Interview with Leyland DeCambra: Conclusion

Jul 01, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

We published on June 16, 2021 an interview with one of the founders of the UK branch of the WPA. Today, we conclude the process.

FK – You had a good working relation with the WPA people that have degenerated so badly since 2015.

LD – I am disgusted by this degeneration. I feel that I was conned by leading WPA figures like Rupert Roopnaraine whom I got to know quite well, due to his regular visits to London in the 1980’s and 90’s. He gave many rousing speeches at public meetings calling for social justice. I now feel it was all false. He was and is a fraud. There were people like Nigel Westmaas and David Hinds for whom I had great respect, who shamelessly supported the attempted rigging in 2020. The WPA London Group invited Hinds around 2000, to deliver the June 13th Rodney lecture.
We organised a public meeting that Nigel spoke at. He did an analysis of the way the PNC dictatorship was using their control of the economy to build an economic base for the essentially afro-middle class who were masquerading as socialist. Andiaye spent a year, in the 1980’s, working with us in London, she was one of the few whom I feel remained true to Rodney’s legacy. What really saddens me is the transformation of people who were in the Ratoon group, whom we knew in the 1970s through their involvement in MAO. Academics like Clive Thomas, Maurice Odle and Bonita Bone, I wouldn’t have expected them to have politically degenerated to the extent that they did; in some cases aligning to anti Indian politics.

FK – Andaiye died without writing about the WPA’s confrontation with Burnham. Roopnaraine has never touched the subject. Clive Thomas, Moses Bhagwan and Kwayana are in advanced age. Do you think the reason is that they feel guilty that they were part of a WPA/PNC conspiracy?

LD – I would separate Andaiye out from the other characters. I know that Andaiye drifted away from the WPA in the 1990s and concerned herself with mainly women’s issues. Her work was recently published. This book was edited by Alissa Trotz, I don’t know what was left out in the editing process and the reasons for this. I met Andiaye a few times in London and Guyana in the 1990s. I feel confident that there was no guilt on her part.

FK – Why I ask this question is because I think there is a crescendo of consensus that there were moles high up in the WPA leadership that plotted with Burnham. Both Hamilton Green and Elvin McDavid gave it away in my discussions with them.

LD – If Green and McDavid said there was a WPA mole then I would give it some credence. I have heard a few names mentioned, but I have no evidence to substantiate this. Not being on the ground in Guyana it is not easy to get this kind of information.

FK – I know you are friends with Ann Braithwaite, who perhaps is one of the most known ex-WPA person in the diaspora, do you two, as founding members of the UK branch, live with a sense of sadness that the great WPA is now a formidable set of betrayers of what Walter Rodney stood for?

LD – I am a close friend of Anne Brathwaithe; known her since the 1970’s. A central issue that we in the UK campaigned for since 1980 was for a Commission of Inquiry into Rodney’s death. Little did we know that in 2005 after President Jagdeo promised Mrs. Pat Rodney that an inquiry would be held, they both agreed that Rupert Roopnarine would facilitate the setting up of the inquiry, that he would deliberately sabotage the process. A number of PPP officials have publicly stated that shortly after Mrs. Rodney left, Roopnarine told them that the Rodney family was no longer interested in an inquiry, so the process stopped. This was a lie; the Rodney family said no such thing. Mrs. Pat Rodney was in London last year and repeated this. There clearly was a conspiracy between the PNC and the WPA to betray Rodney. The WPA leaders were desperate to ‘jump into bed’ with the PNC.
Rodney was passionate on the issue of multiracial politics with a class analysis of society. Since the 1990’s the WPA seems to have reverted to the pre-WPA, ASCRIA’s position. Many of the positions of Hinds, Ogunseye, Kwayana and Waddell before he died can be seen as downright racist. What an obscene betrayal of Rodney’s lofty ideals. Roopnarine as an APNU MP supported the termination of the Rodney COI in 2015. Other WPA members kept quiet, another betrayal of Rodney.
(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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