Where are the Youths?

Jun 24, 2013 Editorial

It was Frantz Fanon who challenged that “every generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
But part of the problem in Guyana today, is that there is not more than a handful of this new generation who may have heard of Fanon, much less read his classic “Wretched of the Earth”.
And it is most unlikely that this handful would be found at the University, which is usually the institution where more thoughtful youths use imparted analytical tools to critique the present and craft visions for the future.
The University of Guyana(UG) is so debilitated, and its denizens so accepting of the status quo, that they focus exclusively on obtaining the pieces of paper that will enable them to fit into the system or more likely exploit it as the present leaders in all sections of the society do.
The unsavoury episode involving the head of the Students Society “borrowing” hundreds of thousands from the students’ fund just illustrates how well the future leaders are learning the “tricks of the trade”. The intriguing silence and the lack of outrage over the incident by the rest of the student body are instructive.
We have just commemorated the thirty-third anniversary of the assassination of one of the greatest youths this country has produced – Walter Rodney.
It is an indictment of the passivity of the present generation and their refusal to “discover” their mission, much less fulfilling it, that only three men – all in their seventies – offered assessments of aspects of our situation. Disjointed, passionate criticisms – but inevitably reflecting their old ossified orientations. The fault lies not with them but in those that refuse to pick up the baton from the older generation.
Was there not a Rodney Chair endowed at UG in 2005 after the 25th Commemoration of his assassination? Has this now also “lapsed” like every other institution in the land? Back in 1972, when Rodney was but thirty years old (let us not forget he received his PhD at the age of twenty-four) he said: “Most schoolboys would have heard the axiom that each generation rewrites its own history.” Rodney had studied Fanon intensely and was probably alluding to the quote above. Forty years later, we wonder how many “schoolboys” know of the Rodney aphorism, if not Fanon’s.
But Rodney developed the premise on the new generation rewriting its history in a somewhat different vein from Fanon, which reflected his training as a historian: “It does so not merely by giving different answers to the same questions but by posing entirely different questions based on the stage of development which the particular society has reached. Certain scholars will be among the first to raise the new and meaningful issue because of their sensitivity and connection with the most dynamic group in the society.”
In reference to the old men who delivered the “Rodney” lectures recently, they could not help “giving different answers to the same (old) questions”. It is not that the answers are “wrong” but they are probably irrelevant to the present realities.
One does not have to be a Hegelian to accept that structural changes in the last twenty years have created a new Geist or Weltanschauung and that the new generation needs new questions more than anything. For one, the question as to the effect of universal corruption on our everyday lives.
The “most dynamic group” that might trigger the early epiphany in “certain scholars” is the working class, the wretched of the earth, according to Rodney. Today, it is considered infra dig for the old scholars, much less the younger ones, wherever they might exist, to be “sensitive and connected” to the people whose labour sustain us all. And it is because of this phenomenon that we continue to accept all the current excesses.
Over in Brazil, as our editorial in yesterday’s edition reminded us, it was a movement that called for “free transportation” that shook the country out of its wider apathy to similar excesses. Those young people were connected.

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