Provocateurs and Rants

Sep 27, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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One of the most unfortunate developments in Guyana has been the rise of the “rant” in public discourse – especially on TV and the press – in the political realm. In these rants, individuals harangue the public about alleged abuses of the government and, most pertinently, demand that ordinary people resort to violence, if necessary, to remove the elected government of the day.
These provocateurs also arrogate to themselves the right to attack, in the most virulent and vile manner, anyone who may have expressed opinion different from theirs. The right to one’s opinions do not trouble these fighters for “democracy”; innuendoes, hearsay and ad hominem attacks serve their fascist interests much better.

In Mr. Eric Phillips’ riposte, “It’s a moral imperative that these two imbalances be addressed” to my piece, “Ballots not bullets”, I thought I detected a note of nihilism about what Mr Ogunseye once deemed the “dread” situation in the African community. I hope that I am wrong and that he has not succumbed to the rants of the provocateurs to advocate violent political change. He lumped me with some Indians who pronounced on slavery and marginalisation, and suggested that, “these individuals search their souls or read history and know Africans will always fight slavery.”
For what it is worth, I never equated slavery with indentureship; invoking on numerous occasions Orlando Patterson’s assessment of chattel slavery: “Slavery immediately made possible something that had never existed before: the absolute, unprotected, unmediated power of life and death of one person over another.” Indentureship was never chattel slavery. Has Eric not seen my pieces on the social, cultural and political marginalisation of the African in Guyana? But most significant is Mr. Phillips’ stricture for others not to forget that because of their history, “Africans will always fight slavery”. Or what is presented to them as slavery.
This was the point that I had developed in “Aetiology of an Ethnic Riot”, which Mr Kwayana used to tee off on in “No Guilty Race”. As I said in that piece, every group’s history influences them in the present. As William Faulkner reminded us, “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.” It has nothing to do with genetics or race. But the point I emphasised then, as I want to now, is the role of the leader in massaging the “tendency” within a particular group, to become “reality”. The mobilisation strategy of leaders is crucial since history is not determinist: it may explain many things but can never justify them all.

In my estimation, leaders have too often used the ordinary African as cannon fodder for their own ambitions while remaining insulated from the fray. While I disagreed most vehemently with his decision, Ronald Waddell, to his credit, put his money where his mouth was. The same cannot be said for the present crop of provocateurs ranting to unleash what they see as “dogs of war” to ravish the perks of office. I will never forget the signs of disdain on the faces of the elite African leaders when the grass-root African expressed their sentiments in front of Parliament Buildings at the funeral of Mr Hoyte. Yet they were the ones that had been used to bring the PPP to their knees (and to the table for concessions) in “mo’ fyaah, slow fyaah”. How was their lot improved?
This is not to say I reject violence as a means of political change for all times and all places. But as I said at the Rule of March Rally at the Square of the Revolution, now is not the time and Guyana is not the place for this strategy: we are just too small and fractured a society to survive the repercussions. In 1988, in the very first issue of “Jaguar”, a newsletter we published, Baytoram Ramharack wrote an analysis on the eve of our departure to Guyana, “The Right to Rebel”. We were convinced that after the rigging of 1985, the PNC under Mr Hoyte would not permit peaceful political change.

But in Guyana, we found the situation on the ground very different from the theory of the analysis. Unlike what the WPA and some of the present rabid war-mongers thought, our painstaking surveys revealed that the country was as divided as ever. Any armed struggle was going to precipitate a civil war, which would serve no one’s interests; least of all, Guyana’s. Rather than sinking into nihilism and despair, we suggested the need for “A New Political Culture” in which new political institutions would offer incentives for win-win outcomes, much as Mr Phillips is calling for.
We agree that there is much that needs to be improved in our country but violence, to a greater degree than in 1988, is not the way to engender the necessary changes. Apart from the fact that in a nation of minorities we now do not have the automatic tyranny of any one ethnic majority, the new political culture that promotes consensual governance (which Mr Phillips promotes) means that we will have to all work with each other. How will this be possible after warfare in such a small society?

The present drumbeats of the warmongers simply push the PPP further behind the ramparts raised after “slow fyaah; mo’ fyaah”, which convinced the latter’s leadership that the opposition will not play by the rules of a democratic order. In this scenario, as I wrote a year ago, “The PPP had to act more as a player in the anarchy of the Hobbessian inter-state system than in the putatively settled intra-state order. In this milieu, the PPP has evidently chosen to be “realists” thus augmenting their own tendencies on control and power.”
It is in the opposition’s interest, not to mention all of Guyana’s, for political change to be engendered peacefully. However, to garner the requisite crossover support in a divided polity as ours needs patience and sustained hard work. Do not fall prey to the seemingly easier cynical nihilism of the armchair ranters. “A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences (of their ideas) and prevent them from doing harm.”

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