Vincent Alexander: Who speaks for African Guyanese?

Oct 03, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – In my column of Saturday, August 29, 2020, I indicated that a response was forthcoming to a letter Vincent Alexander wrote on me in the newspapers of August 22, 2020 headlined: “African-Guyanese do not need Freddie Kissoon to speak for them.”
Alexander was reacting to a trenchant criticism I made of him for which I am unapologetic and would repeat for polemical clarity. My accusation was moral hypocrisy. It was Alexander himself who informed the Guyanese public that when the five CARICOM Prime Ministers came here to mediate in the election impasse, the International Decade for People of African Descent – Guyana chapter (IDAPADA-G) of which Alexander is the chairman, wrote them and the UN to request consideration of issues that were more exigent and compelling than the election results. There were no follow up from the CARICOM and the UN.
I suggested in a column that Alexander may have been the reason for the dismissal of the letter because the five PMs had to know that he was part of the GECOM commission and was in support of a fraudulent process that GECOM was involved in that would deform the factual results of the election.
Alexander replied. Whether he gave his letter the title or it was the editors, I don’t know, but I didn’t see the relevance of the caption; in fact, it was irrelevant but it betrays a Freudian mind set characteristic of African Guyanese leaders like Alexander. Why is it when a non-African criticizes a Guyanese Black, the issue of who speaks for which community comes up?
I do not speak for East Indians. I don’t want to be seen as someone who speaks for an ethnic community. But at the same time, I question if we can identify who speak for whom. It is an undeniable fact that Indians vote for the PPP. The electoral choice for Africans is the PNC. Outside of election campaigns, who speaks for Indians and Africans?
People like Alexander and David Hinds arrogate to themselves the title of defenders of African Guyanese interests. A survey hasn’t determined how African Guyanese feel about personalities like Alexander and Hinds. Is it possible that substantial numbers of Black people in 2020 did not vote for the PNC and rejected people like Hinds because they felt betrayed?
How do Black people feel about the refusal to follow-up on the retirement age for public servants; the draconian penalties for small possessions of marijuana, and substantial salary hikes for state workers, particularly, the police force. There is the failure of people in the WPA like Clive Thomas, Tacuma Ogunseye and Hinds to instill a Rodneyite aura in governance from 2015. There was the humiliation of Hinds when he was expelled from the Chronicle column pages, etc?
My point is people like Alexander and Hinds (a column is forthcoming on Ravi Dev’s reply to Alexander’s angelic posturing and Hinds’ forming a new organization) come across as leaders of the African community and they might not be accepted at all. How do we know that African-Guyanese want them to speak on their behalf?
One of the problems people like Alexander and Hinds have is that they cannot see that they reduce the dignity of African Guyanese by asserting that Black people in this country cannot use moral criteria to judge indecent and morally unclean behaviour of fellow African-Guyanese. The other side of that coin is that people like Alexander and Hinds believe that any type of egregious lapses Black Guyanese will overlook. They transport this condescending attitude to Black people to Africans worldwide.
Some African politicians in Guyana were annoyed that Black international personalities like Mia Mottley; Owen Arthur; Keith Rowley; Bruce Golding; Hilary Beckles; former Liberian president and Nobel Prize winner, Ellen Sirleaf, did not use ethnically based judgment in examining the Guyana election rigging. Alexander thought the five CARICOM PMs would have listened to his Black reasoning but they wanted the rule of law to prevail something Hinds doesn’t believe in. So the question should be asked; who speaks for Black Caribbean folks? Someone like Hinds, Alexander or Eric Phillips? Is the brilliant historian and current UWI Vice Chancellor, Hilary Beckles, a conscious Blackman? He is head of the Caribbean reparations committee. He denounced election rigging in Guyana and accepted the results in favour of the PPP. What does that make him? Is he a betrayer of African Guyanese interest? There was an interesting dimension of the recount that no one has commented on. Five African Caribbean officials initially came to observe the recount. The PPP did not object? Why? Because not all Africans are like Hinds and Alexander.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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