Jagdeo’s theory is pure nonsense

Jun 02, 2013 Letters

Dear Editor,
As a person who grew up in dirt poverty, I would be the last person to criticize someone who did not achieve a sound university education. I would never go in that direction. But if Bharrat Jagdeo had skipped his mediocre exposure to learning at Patrice Lumumba University in the USSR and entered a programme in Guyanese history he would never have uttered the appalling absurdity that the colonial system didn’t want Guyanese Indians to send their children to school
It could not have been a historian that told Jagdeo that. No Guyanese who passed through a course in Guyanese history would utter such nonsense as Jagceo did at the funeral service of Reepu Daman Persaud.
Going back to slavery, many plantation owners exposed their house slaves to the arts, literature and music. Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay of Django in which Samuel Jackson played a house slave with privileged access to his owner’s resources is in fact a historical portrayal of how special was the treatment given to many house slaves. There were plantation owners who wanted to make their house slaves the inheritors of western culture.
So abominable is Mr. Jagdeo’s theory that the colonials rejected schooling for the children of the locals that UG’s History Department should have call on him to apologize. The colonials brought Christian missionaries with them to teach English and Christianity to the colonial subjects, in other words, to indoctrinate them in the epistemology of western culture. One may choose to disagree with the proselytization of the Christian missionaries but the effect of this conversion was the education of the colonial subjects
Thirdly, it made no sense keeping the children of the colonies out of school because the colonial rulers wanted an educated civil service that would run the lower rungs of the colonial bureaucracy. It made life easier for colonial bureaucrats who would prefer the locals to do the more menial tasks in the civil service. It is a horrible demonstration of ignorance of Mr Jagdeo’s part to say that the colonials didn’t want to have Indian children go to school when they in fact set up the prestigious Queen’s College at which a poor Indian boy, Cheddi Jagan, got his break.
In contrast to the civilizing mission of the Christians in the Third World, India is where Mr. Jagdeo’s theory is more visible. The Indian caste system shut out education for the lower castes who they considered too dark to be civilized. In fact, the Indian caste system frowned upon the education of the lower castes especially dark skilled Indians because ideologically the upper caste categories would have viewed these people as being unfit to be educated. One of the criticisms of Mahatma Gandhi was his acceptance of the caste system. The Dalits, who belong to the lower caste groups, never forgave Gandhi for this attitude of his
Sigmund Freud was at work in the mind of Mr. Jagdeo when he addressed his East Indian audience. Instead of painting a picture of education denial by the colonials, it was Mr. Jagdeo’s ancestors in India who rejected an education for the lower classes. One of the mistakes Kean Gibson made in her book, “The Cycle of Racial Oppression” was to apply the morbidities of the caste system to the PPP without modification. The book should have been applied to the East Indians in Guyana not specifically the PPP
This was the sad weakness in her book. Her scholarship on the Indian caste system as contained in two of her books (the other being “Sacred Duty” are great scholarly material on the Indian caste system. Where she went wrong was to say that the acceptance of the caste system by the PPP has allowed the PPP to see Africans as an inferior race to be extirpated
The PPP evolved differently from the way Gibson portrayed it. There was never a specific Hindu hegemony in the PPP but an Indian domination mentality. So there were Muslim and Christian leaders in the PPP who saw African Guyanese with the same contempt and venom as Hindus in the PPP that practiced the caste system. Gibson’s theory that the Hindu caste system was the essential biology of the PPP played into the hands of Janet Jagan because Gibson’s paradigm would not have included Mrs. Jagan who in fact was the de facto head of the race ideology in the PPP. Mrs. Jagan was neither Hindu nor East India.

Frederick Kissoon

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Jagdeo’s theory is pure nonsense

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