Snippets of memoirs

Dec 24, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Thirty years ago, even with my exposure to history, I would have laughed cynically even though there was no philosophical reason to. I’m referring to an email my friend sent to me last week. It was from a small, successful businessman, hardly nationally known. He started out modestly and has done well with a few small ventures. He is a nationalist that has an ongoing interest in politics.
After carping about Guyana’s ongoing dystopia, in the email, he said he wants to try his hand in politics, vying for the presidency. I wished him luck. Thirty years ago, I would have brushed him off with cynical dismissal. Why I would have done that I don’t know, but I know that was the way I was 30 years ago. Now I am convinced, after being much older and wiser, that this guy could very well do it. We simply cannot and should not be flippant about any possibility in life. Life is one incredible journey, with incredible things unfolding in front of our eyes every passing day.
I was having breakfast with my wife and daughter in the kitchen and I mentioned what this businessman wrote to me. They know him because we patronize his businesses all the time. I then said to them; maybe he could become president. I told my wife and daughter that if and when I write my memoirs, there will be mention of these kinds of things; like two unbelievable stories that will fascinate my readers. They asked me for details.
These two descriptions are snippets of my memoirs, though I don’t know when I will ever publish that autobiography. I am simply too lazy and disorganized to get started. And time is going. Maybe it will never be done and the entire collection of these columns will constitute my autobiography.
Here are the two impossible circumstances. I came back home in 1984 after studies at the University of Toronto and serving the Maurice Bishop Government in Grenada (I should definitely publish my diary on the Grenada coup and the subsequent American invasion; I still have it). I went to the John Fernandes wharf one day to collect my things that were posted. What I saw I could not believe.
There was Mohamed Shaw, working as a stevedore. This was one of the best teachers of West Indian history. He worked as a full-time teacher at Guyana Oriental College. When I did “afternoon” lessons for my GCE at that school, he taught me West Indian history. From 1984 until 1992, I would meet Shaw and implore that he go back to teaching and politics that he liked. Shaw had a refrain – “I make ten times more than what I would earn as a teacher.”
Come 1992 and the PPP won the general elections. Just by chance one day, I ran into an old friend, Anand Sanasie, Secretary of the Guyana Cricket Board. He said that Shaw warned him, Sanasie, that as a businessman, he should be careful with people like Freddie Kissoon, who is always criticizing the new government.
Shaw had now become one of the most powerful men in what Marxists refer to as the coercive state machinery. He was head of BASS, a strategic branch of Customs and Excise in Berbice. Surely, life has its inexplicabilities. My history teacher turned stevedore turned custom officer had now seen me as an anti-government threat.
The second circumstance in essence is the same, only the form is different. In the same year of my return, 1984, I went to America Street to change American currency that my brother sent for my mom. A close friend that I knew as a fellow UG student, (I later taught his daughter at UG), Phulandar Kandhai, came up to me to change my money. I was stunned. From 1984 to 1992, whenever I meet Kandhai, I would implore that he put his UG education to good use by teaching. Like Shaw, Kandhai would say; “I make ten times more than I would make teaching.”
Come 1992, the PPP won the 1992 elections, and Kandhai became the PS in the Education Ministry.
In December 2011, Kandhai, who was now the Ministry’s representative in the UG Council, got up at a Council meeting, took a piece of paper from his pocket and shouted at Vice Chancellor, Lawrence Carrington, “I want these four lecturers to be dismissed, and Kissoon must go tomorrow.” Carrington refused. The Council then terminated my contract. My UG friend turned money changer turned Permanent Secretary got me out of my UG job.
Don’t ever think you know what life has in store. My business friend may end up as the President of Guyana. Don’t be cynical about it!

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