Shah, Lewis and Alexander: This is Guyana

Oct 19, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Here is what Lincoln Lewis wrote on April 7, 2019 in this newspaper, “…immigration brings with it consequences such as stress on the education and health services, housing overrun, the creation of slums, and our resources exploited by others willing to undersell their labour at a time when we are on the cusp of economic greatness. We also face a crisis of submerging our culture further. This threat comes from others who do not speak our language and share a common culture… we also face a crisis of submerging our culture… we are facing a pending catastrophe which we must seek to avoid at all cost. They do not speak our language and share a common culture and coming here. We are already bearing witness to criminal elements crossing our porous border and terrorizing our citizens in unprotected border settlements.”
I was deeply disgusted at this racist xenophobia coming from a country that would be the last to have a citizen write that anti-immigrant poison. See my rejection on the mentality of people like Lewis in my column of April 9 titled, “Is Lincoln Lewis the Black version of White fascism?”
Instead of apologizing to the US, UK, Canada, Trinidad, Barbados and Suriname and Antigua that have collectively taken in more than a million Guyanese, including Lewis’ family, here is what Lewis wrote in response to my condemnation of his anti-immigrant insanity in my column of September 28, 2020, “I stand by my position that systems must be put in place to protect Guyanese business from being overrun by businesses established by an imported Chinese business class whose owners continue to exploit Guyanese labour and make no reinvestment in the community within which they operate.”
Any school boy who read what he wrote in April that is reproduced here knows he is referring to poor souls from Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela coming here to preserve their right to an existence and not Chinese business investors.
This man is the head of a trade union organization. Let’s move to another African rights activist bent on deceiving people.
This is what Alexander wrote last Saturday in reply to me, “At no time during the PMs’ visit did I sit or have any contact with them. Kissoon’s contention is therefore built on an untruth and cannot be the basis for the conclusion that I am two faced”.
There isn’t one word or one line in my column of Thursday, October 16, 2020 on Alexander’s negative role in Guyana that even vaguely implied that he met with the visiting CARICOM PMs.
Here is what I wrote, “I then commented on IDAPADA’s failure because the PMs must have detected an air of hypocrisy on the part of Alexander as chairman of IDAPADA. This chairman was asking CARICOM to look beyond election results because there is a bigger, problematic picture. But this same chairman would have been sitting with the PMs discussing the bigger picture while at the same time as a GECOM commissioner was trying to get GECOM to accept a fraudulent election result.”
My point was so elementary that it shows up the inherent evil in people like Alexander. I argued that if the PMs had agreed to meet Alexander and IDAPADA then he would have been sitting with them while at the same time rigging the election.
The meaning is so obvious we could cite a banal example – “if you had accepted the CARICOM offer you would have been sitting with Mia Motley discussing CARICOM over coffee.”
Finally, Ryhaan Shah. I hope Sherwood Lowe reads Shah’s reply to me of October 15. Lowe’s theoretical offer, which is housed in two replies to me last week on the danger and evil in ethnic minds, is that you can be proud of your ethnicity yet appreciate other people’s culture. Shah in her reply was unapologetic of how she sees African Guyanese, the ethnic perspective she uses in understanding the struggle against the PPP government prior to 2015, when it was in power and her approach to Indians who join with Black Guyanese in their struggle against discrimination.
The entire letter is fertile research soil for those interested in how ethnic consciousness drives the existence of humans who live with racial obsessions.
The entire letter is about an East Indian guy (Frederick Kissoon) who hates himself because he had Black friends that he was active with against an Indian government.
It would be interesting to see if Shah finds the other high-profile Indians as self-haters who had similar Black friends like me. Christopher Ram comes to mind. Is he a self-hater too? The haters in Guyana are Indians like Shah and Africans like Lewis and Alexander.

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