The death of the spirit in Guyana: Brief notes   

Oct 18, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – I believe that after a concatenation of violent episodes to reject the return of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) to power from 1992 to the present time, a psychological change came over the nation.  Before that, Guyana lost its philosophical soul after the assassination of Dr. Walter Rodney.

Even though the worst violent mayhem in Guyana’s history was the Wismar massacre, it was the Rodney Assassination that killed the spirit in Guyana. Maybe, two factors hold the explanation.

By 1980, a substantial number of the victims of the Wismar massacre and their family members and relatives had migrated or maintained their silence as they grew older. What happened then; is that they did not preserve their narrative for it to ferment into the consciousness of the generation of the seventies and eighties. The second factor is that even though the Wismar massacre was still in people’s mind, its presence got weakened by the cruelties and depravities of Burnham’s totalitarian exercise of power.

From 1968 onwards then, the energies of political parties, civil society groups, the professional classes, the business community, academics and the media were completely devoted to resisting Burnham massive descent into frightening dictatorship. The Wismar massacre was taken off the radar.

The totalitarian acts of Burnham were like a runaway train. Each day in the life of Guyana under Burnham was a struggle of the nation to exist. There were rigged elections in 1973, 1980 and a rigged referendum in 1978.

There was the banning of essential food items, vicious attacks on the media, the creation of the paramountcy of the party, the unleashing of House of Israel violence, compulsory National Service, the oppressive sugar levy, attempted assassination of Dr. Joshua Ramsammy; just to name a few. There simply was no moment of pause for Guyanese who were seeing the unveiling of a vicious dictatorship.

Then the assassination of Rodney came. If the Wismar massacre was still in the nation’s consciousness, the Rodney assassination displaced it. It was an unthinkable act in the English-speaking Caribbean. It created more velocity in the migration drive. After Rodney’s assassination, some members of the African middle class joined the Indian masses in migrating. But the pessimistic and dejected mind of Guyana did not disappear after 1992 when free and fair elections returned and the globally popular opposition leader Dr. Cheddi Jagan came to power.

There was relentless violence directed against the PPP for its 1992 election victory and after seeing this, Indians felt that the moment of hope was receding. The life of the soul that was killed by the reign of Forbes Burnham did not rise from the ashes. The traumas were too much to endure to allow for rebirth. The enumeration is long. The PPP’s 1997 election triumph ushered in mo “fyaah/slo fyaah” and a destructive politically motivated public service strike. The PPP’s 2001 election success gave birth to the Buxton orgy. The insanity of anti-PPP, anti-Indian violence in Buxton lasted from 2002 to 2006.

Guyana settled down from 2007 onwards and the 2015 election success of the Alliance For Change (AFC) looked set to take Guyana in optimistic directions. This was not to be.  The nation’s psyche was violently shattered when the party of Walter Rodney, a transformed PNC and the vastly admired AFC drifted into mediocrity, corruptibility, immorality and racial rascality.

The rebirth lost after two decades of Burnhamism and systematic attacks on PPP election victories did not come into being after 2015 thus furthering imprisoning the spirit of the nation. The point is from 1968 onwards Guyana lost its soul, its capacity to think creatively and act with philosophical consciousness of what are the obligations of living in society and the recognition that unless the voice is heard, the pen is seen, then psychological death ensues.

Perhaps the APNU+AFC failure and the five month election drama have set Guyana back more than 50 years. Antonio Gramsci once wrote the optimism of the will must overcome the pessimism of the intellect.

In Guyana there is no will, no philosophical intellect. There are three types of landscapes we live on in this country. One is the numbness of the mind so even the most obnoxious forms of ignorance are met with no resistance. The second one is the instinct of despondency.

This is the acceptance that Guyana will always be what it is – a place of hopelessness.

Thirdly: the acceptance of personal life. By this I mean the recognition of that the individual has personal obligation to loved ones and his/her life in this country is about that.

There is no mental thought that people are interconnected and life only have meaning when we recognize that interconnection and the obligation we have to it.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not this newspaper) 

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