Psychic burden

Sep 27, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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There is hardly any public intellectual debate taking place among Guyanese academics. This is quite unlike Trinidad and Jamaica.

Without wanting to appear chauvinistic, our political and contemporary history is by far the most controversial among CARICOM states, yet Guyanese academics do a huge disservice to the younger generation by not being engaged in ongoing polemics about the vast grey areas of our history.

I will never shy away from a request to provide answers to nagging things raised in my ongoing evaluations of past events. Three times a request was made of me, but I thought the requester was not using his real name.

Now that it has been proven that Errol Arthur does exist, I offer to him my notes on his question as to why Martin Carter chose to join the Burnham Government.

This subject-matter involves a lot of research material that cannot be compressed into a short newspaper column.

Whatever lacunae exist in this essay, and if Mr. Arthur wants them filled, then I will continue my judgement. More than ten years ago, I wrote about what Carter mentioned to me in his office.

I just mentioned it in another article last week. I could only repeat what Carter told me. His position was that Jagan did not engender optimism in his colleagues, who saw him as an over-exuberant communist whose zeal was unimpressive, inelegant, devoid of tactics and strategy, and appeared destructive. That was how Carter saw it at the time. He later broke with Burnham.

I could understand that. I was an over-enthusiastic communist youth even during my undergraduate days at UG. Post-graduate studies opened my horizons. I saw both the philosophical and inherent flaws in communist theory.

As an East Indian, I would appeal to the hundreds of thousands of East Indian Guyanese in and out of Guyana to experience a psychic catharsis. I have.

I have been fortunate to meet other East Indians with fantastic minds who have, too. These other Indians have contributed to the death of my psychic burden, coupled with the extensive research I have done on the PPP and Cheddi Jagan.

The priceless value of Walter Rodney to African Guyanese is that he showed them with political passion and admirable semantics that their great leaders, like Forbes Burnham, failed them.

From the time Rodney came on the scene, the psychic burden of Africans began to be lifted. Very few Africans today, though they yearn for the time when African Guyanese controlled the state, given what is happening to them now, believe that Burnham was a humanitarian leader who had true intention to take them to the Promised Land.

Every Indian over forty years of age will continue to be a psychologically unhappy person, seeking to leave Guyana even though each voted for the PPP. They want to seek refuge all over the globe until they dissolve the psychic burden they bear.

That mental scar is the belief that Cheddi Jagan was their leader. He was not.
This they must understand. This they must come to grips with.

I believe the Africans gave the AFC six seats at the last elections because they are no longer saddled with the fiction of the PNC being their saviour.

If the Indians had gone through the same experience, life in Guyana would have been different today. I doubt there would have been a “Fine Man” to worry about.

Cheddi Jagan was erroneously crowned a hero because we, as Indians, were psychologically traumatized at what happened to us under the British, and then later under Burnham.

We had no time to look at Jagan’s true nature, his essential being, his ideological substance. All our time was taken up denouncing the American CIA, the United Force and, later, with monumental energy, the 21-year rule of Forbes Burnham.

A few wonderfully talented persons came on the scene and lectured to us Indians about Jagan’s innate weakness, but two of them were Africans (Walter Rodney and Eusi Kwayana) while the others, though being Indians (Rupert Roopnarine, Moses Bhagwan, Josh Ramsammy) were unable to wrest control of the sugar community from Jagan, because Burnham would not stop his authoritarian ways.

Forbes Burnham single-handedly created hero status for Cheddi Jagan. Forbes Burnham has invented the psychological fiction about Jagan that Indians live with. For all his erudition, Burnham was unbelievably stupid.

Imagine banning essential Indian foods, and making National Service compulsory! Burnham was playing a game of life and death with Jagan, and he was giving Jagan all the cards to win the game.

Indians must understand that if Burnham was smarter than we thought he was, then Cheddi Jagan would have fallen by the wayside. Jagan’s main concern was his ideology, not Indian people.

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