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Rudy James: An immense appreciation

Feb 21, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One of my favourite Guyanese has died. The second nicest UG personality I have met in my twenty-six years as a lecturer at that institution has died. One of Guyana’s brilliant multi-racial citizens has died. One of the persons I could approach for any kind of assistance, material or otherwise, has died.
Law professor Rudolph James has passed away. Guyana and the intellectual community have lost a good soul. I met Rudy when I joined the teaching staff at UG in 1986. I went into UG with the personality I always possessed – argumentative, combative and willing to engage all and sundry over the things I believe were right.
I earned few friends with that kind of activism, but one was Rudy James. When I was considered too aggressive and confrontational, Rudy was a pillar of support for me at UG. I can remember at one of the sessions of the weekly meetings of the sub-committee of the Faculty Board under the deanship of Professor Ken Danns, the late Sybil Patterson, representing the Sociology Department, asked for a decision to discipline me.
I was the representative of the junior lecturers in the Social Sciences faculty at the meeting. Rudy, with his usual aplomb, succinctly told the gathering there are many more people in the faculty that need to be disciplined other than Freddie Kissoon. The room was silent for a second. The faculty’s business continued as if the discipline issue was never raised. Rudy was Head of the Department of Political Science and Law at the time, and I was a lecturer in the same department.
I hardly saw Rudy the past fifteen years. He was in and out of Guyana and UG, often having a commitment to Papua New Guinea. The last time we met for serious conversation as two friends was long ago, in 2005, at the New Thriving Restaurant, when it was situated at the junction of Camp Street and Brickdam.
The violence in Buxton took up the greater part of our discussion. He was African Guyanese, but had absolutely no positive feeling whatsoever for what was taking place in Buxton. Whereas many African Guyanese saw the events in Buxton through anti-government lenses and viewed the situation there as pressure on the government of the day to end discrimination against African Guyanese, for Rudy, the gunmen were anything but politicized fighters. Like Eusi Kwayana, David Hinds, Andaiye and Lincoln Lewis, his perspectives on Buxton were highly enlightened.
Rudy James was a tall, imposing man, whose personality was what you can call a winnable won. I doubt any human working with Rudy ever had even a modicum of dislike for him. For me, he was Mr. UG. I have not met another UG academic, apart from Sister Mary Noel Menezes, who was a more pleasant and loving person.
I never understood why he was not interested in a political profile. I would ask him many times, and with his imitable smile, he would say. ‘Boy, politics in this country is something else.” He would not expand. He wrote one of the finest academic books ever to be written about Guyana. It is unfortunate that in the plethora of thoughts on the 1980 constitution, his book is seldom mentioned.
Co-authored with Professor Harold Lutchman, “Law and the Political Environment in Guyana” is a brilliant description and analysis of the 1980 constitution. What is absorbing about the text is a vivid portrayal of how the framers set out to deceive the Guyanese people in the composition of the document. The book shows where one article allows a brake on presidential power then there would be another article that nullifies that restraint.
What “Law and the Political Environment in Guyana” sought to do was to expose the deception of the then President, Forbes Burnham, in preserving his hegemony through constitutional farce and engineering. As Guyana is currently in the throes of a constitutional crisis, I would recommend a reading of this book. And it comes at a time when one of its brilliant authors has died, which makes its reading morally compulsory. The book is out of print and I would be happy to loan it. Please call me at 614-5927 or [email protected].
My wife knows how close Rudy and I were, and when she heard of his passing, she exclaimed, “My God, so many people close to us are dying”. I am so sorry that my country and the University of Guyana could not have had more of Rudy over the past twenty years. He was a fine, admirable Guyanese that if you had met and interacted with him, you would have liked him immensely, as I did.

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