Strange Stories of Some Guyanese

There is a dimension to life and history in Guyana that remains invisible, unrecorded and unmentioned. These are little, weird, unusual, unbelievable facts that set Guyana apart from the rest of CARICOM and which should propel Guyana into a prominent space in the Guinness Book of Records. Let us enumerate some of these mysterious tales and see if you agree. We begin our peep into Guyana's rich box of untold stories with Mrs. Janet Jagan.
Mrs. Janet Jagan is in her eighties and began her political career in the forties when she first contested municipal elections. Mrs. Jagan is still around and is the hand behind the throne. The throne is occupied by a thirty-seven year-old president whose is forty- five years Mrs. Jagan's junior. Surely, this is a phenomenon in politics. Where in the world would you find another example like this? Yes, there are politicians who are at Mrs. Jagan's age, who have been as powerful as Mrs. Jagan and who are still alive. But they live quietly and far from the seat of government. Believe it or leave it.
We come to Mr. Miles Fitzpatrick who was once referred to by a member of a previous government in Guyana as a man without identity. This is far from the truth. Over the past forty years, Mr. Fitzpatrick has had more identities than most other human beings in the world. It is not that Mr. Fitzpatrick has no identity but to many identities. Mr. Fitzpatrick has so many hats that you cannot tell which one he is wearing when he is wearing them at which place.
This is one public figure I have to be careful with when I write about him; I don't want me or the paper to be sued so I have had this article checked for libel by visiting a legal friend at 5.52 am Sunday morning just to make sure it is legally clean. Mr. Fitzpatrick, as the editor of the Strabroek News boldly proclaimed in his paper, had advised Stabroek's senior reporter, Gitanjali Persaud-Singh to go to the police to have me arrested over a controversy on her entry to UG. The claim was that I threatened her. Whatever happened to the cardinal rule in journalism -- ask the other side for their version? Well as you know, Mr. Fitzpatrick and Stabroek's chief, deCaires are lawyers and media people. So I guess they knew what they were doing.
Anyway, the Guyanese historical record shows that Mr. Fitzpatrick has touched more organisations than any other political activist in the region. He was with the original PPP. Then when it broke up, he sided with the Jaganite PPP. He had a close working relation with the Movement Against Oppression (MAO) and the WPA. He shared his ideas when the Guyana Anti-Discrimination Movement (GADM) was born. He founded the Fundamental Rights Action Committee (FRAC), Civil Liberties Action Committee (CLAC) and Guyanese Against Crime (GAC). When GUARD was founded he played no small part. Together with Christopher Ram a few years back they brought something into being nicknamed the Interim Government Committee. Last year with Grantley Waldron who manages Channel 9, NBTV and Clive Thomas, he formed a group named THE INIATIVE. Mr. Fitzpatrick was Mr. Hamilton Greene's lawyer when he was expelled from the PNC and took Mr. Hoyte to court. This year, Mr. Fitzpatrick developed a closeness with the PNC/REFORM. Do you know of anyone who has had so many identities? Some of my friends in the academic field call Mr. Fitzpatrick, potsalt. Believe it or leave it.
Finally, there is Brindley Horatio Benn who is commonly called BH. When Benn split from the PPP after the 1964 elections, he sat as an independent in the National Assembly. And for the next twenty years did what no other regional politician has done so far. He dedicated his life to exposing the false politics of Cheddi Jagan. For the next two decades, every five public words, BH uttered, three were on Cheddi Jagan. BH dreamt of Jagan. When he spat, the thought of Jagan. When he coughed, he thought of Jagan. When he sneezed, he thought of Jagan. Jagan became a pathological obsession. And the practice of BH's politics descended into the morbidity of an anti-Jagan crusade. I have countless memories of BH just getting into a frenzy if you casually mentioned Jagan's name. You run the risk of getting physically hurt, if you did that too often. After the WPA was formed, Benn dropped out because he said the WPA should have no relation with the PPP. BH almost broke up the WPA in 1974 with his anti Jagan hysteria. Then quietly, and to the surprise of the entire nation, Benn's name appeared on the PPP/CIVIC's list in 1992. After the victory, he became our High Commissioner to Canada. Believe it or leave.
What is strange in this country is how we tend to bend our psychology for our own convenience. And you wonder if we are not fooling ourselves. We in this country tend to dismiss the odd politics of people who do not have a proper education. We laugh at them. We use all types of adjectives to describe them. The name CN Sharma comes up. But we must ask ourselves this question: If Sharma was a graduate from a top class university, spoke perfect standard English, and hobnobbed with the Georgetown elite, would we have disrespected him the way we do? Who really are the people in Guyana who we should in fact disrespect?