Be true to your thoughts, you will be what you want to be

Oct 19, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Last week over lunch, Lincoln Lewis explained an incident in 1968 between the bauxite union and the government in Mackenzie. He described the betrayal of the workers and mistreatment of the union by a government that was supposed to be on the side of workers, workers who helped that government to power. Lincoln said people who you think would be better in the use of power many times turn out to be worse.
I mentioned this event because I want to write my memoirs. I made a start, only to find that I cannot locate the notes I begun with. Should I write my memoirs before the next general elections, I wonder if I would succeed the way Kevin Pietersen did with his autobiography? The revelations of Pietersen are reverberating throughout the cricketing world.
I have seen so much nastiness in people that this nation look up to, and that the Guyanese people trust to be democratic, that it will cause many to think that the people who criticize the PPP aren’t different from them at all. The reason for this column stems from the personal pleas I got from two lovely persons who were shocked at what I revealed about Miles Fitzpatrick in my last Saturday column.
Both of them said that they cannot believe what I wrote about Fitzpatrick because for them, Fitzpatrick is a huge figure of positive value. They said if Fitzpatrick did what he did, there must be an explanation. They wanted to know why I think Fitzpatrick acted like this because for them, he is not that type.
I told them I don’t normally lie and they should be prepared for a heart attack if I enumerate the vicious attitude of Miles Fitzpatrick towards me. And they are many like Fitzpatrick who I know fought against the PNC, now fighting against the PPP, that may be more intolerant and undemocratic. On the issue of why Fitzpatrick was so poisonous, I have spoken on the subject to two persons only; they are two very close friends – Catholic Standard editor, Colin Smith, and my former student, attorney Gino Persaud.
No need to mention Fitzpatrick’s legal defence of the Stabroek News only and not the columnist, when Dr. Hughley Hanoman sued me and the paper. In April of one year, Mr. de Caires, the editor, went on holiday and left Fitzpatrick as editor. The gentleman made my life miserable, openly telling me in writing that a newspaper should not have columnists, a letter I have kept up to this day.
Fitzpatrick finally succeed in removing me when, in 1994, de Caires called me in to say that Fitzpatrick was in a rage over my column which described Jocelyn Dow of the WPA as being facilitated by Dr. Kenneth King of the PNC as one of the opposition members of the Elections Commission.
It was the truth, but Dow was alarmed that I exposed her. She ran to Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick got his chance to remove me. Next, one of Stabroek’s senior journalists got admitted into UG illegally. That was in my Faculty and it was unthinkable that the Dean would do that. In a quarrel with the journalist, she knew Fitzpatrick hated me, so she complained to him. Fitzpatrick advised that she call in the police.
Fitzpatrick never advised Moses Nagamootoo to call in the police when Doreen de Caires was very abusive to him for walking up the Stabroek stairs without checking with security. Fitzpatrick never advised the Stabroek staff to call in the police over the extreme loud-mouth insults of Doreen de Caires, one of the most ill-mannerly women I ever met in my life. Finally, Father Morrison asked me to help with the editing of his book. The next week Father said sorry, because Fitzpatrick refused to have me on the team.
There is no scope in a column to analyze the Fitzpatrick hate. But briefly, from the fifties onwards, the Fitzpatrick class was the crème de la crème of Guyana. The Fitzpatricks, De Caires, Ian McDonalds, Joey Kings, Kit Nascimentos, Peter Taylors, among others too numerous to mention, were the inheritors of the white colonial world
My mistake was that I didn’t realize that I was a dark-skinned nobody from Wortmanville that should always bow to the class of the Fitzpatricks and acknowledge them as our masters. I was the only one to refuse to do that and it brought out the aristocratic hate to the fullest in Fitzpatrick.
My parting advice to young people is stick to your dreams, be true to your thoughts and you will be what you want to be in the end. Am I not still around and aren’t you still reading me? Yes, I will write my memoirs one day.

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