Freddie does not get it

Jul 30, 2013 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
In his column dated July 23, 2013, under the caption, “A woman I greatly admired has died, Goodbye”, Freddie Kissoon took issue with the idea that people, as racial or ethnic groupings, should subjectively recount their historical experiences. The woman in question was Helen Thomas, a feisty liberal journalist who incurred the wrath of several Republican Administrations for asking questions at White House press briefings that they would rather not answer.
I surmise that in some ways Freddie perceived Helen Thomas as his journalistic role model, and to some extent, they shared similar experiences. She was ostracized by the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush Republican Administrations, and pilloried constantly by right wing political pundits, not too unlike the experiences Freddie endures under a PPP administration.
But to get back to the main point of this missive. Freddie Kissoon wrote, “Last Friday a Guyanese academic in the presence of Dr. David Hinds and others told me that a race should write its own history if the truths of one’s race are to come out. I disagreed. After the meeting I told promising, young activist Norville Hinds that Africans, White people, East Indians writing their own history respectively may end up hiding the truths. Embellishments based on fiction may very well be included”.
Freddie, in further expansion of his position, asserted that quote, “As a trained historian, I am contemptuous of Afro-centric, Euro-centric and other centric approaches to writing about the origins and contours of civilization. For me all of these centrics are historically weak”.
So in one fell swoop, Freddie Kissoon arrogantly dismisses the efforts of the Anta Diops, the Ivan Vansertimas, the John Henrik Clarkes, the Walter Rodneys, all so-called Afro-centric Historians who courageously and by dint of arduous investigation and dedication, committed themselves to dismissing the myth and racially conceived notions that People of African descent had no history other than that of beasts of burden, and were genetically and intellectually inferior.
To say I am surprised at this kind of reasoning coming from someone who frequently chastizes others for ignoring the nuances, contexts and complexities of history and human social existence, would be an understatement. I mean, the argument being advanced by Freddie is eerily similar to that of right wing pundits and organizations in the US, put forth against the recognition of February as a month to recognize the contributions of Africans to the development of America and the world.
On its face it appears balanced and plausible. However, when one considers what existed and still exists in the minds of many about black people, and what children of African descent had to accept as their origins from an educational and historical curriculum, specifically designed to perpetuate the myth that they belonged to an inferior class of humans, then one feels compelled to painfully ask, can Freddie Kissoon really be so obtuse?
For as the late and erudite African American Historian and Teacher John Henrik Clarke postulated, “Africa and its people are the most written about and the least understood of all of the world’s people. This condition started in the 15th and 16th Centuries with the beginning of the slave trade system. The Europeans not only colonialized the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people”.
Freddie Kissoon arrogantly expresses abhorrence for the kind of information that truthfully and unapologetically answered essential questions about the history and experiences of people of African descent.
I believe that Freddie Kissoon attended primary school during the same period me and my 12 brothers and sisters did in the Wortmanville/Werk-en-rust Area of Georgetown. He went to St Mary’s, I believe, and we went to Smith Church Congregational. He, like all the children of Guyana, studied English History and learned about the glory of Britannia and its exploits.
Freddie’s primary ancestry was linked to India, a group that entered Guyana culture intacto, albeit under labour and social conditions that were horrible. Those conditions, while in no way can be presented as equivalent to the experiences of Africans and the First Peoples of Guyana under the dehumanizing circumstances of slavery and coerced cultural disassociations, were, nonetheless, oppressive, discriminatory and brutal.
For anyone to even suggest that there is some kind of equivalency in the Euro Centric recounting of history, and the corrections engaged in by African Scholars, represent an absurdity of gross proportions. Moreover, for this to be the perspective of someone who presents himself as a repository of cultural universality and empathy is, to say the least, disquieting.
Doctor John Henrik Clarke points out that “History is not everything, but a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of the day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but most importantly, what they must be”.
If we were to accept Freddie’s argument that the recounting of human experiences from an African World View is unacceptable, we would be left with a map that positions the origin of people of African Descent as that of enslaves, with no civilized history or contributions worthy of note. We would be left with a linear compass that stratifies White Europeans at the extreme positive end of a human continuum, and black Africans at the opposite end.
The descendants of the enslaved would have to accept a status of permanent inferiority, and be contented with whatever discriminatory and marginalizing social and economic conditions are imposed on them. Analogously, we would be that dalit/untouchable caste in every society, because every other group would be closer to the positive end of the human continuum than we were.
For the edification of Freddie Kissoon there is a marked difference between the motivations that spurred the Eurocentric recounting of human history and that of African and other scholars and historians who engaged in correcting the myths and hubristically-conceived notions presented in the former.
The former was borne out of a need to create a world where human attributes and intellectuality were linked to where a group was positioned on a continuum of race and colour. The latter was borne out of an imperative to correct those misconceptions that are responsible for, and provide rationale for, prejudice and discrimination against people of African descent.
The Eurocentric version of human history extols the contributions of Einstein, of the Greeks, of their contributions to human development and progress. It does not educate or enlighten on the fact that in an era of oppressive social, cultural and economic vicissitudes, Doctor Charles Drew, a black man, pioneered the process for storing blood plasma; a medical process essential in preserving human life on earth today.
It does not educate and enlighten on the fact that the traffic lights, a system that regulate the flow of vehicular traffic across the world today, was invented by Garret T Morgan, a black man. It does not educate and enlighten about the hundreds of inventions and contributions made to the human society by people of African descent. It does not, educate and enlighten, even purely from a business accounting and profitability perspective, the monetary and economic value of the centuries of free labour that went into the early development of every single society in which African Slave labour was utilized.
Like Saint Francis of Assisi, these African historians and others went into their examinations with the conviction that there would be things they could not change, that there would be things that they could change, and with a clear understanding of the difference between the two.
My charge to Freddie, whether he is of a mind to embrace it or not, is to festina lente, to hasten slowly as he proceeds to draw conclusions on issues that are far more complex and nuanced than the manner in which he chooses to present them.
I am not arguing that only Africans should write or have opinions or perspectives on the experiences of Africans. I am asserting that if anyone assumes, as a starting point of examination, that the Eurocentric presentation of human history, and the process engaged in to correct that which was mischievously presented as a fact of a people’s history, culture and experiences, are twin seeds conceived in the same pod, then whatever conclusions they come to will be a product of that starting point. That is what I am saying.
Keith Williams

 

 

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