The American Civil Rights experience is not the same as Guyana’s

Aug 03, 2023 Letters

Dear Editor,

Please allow me to reflect on Lincoln Lewis’ letter that appeared in your newspaper on 2 August 2023. The letter exemplifies the crisis in the scholarship of those who purport to advance the interest Guyanese. Let me elaborate.

First, Mr. Lewis’ opening salvo were the words of Martin Luther King. This is emblematic of the crisis that I have alluded to. The Guyanese intelligentsia have been fed a good diet of the Black American experience and their civil rights struggles. The debilitating effect on Guyanese scholarship is that the Guyanese intelligentsia view Guyanese society through the prism of the Black American experience. Their pronouncements are shoe-horned to conform the analytical paradigm of the American Civil Rights movement. A careful reading of Mr. Lewis’ letter demonstrates this phenomenon; he excluded any of the uplifting speeches of Linden Forbes Burnham, Ptolemy Reid, Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow, or Walter Rodney. Instead, he sought refuge in Martin Luther King. He did exactly what Chinua Achebe wrote about in “Things Fall Apart.” He reduced authentic Guyanese voices of Burnham, Reid, Critchlow and Rodney to mere footnotes.

Second, Mr. Lewis is enamoured with the American Civil Rights struggles and shoe-horns Guyanese experience to fit the American paradigm. He tries speciously to make a comparison between the American Civil Rights movement and what he claims to be “daily resistance to chattel slavery by our ancestors.” But for Cuffy, Damon and Quamina, slavery in Guyana was a stable situation. We did not have a protracted struggle like the march on Selma or the sitting at the lunch counter of a Woolworth’s; we did not have a maroon population engaged in a constant battle with the plantocracy. In fact, Mr. Lewis contradicts himself by unwitting stating, “Africans in the British Empire achieved their freedom based on the Emancipation Proclamation.” The Proclamation was not the result of insurrection but by the suasion of the likes of Buxton and William Wilberforce. It was the Emancipation Proclamation and not insurrection in the colony that resulted in abolition of slavery.

Third, Mr. Lewis falsely represent Guyana as a place where “inhumanity, brutality and cruelty are still present.” Having read this sentence, I was imagining a Guyana that looks and feels like Afghanistan, South Sudan, or Ukraine. Guyana has problems but not those that Mr. Lewis claims. We have our problems but the glass is half full.

We have issues to confront: the development of oil, the reduction of poverty, the reduction of crime, issues of good governance, the degradation of the environment, what kind of society we are creating, etc. So, Mr. Lewis, I will join hands with you and crusade the length and breadth of Guyana to advance the struggles for equal rights and justice for ALL.

Sincerely,

Roger Ally

Fort Lauderdale, FL

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