Preserving the integrity of Mashramani

Mar 09, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor,
Is it possible for the snake charmer ever to free his soul and let the serpent out of the basket? Can the deceptions of PPP politics ever liberate itself to become Guyanese unequivocally?
I implore these questions relative to the observations made over the Mashramani celebrations 2011. I was at home when an NCN reporter asked some people in this PPP contingent who declared that they had travelled from Berbice to participate in the Party grouping; what they thought of ‘Mashramani.
They responded by saying that the celebration represented “the coming together of the races of Guyana to celebrate after work done.” This was not the right answer but I committed this shortcoming to the wave of ignorance that seems to be striving in Guyana today, from the responses to a Radio DJ asking for the right spelling of Mashramani to some years ago when a Miss Guyana contestant replied that her favourite author was ‘Arthur Chung’, to a new breed of politician who could not distinguish Dominica from Dominican Republic, to the daily tragedies of scandals etc.
But it was on reading parts of our [by protocol] national newspaper ‘The Chronicle’ that I realized that the wrong answer given was by no means an individual lack of knowledge, but the result of a contrived sinister effort to rewrite Guyana’s history and misguide, if possible, future generations.
In the Chronicle was a supplement by Parvati Persaud titled ‘Harbingers of Guyana’s Independence and Republican status’. This is a person I thought I knew. This supplement was sycophancy of an incredibly shameless depth. The picture essay was a documentary of PPP pre Independence era without the ‘Why?’ to every caption.
It had neither in the context of its narrative nor pictorial anything to do with Mashramani; it was a
miserable attempt at political mesmerism by a soul consumed by hate.
There was also an accurate article titled ‘The Origin of Mashramani’ this article should be extracted and placed in a scrapbook for further reference, the one little touch the article lacked was to inform that Mashramani celebrated our Republic status and the Revolution of 1763 and that ‘Kofi, our National hero is inseparable from MASH.
The revolution of 1763 is one of the four most important Revolutions carried out in the Americas. Its intent was to win nation status; this was the first attempt by an ancestor of the Guyanese nation to institute nationhood.
It began on February 23, 1763. In honour of this Revolution we became a Republic on February 23, 1970.
The Kofi [COFFY] dollar was issued..
MASHRAMANI was the celebration that commemorated the 207 years of Work, Resistance, Perseverance and Struggle from Revolution to Republic, and no Guyanese is separate from this Heritage nor must any seek to desecrate it.
Barrington Braithwaite

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