Freddie couldn't be more right in his analysis

Freddie couldn’t be more right in his analysis

May 17, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,
Freddie is correct not to accept the WPA activism of some individuals who dropped by the wayside as soon as Rodney was assassinated. Yet these individuals were in the forefront to demand that Dr. Cheddi Jagan relinquish the PPP Presidential candidacy in favour of one of their comrades. Their reasoning was African people will not vote for an Indian leader. How wrong they were as the results of the 1992 elections proved.
More importantly Freddie wrote that “Rodney was involved in the violent attempt to overthrow President Burnham. Rodney loyalists, family members and relatives may not be comfortable with that fact but that fact is reality and must be part of the historical record.”
Freddie is most correct in this assertion. During the Rodney Commission of Inquiry (RCOI) Dr. Roopnarine publicly revealed that the WPA was accumulating weapons. Dr. Roopnarine should know what he was talking about as he, Rodney and others were on the WPA’s committee charged with accumulating weapons. Rodney being dead cannot corroborate this fact but there is at least one individual who can but prefers to remain silent even when this fact in the past was revealed.
It was common knowledge that Rodney did not trust every member of the WPA, particularly one of his comrades. Rodney was realistic enough to know that that individual would have opposed this tactic. The individual would have had to reconcile with himself why he was supporting the accumulation of arms to shoot people of his own race. In fact Hubert Rodney, younger brother of Rodney told me in 1995 that Rodney’s long term objective was to merge the WPA into the PPP. Would that individual have been happy with this move? Very important is Freddie’s point that “One of the pitfalls of Rodney was that he never organised among the rural Indian peasantry.”
“… independent Indian scholars believed that Rodney was motivated by Black nationalism, a point that needs researching.” This is particularly correct as Rodney did not have a grounding with Indians; his emphasis was on Africa and Africans.
Freddie wrote: “It is an accepted position in academia that we learn more of the good and the faults of an historic figure as the ages pass and secrets and previously unannounced action and deeds are revealed. Freddie couldn’t be more right in his analysis.

Yours sincerely,
Sultan Mohamed

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