Strange sensations inside of me Thursday evening at Buxton

Oct 02, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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I first met Walter Rodney one evening at a political rally. The time was 1974. The place was the George Walcott Lecture Theatre at UG. It was his first political outing on the campus after the UG Council refused to accept the academics’ endorsement of Rodney as a history lecturer. I had never heard Walter before. I knew nothing of his delivery. I was a university freshman who only heard about him.
I sat next to final year student, Hubert Devonish (now linguistics professor at UWI). The lecture hall was completely filled and the audience spilled over onto the rails and balconies of the lecture theatre. One could just feel the excitement beating inside the heart of the person next to you.
You had to see Rodney to understand what charisma is. You had to see the delivery of the man to understand what revolutionary fervour is. I will never forget that night at UG. I knew there and then that some human beings are talented people and destined to be on the world stage. Rodney met those requirements brilliantly.
When you saw Rodney in action, you knew his confrontation with President Burnham had to produce only one winner. I was smitten by Rodney, became an activist with his party, the WPA, and fought alongside him. I will always regard him as the quintessential Guyanese hero.
I left the High Court at 17.15 hours Thursday in a hurry. The libel suit I am involved in went until just under 17.00 hours. I phoned my wife to tell her that we have to rush home quickly because I wanted to be on time to hear Nigel Hughes speak at the AFC Buxton rally. Michael Carrington of the AFC told me that Hughes had joined the AFC campaign and was a fantastic speaker that I must hear.
I knew Hughes since 1989 when as a baby-faced lawyer just out of law school he defended me in court when my workplace, UG, accused me of lighting a fire at a protest on campus against the 1989 national budget. In all those years, I never heard Nigel speak publicly.
I sat next to Mark Benschop, his son and Michael Carrington and looked and listened to Nigel Hughes. In all honesty and from the deep recesses of my heart, this is Walter Rodney all over again. On the platform, Hughes looked like Rodney, sounded like Rodney, and exuded the historian’s angle that was so present in Rodney’s public rallies. If you were associated with Walter Rodney closely, if you were active with Rodney, then you would know what I mean. You had to see Hughes that night to understand the feeling.
As Hughes’s delivery followed the pattern of Rodney, strange sensations were occurring inside of me. The image of Rodney was in front of me.  On Thursday evening in Buxton, nothing reminded me more of the beautiful struggle of Walter Rodney in the seventies since that time than the speech of Nigel Hughes on Thursday, September 29, 2011.
Nigel began his rally in the same fashion of Walter. He quoted from a Jamaican reggae singer who said he was born a sufferer and grew up as a sufferer. Then the unique nuance of Rodney came out.
Hughes went back to the African role in Guyanese history, and the post-emancipation life of the freed slaves. He said without loans and gifts but with their own savings, they bought plantations up and down the coast and worked tirelessly on them.
There was this eerie, uncanny resemblance to Walter when he lamented the lack of protest from African Guyanese after it was said by a powerful member of the Government that no African-Guyanese was at the moment qualified to be an Ambassador.
Like Rodney, he told the crowd that their forefathers/mothers were proud people who wore their dignity loudly on their clothes. Then he projected into the present and explained how the lands and resources are being given away by the government to a tiny few.
There were more Rodney moments when he chastised young Africans who said that they aren’t going to vote out of frustration. He said it would be a big insult to their ancestors if they didn’t vote because those people shed their blood so that the present generation could be free to vote in today’s Guyana.
He concluded in identical fashion like Rodney. He warned Africans and East Indians they are bound to each other and must fight for each other. He took a note out of Walter’s songbook when he told the audience that like in the Burnham Government, it is only a tiny few that benefit from the present PPP Government. The 2011 election campaign is on its way.

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Publisher’s note:  Mr Kissoon wrote a letter in the Friday issue of Stabroek News, seeking to suggest that this newspaper curtails people’s views and opinions. I hasten to say that this newspaper will not deny anyone the right to write anything.
However, the editorial pages are the prerogative of the newspaper and its publisher. Views and opinions should be presented in a letter to the editor.
Why should a newspaper pay someone to write something that is not in keeping with the principles of the newspaper?  The publisher has the right to determine what should be published and this is the case in every newspaper and news media the world over.

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