What would Naipaul say about 50 years of Post – Colonial Guyana?

May 25, 2016 Letters

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Dear Editor,
V.S Naipaul wrote that “the history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and nothing was ever achieved in the West Indies”. Naipaul’s indictment emerged from a provocative mind that dared conceive the existence and nature of a ‘Caribbean Void, where interaction is built upon a cycle of brutality, lack of achievement and mediocrity’.
There were many contributions in your newspapers reviewing Guyana’s post-colonial achievements and failures. Naipaul may not be celebrating. His point may be that during the period of Caribbean prehistory starting about 10,000 BC and since noting was created in the Caribbean that shifted its historical arc of accomplishments. Although not an island Guyana is ‘Caribbean’ in most respects.
Naipaul’s lamented brutality existed; between the Guyanese state and citizens and between the haves and the have nothings. Interaction in post-colonial Guyana remained in essence, colonial, and even medieval. Differences between colonial and post-colonial interaction are irrelevant. The relevant lesson, given man’s achievements at civilization, is that interaction characterized by brutality is not necessary for achievement, and therefore must not be repeated. He might therefore say, for example, that instead of conceptualizing a culture built around ideas of freedom, that former PPP Attorney General Anil Nandall asserted that he is a “higher breed of humanity”; presumably, an entitlement to impose his beliefs on others, and possibly much worse, is retrogressive. That this is precisely a source or cause of brutality, not enlightenment; a march backward to a medieval world in both image and content that haunts Guyana.
He might disagree with Stalinists that power is not necessarily projected through the barrel of a gun, and that state violence, repression, terror, intimidation and fear, exclusion and discrimination are not evidence of strength. Are these not post-colonial replicas of Naipaul’s brutality? He might view Post-Colonial disorder in Guyana as evidence of a people who are without direction or purpose. Just go back and review the writings over the past fifty years. There are no descriptions of a flourishing and prosperous culture. Unless the writers were only villainous propagandists, and some surely were, the story and big picture is one of disintegration, degeneration and decay in all domains of Guyanese life
At a lower level, below fundamental conception, he might be concerned that an entrenched colonialist-communist-socialist continuum of authoritarianism, absolutism and privilege, continue to strongly influence the culture of political organization and government.
His penetrating mind, concerning the causes of failure to accomplish, might see the PPP-Civic and the PNC Reform as unimaginative and frankly ‘empty’ schemes of political organization, merely designed to deceive the people rather than real devices capable of accomplishing anything. He might ask if this is best our minds can conceive. He might say that mediocrity in Government is self-evident. One only needs to browse the ‘Audit reports’. It deserves no discussion. Suffice to say that the culture of impunity in government, described in the Audits, originate from abuse of power and misuse of governmental authority leading to unlawful, arbitrary and corrupt acts without any accountability, and, commonplace duplicity, malfeasance and rank ineptitude; cultural elements that contribute nothing to progress.
He might conclude, on these two points that countries fail to become anything because ‘Void’ exists. Government, today, is not a medieval or colonial monarch. It is a facilitator of collective action and must do so without inhibiting individual expressions of free will. Mechanisms for consensus building must be invented as an absolute minimum necessity. Hopefully therefore, fundamental conception will deliver a paradigm for the Constitution and rule of law that could, itself, be sufficiently illuminating and imaginative as to effect a really substantive change of direction
He might suggest that Post-colonial Guyana has not provided the world with a single imaginative example of integration among its ethnicities. Singapore has achieved this during the same time span. Exasperatingly, Guyana failed to accomplish a basic task in today’s civilized context; a people who could, even while disagreeing, deliberate about the future and thereby collectively conceive and invent solutions that were never devised elsewhere. Indeed, its ‘fringe’ voices have deliberately manipulated divisiveness, thereby inhibiting the possibilities of nationhood. Without this starting point how would it be possible to organize as a force, essential to create anything?
He might suggest that economically, Guyana never really left the colonial station. An historian once asked, ‘how could a people call themselves a nation when they do not make their own garments or shoes’? And this is the lowest round of accomplishment. What about medicines and medical science to save the population from disease; what about transportation vehicles, machines, tools, or anything used by nations to build and to defend itself? Entrepreneurship, free enterprise and free markets are essential ingredients to this effort in today’s world, if only because they contain elements of ingenuity and motion not present in government.
Mr. Editor, Naipaul might ask, did Guyana squander its colonial inheritance? Were 50 precious years and therefore the education, talents and labour of one and one half generations wasted, and potentially those of the next emerging generation? What is Guyana, and what is the destination of its people? Does post-colonial Guyana, so far, prove him right? Has Naipaul’s curse exposed Guyana’s enduring mediocrity?
Ivor Carryl

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