Granny at 88

Oct 27, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

In Friday’s Peeping Tom, titled, “Respect due to Granny,” the writer penned some glowing tributes to Mrs. Janet Jagan on the attainment of 88 years of being alive on Planet Earth. One hopes that particular Peeping Tom never gets his/her identity revealed, because ridicule is bound to follow.
Positive roles and positive attributes are two different things altogether. You can speak of the positive attributes of a person. That is your normative interpretation of their character make-up. It is going off in the opposite direction when you refer to that person’s positive role. Here there is no room for normative judgement; the facts have to be graphically correct.
When writing about Mrs. Jagan, one cannot do so holistically. This is when the holistic methodology becomes irrelevant. One has to use the periodisation approach. Someone like Mrs. Jagan would understand the periodisation schema because it lies at the heart of Marxist dialectical explanation of history and how class structures transform themselves dialectically over different periods of social evolution.
There can hardly be any dispute that the early Janet Jagan was a woman whose political and community work at the time (the forties and fifties) generated colour and class consciousness in the masses of people in British Guiana.
We tend, however, to over-emphasize the work of the Jagans in that era while downplaying the crucial intervention of key actors. It was Jai Narine Singh who was the protagonist in the protest against the shooting down of the Enmore Martyrs. Cheddi Jagan joined him.
If we can speak of the early dynamism of Cheddi and Janet Jagan in galvanizing the working class into consciousness in colonial British Guiana, then by what scholarly magic can we leave out Forbes Burnham? Burnham at the time was the more persuasive of the anti-colonial demonstrators. The main point being made here is that Mrs. Jagan, Forbes Burnham, Ashton Chase, Jai Narine Singh and their colleagues contributed positively to the early awakening of the labouring masses. We should not deny Janet Jagan that accolade.
Pro-PPP writers project the PPP as the main architects of an anti-colonial rampart; this is not true.
It is when we leave the colonial epoch and enter the late 20th century that we begin to see the periodisation methodology having more efficacy over holism. Forbes Burnham certainly made African Guyanese proud of their heritage and their post-slavery achievements. Burnham, at a Freudian level, was always suspicious of the League of Coloured People and John Carter’s National Democractic Party, the reason being class and colour. Burnham felt that there was no place for the dark-skinned African on the agenda of the League of Coloured People and the political parties they supported. He made the dark classes of Guyana proud of him. Then power took over. It destroyed the psychology of Burnham and the country he so loved.
Looking at Mrs Jagan, the analysis becomes similar. The record of Mrs. Jagan’s insistence on communism for British Guiana is too mountainous to be denied. Nothing wrong with that, but her supporters and the broader society in British Guiana didn’t want communism. The facts on Mrs. Jagan’s authoritarian shaping of the PPP’s physiology are again mountainous. It virtually destroyed the character and viability of the PPP, until President George Bush, snr., resurrected Cheddi Jagan.
The biggest irony of this country is that Jagan destroyed his career fighting the Americans to have communism in Guyana; then, when he was about to fade away, the Americans allowed him in after he promised not to have communism anymore. All those decades were wasted for nothing. The definitive biography of Cheddi Jagan should be titled: “Cheddi Jagan: Wasted Time; Wasted Life.”
Mrs. Jagan has spent more than sixty years in politics and never — I repeat, never — once made a critical note on one of the 20th century’s monstrous dictators, Fidel Castro. How about that for a person who believes in freedom? Mrs. Jagan and her husband and her party fought for free and fair elections in Guyana for three decades, but she sees nothing wrong with Cuba not having free and fair elections.
Someone should ask her if it is not time that Guyana scrap the bourgeois deception and capitalist expense of free, competitive elections and let the PPP declare itself the vanguard party of the country. What is wrong with that? Cuba has it and Mrs. Jagan is an emotional supporter of Cuba.
Just before her 88th birthday, she disparagingly referred to one of Guyana’s freedom fighters, Dr. David Hinds, as an extremist hate activist. Dr. Hinds spent three years in jail and more than 20 years fighting for this country. Mrs. Jagan must apologize immediately for this terrible sin.

---

---