Beneath our education lies the beast

Mar 09, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I grew in two circumstances of sociology. First, I emerged from an East Indian family that supported the PPP. Secondly, I was indoctrinated with Marxist theories of life. I broke free of both formations because of education. I started to read difficult books on philosophy and history texts. Then I entered university. I met professors who taught me about the crimes of wicked tyrants. I had lecturers who told me that this world has East Indian and African rulers who behave just like the white colonial leaders I grew up to despise.
On the campus of the University of Guyana, I met African and non-Indian students and lecturers who appreciated my company and I reciprocated. We were university dwellers, where malice and envy were replaced by education about the world. My family ties to politics I left behind. I found Walter Rodney more relevant to what I wanted to do with my life.
I left UG and went to two universities in Canada. By that time I was no longer East Indian and Guyanese, psychically speaking. I was me; someone who wanted to fight the scourges of life – racism, poverty, denial of workers’ rights, denial of gender equality, colonial rule over the Third World. I met blond people in Canada with blue eyes but inside their minds were no blondness or blue colour, but people who shared the same values with me. By the time I left Canada to serve the people of Grenada, I had left my Wortmanville life behind.
I didn’t gave a damn about Jagan versus Burnham; India as my homeland, Africa as the continent to look for inspiration. I was armed with the saying of Karl Marx – “the philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. “ By the time I left Canada, I was neither anti-American, pro-American, anti- white, pro-white etc. I was me.
Frequent letter-writer, Dr. Baytoram Ramharack once wrote the following lines on me (Stabroek News, June 10, 2015); “perhaps Mr. Kissoon lacks an understanding of a rich, cultural tradition or that he may have rejected an important element of himself that defines his cultural background.” Dr. Ramharack was lambasting me for writing a column in which I opined that I was ashamed to be East Indian. He left out the context of my anger with the way Indians had voted
For Ramharack, I lost my Indianness somewhere along the way, and that made me a person without a rich cultural background. It was an ironic accusation, in that it was my rich cultural background that caused me to reject my Indian niche. I didn’t want an ethnic niche. My cultural experiences were so rich that I didn’t want to be identified with any ethnic community.
This column was written in support of Dr. David Hinds, a friend of mine from our youthful days in the Working People’s Alliance in the seventies. David observed last week in a letter to this newspaper that for African Guyanese, Forbes Burnham is all good. They cannot and will not accept he was also capable of bad policies and that he did do bad things. David went on to say that Guyanese Indians see Jagan and the PPP as saints who never committed serious violations when in government. This has been, is, and will always be a depressing topic, and is best left to the historians and their symposia.
What David Hinds’ narrative about race in Guyana brings into focus is the role of education in civilizing Homo sapiens. Long, long ago in a time and in a book I cannot recall, someone wrote that race wars were encouraged and started not by the illiterate peasant or semi-literate labourer, but the educated mind. If any statement on politics is true, it is that accurate, historical fact. Once the cry to kill the other side is reverberating, uneducated men will run down the street and kill people of other races. But the poison of hate was brewed on the raging fire of intellectual rhetoric.
This is what tantalizes my psyche as a human being. How can you pass through a university door, mix with great souls, hobnob with selfless people and taste the cultures of the world, yet justify a leader’s atrocity, all because that leader belongs to your race category? Around the world there are African Guyanese and Indian Guyanese who are highly educated, hold top jobs in top institutions, and they are embracers of the myth that Burnham was a great, good man who never committed the wrongs people say he did and that Cheddi Jagan was the father of the nation who was a good man. Please!

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