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Excitement over visa-free travel to the land of our former colonizers and imperial masters baffling

Oct 22, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

It was the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon, who left us the immortal words of another Britisher in his desperate reaching for anyone to barter a most prized possession for a creature of war to help him weather the foul day.  It was Richard III declaring his mortally dangerous straits, when he cried, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” (Richard III, Act V, Scene IV).  As history and Shakespeare told it, the king didn’t do too well that day.  But it shows the depths to which men and women will go to hang on to any thread of a lifeline, sometimes no matter how much has to be given up.

As much as we know the effect of the grand exaggeration instilled by the words, English Literature has now transformed into an equivalent reality right here in 21st century Guyana.  Though I am not on social media, I heard- I couldn’t help hearing, even if I were hard of hearing.  The frenzies and ecstasies, the incredible delirium, the spectacle of swooning Guyanese doing cartwheels and jumping jacks because the people representing the Union Jack have decided to engage in their own bargaining with us.  They didn’t have to bargain and negotiate too hard, for all that it came down to, all that it took, was something as mundane as visa-free travel to the Scepter’d Isle.  Guyanese drove themselves to rapturous heights over the ordinary metamorphosed into the extraordinary, the grandeur, of visa-free travel to the land of their former colonizers and imperial masters.  How quickly we forget!  How self-enslaving we can be!

We have more oil per breathing body than any place on earth, and we are drooling over a visa-free travel announcement?  Is this what the fruits of free and fair elections have come to mean?  That we run to anywhere?  Surely, we have lost whatever marbles we had left, that is, if we ever had any to begin with, given how people have reacted, how things shaped up since that announcement.  I am aware that Esau sold his treasure for a pot of soup, and Africans sold their brothers for a few trinkets and baubles, and there were some subcontinent Indians who loved their exploiters more than their own.  But here we are thrilled to death by what can be nothing but giving up another piece of our prized possessions for the swindle and siren call of visa-free travel to the UK.  A place from which so much originated that condemned the forbears of some of us to chained servitude, and those of my own to palpable serfdom.

Editor, when I heard of the reactions of my fellow Guyanese, I concluded that we are so far gone now that we have nowhere left to go.  We have all this oil, and it is still any port for a storm, even if it is only for a part of a year.  This is not just the rankest of abominable inferiority complexes, or the worst of clever foreign indoctrination (manipulation), it is of people who are bereft of pride.  The whole world is beating a path to our door, and here are Guyanese, not being able to get away from this place quick enough.  I think I am beginning to understand why this fabulous oil, this business about clean governance, and this desire for ethical leadership evidence such stoic indifference.  None of those ever really mattered, not even the rich oil crown.  Give us visa-free travel, and it is off to Heathrow and Gatwick.  Enoch Powell must be doing a slow tortured turn in his restless grave.  The English had so many prejudices to aim at their own fellow Europeans, they couldn’t wait to get out of the EU.  And they could not get far enough from Dishy RishiSunak.  And mindless Guyanese are overflowing with joy to rub shoulders with people who have no use for them, other than how they can use them.  Move over Exxon, here comes Tullow.  It is the second British Invasion, this time with oil blocks in mind.  Richard III lost his head; Guyanese now have nothing left to lose, not even a little self-respect.

Sincerely,

GHK LALL

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