The naked truth

Sep 14, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Next Thursday, the people of Scotland will vote in a referendum to determine whether they will become an independent nation.
The people of Guyana never had the opportunity to vote in support of independence from Great Britain. Our political leaders decided that we should be independent. All that was necessary was to negotiate the terms and date of our independence.
But what if the people of Guyana had to vote on this issue? How would they have voted?
I am not sure that the majority of Guyanese would have supported independence. A large number of the Guyanese people would have voted against independence. And I will tell you why, and why this is an important issue even today.
A great many Guyanese were mentally conditioned to accept the superiority of foreign rule. One of the reasons why there were not sustained insurrections and revolutions against colonial rule was because of this conditioning. The British did an excellent job of conditioning its subjects to accept the ways of life and values of the Empire.
That conditioning would have allowed for many ordinary Guyanese to have voted against independence. The propertied classes would have also felt threatened by independence and they too would have voted against independence. When you add up those who would have been against independence because of colonial conditioning and those whose economic interest lay in Guyana remaining a colony, it would have represented a sizeable chunk of the population.
But the reason why I do not think that a referendum on Guyanese independence would have enjoyed the support of the majority of Guyanese is because of the multi-ethnic nature of our society. In such societies, what is important is who rules or rather which group rules.
We refuse to acknowledge this truth. We refuse to concede that the fundamental political issue in Guyana is that each ethnic group wants to be ruled by its own. This is the ethnic dilemma of Guyana. It is not about who has done better in governing the country. It is that we judge how the country is governed through an ethnic lens, because the various ethnic groups feel secure in being ruled by their own.
For this reason, I think if there had been a referendum to decide whether Guyana should become independent, the vote would not have been carried, because it would have been opposed by those who were conditioned to accept the superiority of colonial mores and values; it would have been opposed by those with economic interests; and depending on which party was in power, it would have been opposed by the ethnic group that was in opposition to that party.
Each of the major ethnic groups would have wanted the party they supported to have been the one to lead Guyana to independence. The supporters of the PNC would not have wanted Jagan to lead Guyana to independence. Indeed, Burnham prevaricated on the question of independence when the PPP was in power because he did not want Guyana to become independent under Jagan. He made all manner of silly arguments including the need for Guyana to attain independence under a federated Caribbean. The bottom line, however, was that he did not want Jagan to lead Guyana to independence. This was the only reason why Guyana did not attain independence earlier.
I think there were many supporters of the PPP, also, who were not keen on independence being attained under Burnham. But to Jagan’s credit, he sacrificed political power for Guyana’s independence. It was the most selfless political act by any political leader in the English-speaking Caribbean, something that has never been replicated in the Region.
Jagan as Premier did not want to leave the talks in Britain without a firm commitment on independence. He knew that the British and the Americans wanted him out, but he dearly wanted Guyana to be free of the shackles of colonialism, and so he sacrificed his political future in exchange for a commitment on independence. Behind the backs of the leaders of his party, he signed an agreement allowing the British to determine the electoral system for elections in 1964.
But even that selfless act I do not believe would have allowed the majority of his supporters to have voted in support of independence under Burnham. Methinks most of them would have voted against this.
This brings us to the present political situation. Until we accept that the various ethnic groups want to be ruled by their own representatives, we will continue to propose and squabble over minor political issues in Guyana.
The bottom line is that if we want political stability in Guyana, there has to be greater political cooperation between the various parties, because it will be hard for one party to rule over the supporters of the other party, regardless of the size of one’s parliamentary majority.

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