Three conversations today: The tragic tale of a nation

Aug 04, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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The first conversation takes place early this evening. If you look at the cricket on television today, you will see happy faces of East Indians cheering emotionally for a Guyanese cricketer of African descent, Christopher Barnwell, as he fields or bats. They will be rooting for Barnwell because he is a Guyanese representing their country.
If you look at the faces in the crowd as the East Indian captain Ramnaresh Sarwan drives to the boundary, African Guyanese will exuberate over the man who leads the nation’s cricket team. For them his race does not matter. He is the captain they want to see win. This first conversation begins and ends there. After they pass the exit of the Providence Stadium and they gather at the bars and restaurants, East Indians and Africans will denounce or embrace political parties and their policies on the basis of race.
This is an immense tragedy that has dogged this nation since the PPP spilt in the fifties and Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham headed two, competing organizations. This has been the shape of the political anatomy of Guyana right up to the end of the cricket match this evening. The obvious question is that if the ethnic competition, ethnic lenses and quest for ethnic domination began with Burnham and Jagan, what then has sustained these depravities over a 50-year period?
The answer is not confined to the analyst only. Any schoolboy can answer it. The politicians from mostly, but not necessarily, the PPP and PNC, have since the fifties created and continue to engineer mass racial hysteria, and it has been relentless. This is not an essay on Guyanese history and space will prevent such a direction, but two crucial features should be highlighted very briefly.
The first one is that amazingly in the seventies, African Guyanese support for an African-dominated government began to wane under the phenomenal pressure of young radical post-Independence African activists, of which the most fantastic among them was an internationally-known historian, Walter Rodney. When the international commission to investigate his death begins, this nation will be dumbfounded with some of the emerging facts.
Both the PNC and WPA will find themselves in the heat of burning embarrassment. Revelations should emerge to show the extent to which the WPA had penetrated the essential fulcrums of Mr. Burnham’s rule and that this permeation was not for defensive purposes, as many admirers of the WPA think. Conversely, PNC supporters will be shocked to know how weak, politically, their talisman Forbes Burnham had become, and the close shave his government had in being removed by Rodney.
The second feature is that ethnic nastiness on the part of the Guyanese people has been devastating to small multi-ethnic parties, whose evolution did not come from a racial cocoon that was its raison d’etre, as is the case with the big parties, PPP and PNC. In 1992, the WPA almost died at the news of the election results. The AFC still remains small because of ethnic voting.
The second conversation began since Friday. This is perhaps Guyana’s most sickening tragedy. In Port Mourant, around the same time the cricket starts, the PPP will select (or if you want to say “vote” for) its leadership. But as night follows day, that leadership will behave the way the PPP has carried on since it was born. The worst forms of violations will be described as the most heavenly policies, to a school of delegates too dressed up in opportunism and too psychologically inept to see the truth.
This will be a conversation in a cemetery. Perhaps the poet will be the best person to describe Port Mourant this afternoon. Corrupt politicians, whose sudden wealth cannot be explained, will be garlanded and hoisted on a pedestal. Politicians in the pockets of extraordinarily wealthy nouveau riche cabals will be presented on stage as working class heroes. This afternoon in Port Mourant, the world will see one of politics’ most bizarre conversations.
The third conversation would have been underway by the time your eyes glance at this column. African rights organizations will be holding an all-day, open session at the ACDA head office building, for every African Guyanese to discuss the plight of the African people in today’s Guyana. Unlike the Berbice conversation, this Georgetown interfacing will be spontaneous and without garlands and politicians. You just walk in and tell your story of how you feel about the future of your race in your country, what you think has happened to bring your race to this state of affairs, and the way out of the drowning pool.

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