The face of the colonial master still hovers

Jul 15, 2015 Letters

Dear Editor,
I find it nauseating as a patriot, nationalist and Pan-Africanist to read in the local newspapers almost on a daily basis Bryan Hunt’s comments on every aspect of Guyana’s internal affairs, from when we should hold local government elections, who must sit in the parliament, how we must vote in international forums and how we should manage the wealth from our resources to the legalization of same sex marriage etc.
Bryan Hunt is the United States Charge d’Affaires.
Pan-Africanist, Kwame Ture, cautioned us many moons ago that “Black visibility is not Black Power”. He was explaining the deceptive and sophisticated system of control exerted under neo-colonialism. When we were a colony we could see the white faces in power, dictating our every move.
I am constantly amazed at the power of white supremacy, especially the way it has imprisoned the minds of non-white peoples. Too many of our leaders are so intellectually incarcerated that they are not even aware of their slavish behaviour and utterances.
Many of them, on the one hand, proclaim pride in their own culture, and relish events where they wear the clothes, eat the foods and dance the dances of their culture but are at the same time unable to view the world from a perspective that is rooted in their own culture, instead viewing everything with a European gaze, a gaze that is so instilled in them that as I said, they are often unaware of their slavish mentality.
African intellectual warrior, Jacob Carruthers said, “Neo-colonialism besieged Africa at the very moment of political ‘independence’ precisely because the African leaders had been nurtured on foreign ideologies and alien principles.” These same alien ideologies and principles – Soviet-style Marxism, Neo-liberal Capitalism, the Westminster system and so-called Liberal Democracy that have Africa and much of the ‘Third World’, including Guyana, in such a mess today.
This is what made Forbes Burnham an outstanding thinker and leader. Burnham was determined to steer us away from this type of ideological, political, cultural and economic enslavement. Recalling Burnham’s vision for true independence and self-determination all those years ago reminds us of the degree to which our nation has degenerated, making our current state of affairs seem all the more depressing.
Hundreds of years of colonialism ensured that all colonized peoples were indoctrinated with a Eurocentric perspective on all matters – theological, philosophical, political, cultural and economic. In a nutshell this perspective instilled in us the idea that, in the words of African historian W. E. B. Du Bois, “Whiteness is ownership of the Earth.” This is a false notion that consciously or unconsciously most of our people hold onto to this day.
Afrocentric scholar, Molefi Kete Asante points out “the liberation of the minds of African people (and all colonized peoples) will be a tougher battle than the eradication of settler (colonial) regimes.”
To free oneself from this type of mental slavery requires each one of us to engage in a conscious and determined act of relocating and repositioning ourselves and our worldview within our own culture. Ideologies, as well as political and economic systems are all products of culture. Europeans have taken what is particular and specific to them and their culture, and in their arrogance they have universalized what is an ethnocentric worldview.
They relentlessly enforce this ethnocentric worldview worldwide in a variety of ways, both overt and covert, using brutal military force when all other methods of coercion fail.
It is only by the conscious act of emancipating ourselves from mental slavery that we are able to become fully aware of, and resist the ongoing tyranny of White Supremacy.
Bryan Hunt, the British High Commissioner, Greg Quinn, the Canadian High Commissioner, Nicole Giles and the European Union representative to Guyana would do well to remember that they are from a group of nations that has no moral or historical right to pronounce on how Guyana or any ‘Third World’ nation governs itself.
They need to be mindful that they represent a group of nations that has committed more human rights abuses, carried out more ethnic cleansing and genocide, committed more war crimes and plundered more of this earth’s natural resources than any other nation or group of nations in the history of humankind.
Gerald A. Perreira
Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP)

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