The Children of Politics

May 17, 2015 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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COUNTRYMAN – Stories about life, in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective

By Dennis Nichols
By the time this write-up is published, a lot of tears will have been shed across the country. The tears would have been not only the joy of the victors and the pain of the losers in the just-concluded general elections, but also the release of pent-up emotions from ordinary Guyanese of every race and class who prayed and pleaded for peace amidst unsettling tension.
Last week I wrote about the questioning mind of a child. This week I am continuing on a related theme – the impact, and the repercussions our words and actions may have on the minds and subsequent actions of children, whether they are our biological offspring or not. It is an easily overlooked and misunderstood aspect of a child’s social and emotional growth.
And despite knowledge to the contrary, adults tend to see children based on grown-up notions about attitude and behaviour. It is so difficult to remember, truly remember, the way we felt and thought and reacted as children to the things we saw adults say and do. We forget that a child’s understanding of adult issues is usually undergirded by innocence and a kind of idealism that most adults have become cynical about.
I was a young child in 1961 when the announcement that the People’s Progressive Party won the general elections that year was made, shortly after it had been rumoured that the People’s National Congress had won. For many people, joy turned to bafflement and sadness. Confused, I stood later at the corner of Princes and Russell Streets and watched as cars drove past with huge enamel cups strapped on top and pointer brooms dragging from their trunks along the road, symbolizing the triumph of one party and the humiliation of the other. (The broom was then the symbol of the PNC party) Even then, I felt something was wrong with that scenario.
The next year, my ninth birthday on February 16 was celebrated with fire – burning, looting and shooting. There had been other Black Fridays in our country’s history, but none like that day in 1962. Although I was both excited and apprehensive, the searing tear gas, the booming dynamite, and the red sky that evening left the most indelible imprints on my mind. Over the next two years there were more upheavals; more rioting, more burning. There were strikes, racial confrontations, and loss of life. It was no longer exciting. And it was the adults we listened to and trusted who were responsible for these things.
For those of us who grew up in the nineteen sixties and seventies, it was not easy to discern the truth behind the actions of the adults who were our leaders then. Burnham and Jagan were larger-than-life figures to me, and more inscrutable than any ancient deity; the politicians who surrounded them maybe a little less so, but still formidable barriers to real discernment. I was mildly disturbed by the contradiction of people saying that the two major political parties were race-based groups when in fact they had their genesis as a singular, multiethnic movement, and even after the 1955 split, retained a number of Afro and Indo Guyanese in each party.
Incidentally, it wasn’t until I was in my mid to late teens that I began to see the ‘ordinary humanness’ of Burnham and Jagan. In the case of Burnham, I saw him visiting the Rangasammy family that I knew, a few doors from where I lived on South Road, and the Guyana labour Union next door, a building where my friends and I frequently played table tennis. During one such visit, he took a racquet and ‘tried out his hand’ with one of my awestruck friends.
And the first time I saw Jagan close up was at the funeral of a Tiger Bay youngster killed by the police in 1972. After the service at St. George’s Cathedral, Jagan stood on the church steps, and as I passed by about a dozen yards away, he smiled and waved at me as if I were a friend. After these ‘interactions’ I saw them for maybe the first time as ordinary men who did ordinary things like play table tennis, smile and wave at strangers. But could I trust them as leaders?
The mid-sixties to mid-seventies period was a confusing, but heady time for young Guyanese like me, especially, but not exclusively, Afro Guyanese. Black pride and Black power were filtering in from the United States, and locally this helped translate into Guyanese pride displayed, to some extent, in how we dressed. American bell bottom pants, ‘kickers’ shoes, afros and afro combs were complemented by the African dashiki and the Guyanese shirt jac, all of which were integrated into a distinctly local trend.
A sense of nationalism was growing out of independence, and things like support for southern African freedom fighters, nationalization, our Feed, Clothe and House the nation (FCH) drive, National Service, the ‘small man will become a real man’ slogan, and something called cooperative socialism. We felt, more than understood these developments.
Therefore although by then we had become young adults, many of us could not fully come to terms with the convoluted and confusing politics we had grown up with. In my mind there developed a notion that even the adults who said they understood what was going on, really didn’t, or certainly not as well as they led us to believe. To this day, that notion sticks with me.
But back then, my friends and I, young and unrealistic, felt these were all wonderful things, especially when reiterated by politicians of the day. However some of the more focused adults we related to, had begun to sound ominous warnings, and again our minds were becoming confused. I and other teenaged friends hung out briefly with some adults from the Movement Against Oppression (MAO) group in Tiger Bay, from whom we ‘learnt’ that Burnham was displaying some dictatorial tendencies and was actually moving away from the kind of idealistic socialism we imagined would transform Guyana.
As for Jagan, we were unsure of where he stood, especially as he had practically declared his party as Marxist-Leninist, but later offered ‘critical support’ to Burnham’s policies which, by the early eighties were seeing Guyanese queuing up to purchase some of the most basic commodities, including food items that had been banned, and substitutes that many felt were inferior to those items. He seemed to us almost as a lost soul wandering in the opposition wilderness, but again we later found out we were being misled by other adults who maybe underrated or deliberately misrepresented the cunning and tenacity of the man.
Today, we who were children in the sixties, now have children and grandchildren of our own. Today, the PPP/C and the APNU/AFC Coalition are still embroiled in some of the political and racial issues that started more than half a century ago. What do we tell our children now as a virtual fiasco was played out for days after the May 11th watershed elections? The truth, I guess, if we truly know what it is.

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