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About Cheddi Jagan’s legacy
Dear Editor,
The dictionary I use defines ‘legacy’ as ‘Thing handed down to a successor’. Cheddi Jagan certainly did not hand down the idea of corruption, dishonesty and racism to his successors. He
just happened to be a dedicated politician and tenacious operator and, in the field of politics, one cannot please all the people all the time, and when one is no longer around, the successors feel free to do as they please.
I often think that CBJ intended to build a political dynasty, hoping his good intentions, honesty and integrity would be carried forward, but, alas, that was not to be. At least his daughter seems to be aware of the party’s departure from her parents’ philosophy of “concern with the welfare of the poorer classes”. I think her father had hoped that both his children shared this concern enough to pass on his ideals to future generations. What the party he founded has become today is not his fault – one cannot legislate against what is in a person’s heart. Some people are naturally greedy, selfish and cunning, irrespective of race, colour or creed.
About the so-called ‘Enmore Martyrs’. I wince whenever I hear that description. I happened to be working in my very first job as a pupil teacher on the Enmore estate at the time, and for more than a week I walked from the train station to the school building in fear and trembling. The strikers ominously lined the pathway, muttering threats – until their womenfolk took up positions and sat in clusters alongside the men, wailing, chanting, solemnly advising us not to punish ‘them picknee’, because the fathers were ‘in a bad mood’. The men then moved to the backdam. The rest is history, a subject for some other time.
What is happening in Guyana today is not ‘Jagan’s legacy’: it is a culture that has taken on a life of its own, birthed sometime after Independence and seriously nurtured from then on. Now there seems to be no turning back.
Geralda Dennison
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