The majority of Indo-Guyanese do not enjoy economic advantages      

Jan 22, 2023 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – I refer to Vincent Alexander’s thesis of African Guyanese disadvantages are caused by “impositions and systematic constructs” published in his letter in the newspapers recently.

There has been no presence of analysis of the Burnham, Hoyte and Granger presidencies in the theories of all African Guyanese rights activists that posit that African Guyanese do not enjoy the benefits of post-colonial Guyana that they ought to.

To reply to Alexander would take more than one column because one would have to present statistics on poverty among Guyanese East Indians and offer a detailed analysis of African hegemony in post-colonial Guyana and how that domination subjugated Indians. Too many policies and mistakes of President Burnham would have to be analyzed.

What are being presented here are brief notes. This column was motivated by a pleasant incident last week in a Banks DIH outlet. I was the only one at the counter and two Banks DIH employees were working.  I told the female employee that the male employee looks like Isaac Hayes.

She asked who Isaac Hayes was. I enquired if she knew the song, “Shaft”. She exclaimed: “Yes I like that song.” I told her Hayes wrote and sang it and he is regarded one of the icons in American soul music.

I gave her more details about Hayes. This young lady now knows that the US has produced a popular Black musician named Isaac Hayes. I met an Indian girl in the National Park years ago who came up to me and told me she read where I urged people on Old Year’s Night to dance to Barry White’s instrumental hit, “Love’s Theme.”

So she asked who Barry White was and what about the song. I didn’t want to embarrass her by suggesting a Google search. After telling her that Love’s Theme will never be replaced on the top of my list as my favourite song, she murmured, “Ooh, I must listen to it.” I never saw the lady again. But she knows there is an extraordinarily orchestral song named, Love’s Theme.

We have to write about the past and the present so the present generation can have access to knowledge that should be possessed. It is incumbent on academics and activists to respond to theories like those that have been espoused by Alexander and others.

I believe each party when they come to power favour their own constituencies. It is natural in Guyanese power-play. Please see my research paper that is in the possession of the Guyana Historical and Research Institute titled, “Ethnic power and ideological racism: Comparing presidencies in Guyana.”  I found both the PPP and PNC as being generous to their own constituencies when in power.

Since I wrote that paper, I do not think there is a parallel in any PPP government with what the PNC did with 7000 sugar workers and by extension, 42, 000 families in the sugar industry. That policy is perhaps the most insensitive act of ethnic targeting than any racially driven pathway since self government returned in 1957.

It is a different construct altogether to argue that the sociology and political economy have devastated the African condition in Guyana and that it prevailed in both pre-Independent and post Independent Guyana and still do. The research does not support this paradigm. This theory is employed by politicians to serve their purpose and should not be given recognition by scholars.

The hegemony of President Burnham and the control of the resources of Guyana by the PNC government under Burnham and President Desmond Hoyte from 1968 to 1992 disprove the theory of African dispossession.

What is important to note is that under Burnham private capital was moribund, agricultural holdings were strangulated, Indian employment in the state was infinitesimal and 80 percent of the economy was under state control with Burnham deciding on his own every direction of the state. There isn’t a book on the history of Guyana that takes in the 1970s and 1980s that is not without statistics on ubiquitous state control.

From Burnham to Hoyte there were no attempts to create an African petty bourgeoisie. Under Burnham, the state owned the resources. Under Hoyte, state resources were not divested to African Guyanese.

In the meantime, poverty persists among rural Indians. The attribution of wealth to the Indian population because of a school of wealthy Indian entrepreneurs is vulgar thinking. I was at the Georgetown Hospital recently waiting for service and though Africans were the majority patients there were quite a large number of Indians.

We end on an interesting note. Vincent Alexander is Chairman of the Forbes Burnham Foundation.

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

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• African Guyanese, Freddie Kissoon, Indo-Guyanese, Isaac Hayes, Vincent Alexander

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