Is the psyche of the former Guyanese colonial subject permanently damaged?

Oct 28, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Quite an impressive list of Third World scholars argue that colonialism’s most dangerous consequence was not what it did to the land and the economy of the colonial subject but to his/her psychology.
This is an argument that is penetrating and deeply moving. You are torn between accepting it and rejecting. I honestly haven’t made up my mind. In Guyana, I believe the theory is strongly applicable. But in other Third World countries, you see the graphic signs of “fumigation.”
Take Singapore and Malaysia. They have come a far way from psychic brainwashing. In India, colonialism has left indelible negatives in the mind of the average Indian citizen.
At a deep mental level, the average Indian in India believes that dark skinned people are not equal to light complexioned humans. Fair-skinned people in India discriminate against dark-skinned citizens, shamelessly so in the film industry.
There has not been any government in India that has dealt with this problem. It is simply amazing that the Black American entertainment industry has not produced a condemnation of this sordid culture in India. It is unfortunate that Oprah Winfrey has not zeroed in on this semi-civilized culture in India.
In India, the whitening skin lotion industry is a thriving one. I doubt Malaysia would allow that. In my own country, Guyana, I find that East Indians are crazy about getting white skin.
One of the nastiest legacies of colonialism is the role of the authoritarian instinct. Colonial society by nature had to be authoritarian and coercive. In this regard, see the seminal analysis that came out in the eighties by the Pakistani theorist, Hamza Alavi, “The Over-Developed State,” in the journal, New Left Review.
Colonialism did for the colonial subject what Niccolò Machiavelli in the 13th century did for princely rulers – argue that violence has a sacred role in politics and that violence is value-free. Communism and fascism borrowed this tenet of Machiavelli which explains why those two ideologies have perpetrated the worst episodes of genocide on human society in the history of civilization.
In Guyana, the legacy of the instinct of colonialism is deeply buried and extensively active in the Freudian edifice of post-colonial rulers be it at the central level, the municipal system or in the security forces. The emphasis is on violence, seldom on compromise and peace.
The Georgetown Municipal police and the Ministry of Works love to destroy. These people have no concept of what justice means. They only understand the role of violence. Minister Robeson Benn’s Ministry goes around Demerara breaking up what the Ministry calls encumbrances. But there is so much building to do that the very Ministry is shamelessly avoiding.
A huge hole on the UG Access Road over a trench is a disaster. Take traffic lights.
I am about to give you an example in post-colonial madness but don’t take my word for it. Please check it out.
Going south on Vlissengen Road, as you turn west on North Road where the football ground (GFC) is, the turning arrow and the opposite signal are saying the same thing making for disaster, many manifestations of which I have seen. My wife and I have a deadly fear of that junction.
The lights are wrongly calibrated. At many, many sites, the signals are wrongly calibrated and this stupid state of affairs has been going on for years.
Yet Minister Benn’s Ministry has done nothing but that body finds itself breaking down vendors’ fruit stands as they did last week on Vlissengen Road by St. Joseph High School. The people came to me in tears. I sent them to this newspapers but one of them told me she is going to beg Mrs. Indra Chandarpal.
I hope Indra gives her a hearing. A citizen on D’Urban Street, Wortmanville with whom I grew up showed me how the water from the gutter is overflowing on his bridge. The parapet hasn’t been weeded for decades and snakes are lurking. So he tried to raise his bridge. City Council came with its sledge hammers. No one bothered that snakes could come into the man’s home because his entrance is right near to the bridge.
He tried to protect himself and the people with damaged psyches came and bullied him. That is the only language Guyana has known since it birth – violence.

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Is the psyche of the former Guyanese colonial subject permanently damaged?

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