Guyana (Discovering South America: History, Politics, and Culture Series)

Located along the northeast coast of South America, Guyana is the only English-speaking nation on the continent. Most of the Country's 800,000 people, the majority of whom are of East Indian, African, or mixed descent, live along the swampy coastal plain in the north. This tropical land of sugar plantations, settled by the Dutch in the early 1600s, received its name from the Indian word Guiana, meaning "land of Water." Later a colony of the United Kingdom, it gained independence in 1966.