The view from an East Indian on Emancipation Day

Aug 01, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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I guess no matter how much I like to refer to myself as a “raceless” person occupying space in a country called Guyana but quintessentially a human being who believes that rights cannot be compromised, the fact is that in a racially polarised nation, one’s ethnicity is defined for him/her by the other side. For me, I have known no sustained moments of ethnic, organisational feelings.

I spent a short time with an African friend, Ronald Gordon, and a Portuguese friend, Leyland De Cambra, knocking around the PPP.

I was merely seventeen then. This brief flirtation came to an end with a leadership that all three of us found uninspiring.

My initial frustration as a teenager inside the PPP was its overt lack of an African content. Ronald sought employment with the Carnegie School of Home Economics.

Leyland left for East Germany for a communist youth meeting and never returned to the land of his birth.

I went out of the PPP and the East-German Guyana Friendship Society and became a happy young man with the Movement Against Oppression (MAO) formed in Tiger Bay.

MAO was the beginning of my journey into non-racial politics and my exit from the world of an East Indian youth. I was no longer an East Indian.

I was a radical youth emblazoned with the euphoria of confronting an unjust government that rigged elections thus denying citizens of a nation their right to vote.

I must confess at this early part of this essay, that the right to vote has been morally abused and the pathway to dictatorship we have reached.

But despite the shattered dreams that have accompanied the restoration of the legal ballot, there can be no replacement for or alternative to the free vote.

The right to vote for a party of one’s choice to run the country’s affairs is not open for discussion. But I do believe Guyana will never, I repeat never, become a socially happy place if we do not have constitutional, political and moral mechanisms to create inclusive governance.

Despite the result of a winner in any electoral contest, the nature of this society cries out for political rearrangements from what we have traditionally lived with since self-government.

MAO evaporated because of its own internal contradictions and its idealists soon moved up to higher grounds.

The dynamism of Guyanese politics produced one of the Caribbean’s finest moments in both the anti-colonial and post-colonial struggle for a free and equal life in Guyana; that was the birth of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA).

There is no scope in this presentation here to describe the short history of the WPA. Suffice it to say that it was a humane and iconoclastic break with Guyana’s ethnic biology.

My experience in the WPA virtually killed my East Indianness, assuming that I ever had such a deportment. The WPA brought together people who understood the urgency of the non-racial content of struggle.

For them, it was impossible to move an authoritarian government if the organisation could not have appealed to the inner decency of both the major races in Guyana.

This is the dilemma that faces the African leadership in this country today. The abominable pitfall of the African struggle since 1992 is that it seeks to confront what it interprets as a government with defined intentions to discriminate against and marginalise other constituencies from which it receives no support and which endorses other political entities.

But it shapes that praxis in ways that alienate half of the population. Some of the greatest minds in the history of the freedom struggle in this country are African Guyanese of which two are phenomenal human beings – Walter Rodney and Eusi Kwayana.

Eusi Kwayana is an African rights champion. Walter Rodney was an African person. As someone who knows Kwayana and knew Rodney in personalized and personal ways, I can say this – no East Indian in the WPA would have chosen an East Indian in this country to become its president if they had a choice. Their preference would have been Walter or Eusi Kwayana.

These men’s integrity excludes even in the most infinitesimal ways, an instinct of racial feeling. African Guyanese who are intent on fighting for the rights of their people must learn to be patient as Jagan was, as Rodney was, as Kwayana is.

The arena of battle now is not as it was when dictatorship first took hold of Guyana. Back then an African Guyanese Government had to face African Guyanese that were exposing it. The PPP Government is not being confronted with East Indian Rodneys and East Indian Kwayanas.

This is unfortunate because there is a dictatorship in this country. But the East Indian voices may come sooner rather than later.

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