Responding to Kissoon's article on Professor Gibson

Responding to Kissoon’s article on Professor Gibson

Jan 12, 2020 Letters

Dear Editor,

Please this letter is in response to Mr. Freddie Kissoon’s article “The African-Guyanese woman many Indians wrongly dislike” (January 11, 2020)
Mr. Kissoon wrote: “Yesterday, Professor Gibson shut the mouths of Indians who dislike her and thinks she doesn’t like Indians”.
First some background why Indians, specifically Hindus “dislike” her.
On December 29, 2006, the Ethnic Relations Commission of Guyana (ERC) issued a decision which agreed with the Indian Arrival Committee’s (IAC) complaint that Dr. Gibson’s book, The Cycle of Racial Oppression in Guyana, “peddled and spread racial hatred in Guyana among its principal ethnic groups, and that it had as its central theme that Hindus in Guyana were oppressing Afro-Guyanese.” The Commission agreed that “the publication was deeply flawed and profoundly unscientific. And so the work must be regarded as wholly lacking in academic character and as representing nothing further than the personal views, unfortunately distorted and regrettably prejudiced, of a private individual.” As a remedy, the ERC concluded that, in the interest of greater ethnic harmony, public institutions carrying a copy of the publication withdraw it from general public circulation.
This referenced 2003 book is not the only writing on the theme of ‘Hinduism calling for the oppression of Afro-Guyanese’. In 2005 she followed up with Sacred Duty – Hinduism & Violence in Guyana. She also had an article published in a Black Journal of Studies in the USA which I rebutted in the Guyana Journal; and was seen on TV in the USA espousing the said ideology. Her writings also led to a group of very concerned academics and senior civil servants and myself petitioning UWI (after the killings of eleven sleeping Indians at Lusignan). I followed up writing a more expansive book – Under Attack! The Caribbean Indian.
“Professor Gibson [will not] shut the mouths of Indians who dislike her” until she unequivocally denounces her writings and views on the theme of Hinduism-led Indo-Guyanese oppression of Afro-Guyanese. I am not optimistic as lately in the Guyana print media she again linked Hinduism and Indian ethnicity to domestic violence and suicides in Guyana.
(I neglected to mention that the book I wrote – Under Attack! The Caribbean Indian – is self-published and not on the internet, but can be had at Austin’s Bookstore in Georgetown.
About a year ago, a close friend, a former senior civil servant of Guyana now in Canada, told me that Mr. Hamilton Green of the PNC/R called him from Guyana, enquiring of him where he could get a copy as he had overhead ‘university students discussing it’.
Since the book has currency I will put it on the internet soon.)
Yours faithfully,
Veda Nath Mohabir

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