Ravi Dev column – Cultural marginalisation

Jun 22, 2008 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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The graphic evidence of the involvement of large numbers of teenagers in the criminal gangs that were based in Buxton (by their deaths and capture) have brought to the fore the need for an explanation.

By and large, most Guyanese will probably echo the blunt sentiment of the mother of one of the dead youths: “Live by the sword; die by the sword”. But if we are going to ever have a peaceful society, we will have to do better than dealing with symptoms rather than causes.

Some activists in the African Guyanese community have pointed to the “marginalisation” of their community by the present regime and have labelled the efforts of some, including the child soldiers, to take up arms against the regime as an “African Resistance”. The dead youths then were foot soldiers in a struggle to rectify their peoples’ marginalisation.

The deployment of youths to settle political questions, however, is not a new phenomenon in Guyana, but it is more pronounced in the African Guyanese community. Earlier this year, in February, I wrote a piece, “Politics and Crime”, in which I elaborated on the opportunism of African politicians who exploited structural disabilities within their community to further their political ambitions.

They inducted youths and other disaffected elements into committing crimes against their identified “enemies” starting from the sixties. We had the introduction of “choke-and-rob” in the sixties, kick-down-the-door bandits in the seventies and eighties, kidnapping, robbery and murder of businessmen in the nineties and finally, Resistance Fighters in the new millennium. The child soldiers being hunted down are from the latest incarnation of the politicians’ ambitions.

Mr Tacuma Ogunseye took issue with my exposition and claimed that, “It was clear that Dev’s sole intention was to highlight what he perceives as the role of crime in the politics of African Guyanese.”

That is how he saw it but he ignored my observations on the deleterious effects of the phenomenon on the African Guyanese community: “The ultimate irony, epitomising the deep destruction of the African Guyanese social capital was the fact that the vast majority of the members of the Black Clothes, the Death Squads, the Resistance Fighters and sundry other criminals killed were African youths. Pandora’s Box kept spewing out its deadly two-edged swords. These youths from Buxton and surrounding villages, including many ex-servicemen, – as before – became seduced by the glamour of the fast life. One top PNC official told me that on a visit to Buxton in the midst of the 2002 killing spree, he tried to engage some of these youths in a discussion on development of the village through creation of economic enterprises. He was quickly shushed and told that all they want were more guns. The destruction of the African social capital, laboriously accumulated since slavery at unimaginable cost continued to be dissipated.”

Even Roger Khan, who announced that he played a role in the mass killings, evidently used African gunmen to kill other African gunmen. If we cannot discuss African marginalisation by pointing to Indian marginalisation, by what logic should we ignore the political nexus of the violence in and by African gunmen and its exacerbation of the marginalisation?

And it is to this destruction of African social capital that I wish to comment today: why is it that we have this pool of young Africans who can so easily be seduced by the “dark side” of violence and nihilism.

And let us not kid ourselves – they are not confined to Buxton. We have seen reverberations in Agricola and we will see more all across Guyana once we do not get to the root of the malaise. Once this pool is in the society, we will see politicians, who are either opportunistic or who have genuinely given up on the present system to deliver justice, dipping into it.

During slavery, a hierarchical, pyramidical society was created in which class and race were coincident: Europeans/Whites at the top, followed by Coloureds/mulatto – all perched on top of the African slaves, who were chattel owned even by some Coloureds, and as I pointed out before, defined the condition of “marginalisation”.

With the abolition of slavery, not much changed – except that very quickly, the Portuguese and Chinese were inserted even ahead of the Coloureds, to the latter’s great chagrin. The masses of indentured Indians were initially seen as sojourners and outside the grand order. They retorted by utilising their own criteria for assigning status etc and became a self-contained community up to the end of indentureship.

For the African masses upward mobility was defined for them as “joining the coloured stratum” through the prescribed routes of education, “marrying up” (lighter complexion) and “proper behaviour”. Most of the rest internalised the racist premises of the society remained culturally as well as economically marginalized.

This was a very rigid system that lasted well into the independence era – by which time the Indians, who had largely accepted many of the premises of the society, begun to enter its bastions setting off the fears in the Coloured elite that has survived into the present.

The agitation by the League of Coloured People in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s that Indians were invading the Civil Service, was symbolic of this fear. For the longest while the African lower classes could maintain some self-respect by looking down at the heathen, miserly, uncouth coolie but with the evident success of the latter group – by the criteria of the evolving economy – a great questioning of African group worth was precipitated.

Comparative studies have shown that when exhortations to compete are made to the lagging group, they exacerbate the humiliation of the colonial experience (much less the slave experience) of the backward group by signaling that the group they had despised had now actually mastered the modern skills necessary for success more completely than they.

The Coloured middle class, like most classes, has historically been consumed with its own preservation and has historically undermined the lower class African community by co-opting those individuals from the lower classes who demonstrated initiative and drive. While the middle class has been severely decimated from the seventies, their orientation towards the lower class Africans have remained almost unchanged. They are expendable cannon fodder.

And we arrive at the child soldiers of Buxton and Agricola, and potentially in other African communities in Guyana. Their experience of being marginalized, which has historical antecedents – and possibly present triggers – can easily be pandered to by “political masterminds” who are mostly from the comfortable middle class.

Any program to address the results and consequences of the marginalisation of the ordinary African must deal with their cultural dislocations as well as their economic marginalisation – they are dialectically related.

Elder Eusi Kwayana’s ASCRIA was a valiant effort to deal with the former problematic but the Co-operative approach to deal with economic empowerment, echoing Ujaama socialism, foundered in its own contradictions. The African lower class and all Guyana, lost “corn and husk”.

We welcomed the formation of the African Renaissance and we believe that the government has to work with such groups – making sure they are “grounded” in the African community – if progress is to be made. The work of rebuilding psyches will not be accomplished with proclamations.

On possible (and charged) present economic discrimination we suggested last week the introduction of  the “disparate impact” test that deals with institutional biases and requires no proof of intent.

India is in the midst of introducing an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in the wake of a study that demonstrated the ‘disparate impact” of discrimination on the Muslim community there.

Activists should also devote some energy to the related policy of Affirmative Action in areas where a historic pattern and practice against a particular group can be demonstrated, and for which we called since 1990.

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