What is the point?

Sep 26, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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In Dr David Hinds’ letter, “One must always look to draw lessons from history”(KN 09-24-10), he takes me to task for some historical allusions I had made in suggesting that his response to President’s Jagdeo visit to Buxton may be a little overwrought.
I would like to assure Dr Hinds that I certainly do not believe it is only the WPA which “has made mistakes about race in the past.” We have all committed our share of blunders in this area: my caution is that at least we do not repeat the same old mistakes. I’m pretty sure, being human, even with the best of intentions we’ll be making some new ones. Not only is there the limitation of bounded knowledge; there’s always the problem of unintended consequences.
Speaking from my own (bitter) experience, I believe that my aggressive mode of pronouncement on the question of race in the post-Jan12th, 1998 era was mistaken. Even though it was deliberately deployed with the intention of shaking Guyanese out of their studied refusal to deal with the contradictions of race in our society, the call for racial equality was completely lost.
Who remembers that we defined and called for the African Security Dilemma – locked out of the Executive by the Westminster System – to be addressed? Or that we may need an Affirmative Action program for African Guyanese in business? Or an Ethnic Impact statement for Government initiatives? Etc, etc…Hence my caution to Dr Hinds on his tone.
But I am further troubled by Dr Hinds ignoring the import of my interventions on the history of our race relations. Essentially it was to point out that there are no “lessons from history”. History is always written by someone – a living, breathing person, with a particular perspective: there are, therefore, only lessons from historians. So I have no problem with Dr Hinds questioning my “interpretation” of Mr Kwayana’s role in Buxton during the 1960’s or of his “interpretation” of that role as elaborated on in his letter.
I am troubled however, that after knowing me personally, he would question whether I have spoken directly to villagers from Buxton about the period on which I commented. That I have, Dr Hinds. And this begun long before I became notorious on the “race question”. In 1972, as students struggling to support ourselves in NYC, I spent scores of nights with a fellow Guyanese (among other foreign students – Trinidad, India, Nigeria etc) whom I remember as “Sam”. It was his surname; he was from Buxton; he was attending Pratt Institute, studying Engineering and we were all working as guards behind the World Trade Centre. We shared much about the defining event of our boyhood – the 1960’s riots – in our respective (and scarred) villages of Uitvlugt and Buxton. None of the facts invoked by Dr Hinds – that ethnic cleansing was a national phenomenon, the Sealy murders, some Indians remained in Buxton – vitiates my statement that Dr Hinds contests.
But he re-invokes and challenges my assessment of Mr Kwayana’s assertion that the ethnic violence of the 1960’s began not in 1962 with the February 16th Black Friday riots in Georgetown but with the murder of Mr Ross in Port Mourant in 1961. Dr Hinds thus baldly ignores all my previous interventions to declare that “Kwayana was merely stating a fact”. I had pointed out that even though the newspapers had reported on the murder neither they, nor the police, then or afterwards, called it “political”. And not even the PNC, of which Mr Kwayana claims Mr Ross was a member. To demonstrate that he was not the only person to make the assertion, Mr Kwayana claimed that Dr Jagan made a radio broadcast on political violence because of the murder. The only problem, as I demonstrated, was that Dr Jagan’s broadcast was before the murder.
In his riposte Mr Kwayana had questioned my statement about the PNC’s silence and dubbed it a “revelation”. I would like to remind Mr Kwayana and Dr Hinds that at the Congress of the PNC two months after the 1961 election (and Mr Ross’ murder), Mr Burnham did not only not mention any political murder but asserted that “on the Corentyne Coast, we can give better than we take.” Did the PNC murder more than the one Mr Kwayana claims the PPP committed on the Corentyne?
The second point that I wish to make is that as I have pleaded before, with the privilege of hindsight, we should connect the past with the present in a broader narrative that is healing rather than destructive. We cannot change the past but we can certainly change the future. My contention that the political violence of the sixties began with the US instigation of the riots of Black Friday does not ignore the feelings of competition engendered by historical contingencies. The latter were well analysed by Mr Burnham in one speech in “Destiny to Mould”.
But that competition never broke out into widespread hostilities. We have always taken pains to point out that Mr Burnham, whom we have excoriated for many things, had to rush to keep up with his “followers” that were being mobilised for violence in February 1962 by the CIA, through its Trade Union proxies. These are now matters of public record, with the release of the formerly classified documents.
Dr Hinds had once asked Guyanese to “revise the narratives of guilt and innocence and construct one consistent with its objective of a national reconciliation based on ethnic equality and mutual security.” Neither he nor Mr Kwayana has ever answered my question as to why this insistence that the PPP started the violence in 1961 (which only Mr Kwayana claims) rather than foreign intervention in 1962, better furthers the objective of “national reconciliation”. Look how Dr Kean Gibson used Mr Kwayana’s assertion.
I once answered the question, “What then are the uses of history? by suggesting that it has to do with the present in which we are forced to make choices every second of every day. And every choice ultimately is a moral choice. The question for us then becomes: what choices are we trying to make (out of the cornucopia of infinite possibilities) in out present problem space and what are we trying to achieve? I hope it is a national reconciliation.

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