Guyana's roughly 744,000 people live along a narrow coastal strip, 10 to 40 miles wide, that covers only about 10% of the land. The largest group is the Indo-Guyanese, descendants of indentured labourers from India, at 43.5% of the population in the 2002 census. The Afro-Guyanese, descended from enslaved people brought from West Africa, make up 30.2%, those of mixed heritage 16.7%, and the Amerindians 10.5%. The Amerindians are the majority in the southern interior.

  Nine Indigenous nations, defined by language, live in Guyana: the Akawaio, Lokono, Arekuna, Carib, Makushi, Patamona, Wai Wai, Wapichan, and Warao. Most Indo-Guyanese trace their roots to North India, especially the Bhojpur and Awadh regions, while a significant minority descend from migrants from Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. The Afro-Guyanese descend from peoples such as the Ashanti of Ghana, the Yoruba and Igbo of Nigeria, and the Mandingo of Senegal.

  In 2012 the population was 64% Christian, 25% Hindu, 7% Muslim, 3% irreligious, and 1% of other faiths. The calendar carries this blend, marking Mashramani, Phagwah, and Deepavali alongside Christmas and Eid. Cuisine reflects it too, in pepperpot, a slow-cooked meat stew flavoured with cassareep, and cook-up rice simmered with coconut milk. Cricket binds the coast as well, with Guyana playing as part of the West Indies team and the Guyana Amazon Warriors representing the country in the Caribbean Premier League at Providence Stadium, the 15,000-seat ground built in time for the 2007 Cricket World Cup.