Sparse turnout for Lindo Creek church service

Jun 22, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

On Wednesday afternoon at 2PM, the families of the eight murdered Lindo Creek miners held a church service in memory of the victims ten years after their death. It was held at the Brickdam Cathedral. I invited Dr. David Hinds to accompany me. I would say the eight victims had about three relatives representing each of them.
If you count in the Lindo Creek Commissioner, Justice Trotman, his assistant, the Commissioner’s lawyer, Patrice Henry, myself and David plus twenty others, that was the congregation. For such a terrible tragedy in which eight miners were senselessly slaughtered, I would say that was a disappointing turn out.
In any country, such a national tragedy would have brought out more than two hundred persons in that church. There was no one that I saw from the Government, the Opposition, individual political parties (David Hinds was there on his own behalf and not representing the WPA), the Bar Association, the Women’s Lawyers Association, the Gold Miners Association, trade unions, any of the groups in Guyana that say they are involved in human rights advocacy. My count of such groups would include the Justice Institute, SASOD, Guyana Human Rights Association, Red Thread, etc.
Why such a small attendance for such a national tragedy? I think it has to do with the class structure of Guyanese society. I never went outside the confines of my poor, working class environment in Wortmanville in South Georgetown until I entered the University of Guyana. It was like an entirely different country I was in.
I grew up seeing what my dad went through when he worked at the Georgetown Cricket Club and the Portuguese Club on Woolford Avenue in the sixties and early seventies. Then I experienced his experience when I became a UG freshman.
It was virtual apartheid at UG. Colour and class dominated UG in the era that I attended that institution. I graduated from UG earning myself only one middle class friend – Carl Singh, who later became Chancellor of the Judiciary. And though, I was very close to Carl at UG and we were good friends. I wasn’t classy enough to be invited to his wedding. That was one of the memories I have of middle class snobbery that is lodged in my mind.
What I saw at UG in 1974 never went away in Guyana. It has always been there and it will always be there. Those who think Burnham and Jagan extirpated it are fooling themselves, maybe hiding their hurt by pretending that the great Jagan and Burnham decolonized Guyana.
I left UG, went abroad and studied at some top class universities, came home and became a UG lecturer but class and colour reminded me that I must know my place. I saw class and colour and their potency when I was in the Working People’s Alliance.
I saw them in action when I was a columnist at both the Catholic Standard and Stabroek News. But Father Andrew Morrison of the Catholic Standard never made me felt uncomfortable. He was a different Portuguese.
The Lindo Creek victims were small income earners. Even the owner of the camp was not a wealthy gold miner at all. If those dead men were from the rich mining class, the Brickdam Cathedral would have been transformed last Wednesday into an Italian fashion fair – fancy women dressed in expensive black dresses imported from Miami with matching tiaras imported from Milan. Their husbands’ Kenneth Cole shirts imported from New York would have cost more than a year’s income of a sugar worker.
This is class and colour in Guyana. This is post-colonial Guyana where Burnham and Jagan were supposed to make us proud that we were a working a class nation and black was beautiful. That since 1966 has been and is a mirage. If the state wrongfully demolishes a housing area in Sophia, you can bet your last dollar, only Nigel Hughes would take the case pro bono.
If a middle class woman of light complexion is wrongfully arrested by a traffic cop, lawyers would line up outside her house to do the case for her.
Make no mistake, if some of those murdered miners were relatives of the wealthy gold industry, the streets outside the Brickdam Cathedral would have been ringed with SUVs, some of which would take a public servant one million years to buy.
I go to the National Park each day, having to pass the motor racing club directly opposite the park. Inside the club has a gym. When I look at the members going in and going out, it makes me wonder where the Black Power movement of the sixties is buried.

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Sparse turnout for Lindo Creek church service

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