An introduction to history: Personal notes

Aug 28, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

My introduction to books and learning came from the younger brother of the great Guyanese economist, Professor Rawle Farley. An extremely odd character but possessed of a brilliant mind, each day we would sit on the steps of the derelict house in front of my home on Durban Street, Wortmanville, and read. He taught me how to digest the dictionary. The next stage was a job at sixteen years in the Michael Forde Bookstore. This was my real introduction to philosophy, history and politics.
There was no turning back for me. I wanted to attend university and study history. After reading so much about the Roman Empire and Nazi Germany, I was fascinated with history. History books are curious things. They leave you always in suspense and suspension. They end with that nagging note that there may be more to what we have read. The search for more than what we have read is called revisionist history. It is simply the erasure of myths that we came to accept as truths but the unearthing of new evidence proved that we were wrong at the time we read history.
I had no money to sit the GCE to gain five subjects to enter UG. At that time that was beyond the reach of my parents and siblings by millions of years. Without money for food and clothes where would the Kissoons find money for buying books for me? My youngest sister knew a nice gentleman, who at the time was the CEO of the Georgetown Club, Mr. Fred Philips. My sister asked him to help. She got him to accept that his financial assistance could unlock a scholarly talent that was latent in me. He bought all the books for the subjects I entered in. I passed and went on to read history at UG under a fantastic scholar, Catholic nun, Sister Mary Noel Menezes.
My first course at UG was “The Philosophy of History” with Sister. I came to love philosophy and history with an intense passion after my classroom experience with Professor Menezes. The first essay I did for her was on Nazi Germany. I remember its main focus was that Hitler could not have succeeded in concretizing his fascist control if he did not have popular support. She did not agree. In her remarks, she opined that the Nazi Party rode roughshod over the citizenry. It was from my interaction with her on that essay, I came to realize that a handful of leaders could control and dominate a large nation using fear as their weapon. My paper also argued that the German hatred for the Jews played into Hitler’s hands.
After my introduction to “The Philosophy of History” I began to question many of the Marxist ideas I learnt under the influence of Boyo Ramsaroop. After Farley and Michael Forde Bookstore, Boyo Ramsaroop was responsible for my intellectual shape. But as a dyed-in-the-wool communist, he was dismissive of all other philosophies other than Marxism. It was as a freshman at UG, I came to see the uncanny similarities between communism and fascism. I honestly believed then and I still do that Mrs. Jagan’s relationship with other human beings was based on fascist epistemology. Read what the just released British secret service files said about her capacity to hate people.
My first year at UG as a history major was a turning point in my life. It was from that moment, I began to question the sincerity and maturity of Cheddi Jagan’s politics. I gravitated with unlimited energy to the world of Walter Rodney. I have long been unhappy with the Jagan/Burnham good guy versus bad guy paradigm.
As someone trained in revisionist history, I yearned to research this good guy versus bad guy tale. So many nice, decent human beings that I met in Guyana would tell me horrible things about the “nice” guy, Cheddi Jagan, while others with no axe to grind would point to some nice things about this “horrible” man Burnham. In the end, I concluded that there were myths about these two men that revisionist historians have to dissolve.
I remember at a small party at the home of Moses Nagamootoo, I asked David Dabydeen to tell me, using his knowledge of a scholar, why Dr. Jagan is his hero. He couldn’t answer. Others told me that though Burnham was a dictator, there was an immense side of tolerance to him that was accompanied by understanding and commitment to certain principles.
Jagan and Burnham made a mess of Guyana but East Indians, of which I am one, grew up deifying Jagan and demonizing Burnham. This black and white methodology is wrong.

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An introduction to history: Personal notes

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