Lumumba diminishes himself

Oct 28, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor,
Given the numerous misconceptions contained in Mr. Odinga Lumumba’s short presentation (“Lumumba rejects house slave label:” KN:26/10/2011), reading it should have been an occasion for mirth not response. However, a few of his musings require comment as they are so fundamentally flawed as to be dangerous.
Mr. Lumumba, remonstrating on behalf of a group that he designated as “people of quality,” commenced his comments by diminishing himself and, by association, the others of that group. He treated us to what must easily be the most blatant untruth to be published in our newspapers in recent times by claiming that “the majority of the African population” does not now oppose the PPP/C government.
Like most Guyanese, Mr. Lumumba knows better, but he obviously has political reasons for verbalising this falsity.
I therefore need to remind him that nowadays the dominating trait of a “house slave” is not generally thought to be timidity, but self-interestedness: a willingness to use or abuse one’s race for one’s own benefit.
Timidity/feigned timidity, deception, duplicity and even courage are but means the “house slave” relies upon to arrive at his self-interested goal. Therefore, by knowingly making the bogus statement above for his own purposes, he has sailed very close to the contention he is in disputation with!
Mr. Lumumba then informs us that his “persons of quality” are qualified to “articulate the interest of Afro-Guyanese … and have access to power and the authority to implement Government policy.”
Few would deny this but the issue is not the articulation and/or the implementation of Government policy: it is the formulation of that policy, and as I have argued elsewhere, (“What we have now is not working in any meaningful manner:” SN:29/06/11) nowhere in the policy formulation structure are Afro-Guyanese sufficiently positioned to even prevent their interests from being negatively affected.
As a result, they have little place in the private sector and there has been a significant change in the ethnic composition of the public sector to their disadvantage. The numerous complaints and accusations about marginalisation are not therefore without substance. What Guyana needs is a management arrangement in which no group is subordinated to others.
Mr. Lumumba then turns upon the black middle class, which has not been and still is not kind to him and to which he has developed a great antipathy. This has resulted in a most jaundiced view of the role of the black middle classes in our history.
Never mind its colour stratifications and the usual class aloofness from the black mass, the black middle class had a good sense of its blackness and place in our society. But like other middle classes, it was very differentiated.
Indeed, it is various elements of this very class who broke away from its traditional moorings to form the PPP, then left to form the PNC and then turned upon the PNC. Mr. Lumumba, Burnham subjugated all the classes and given its context and beliefs, the black middle class behaved no different from other middle classes. Indeed, some of its adherents now argue that had the general ethnic orientation of that middle class been more widely accepted within the race itself, much of the present racial dilemma of the group might have been avoided.
Finally, Mr. Lumumba must have forgotten that old adage: “self praise is no recommendation.”
Henry Jeffrey

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