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Lip Print on a Shirt |
September 9, 2002: In times like these where ethnicity is being use as an endgame on the chessboard of power, one conjures up visions of the fantastic role of the multi-racial pervasiveness of the WPA. No better example of this display of non-racist fraternity is the Arnold Rampersaud trial. Had there not been a Working People's Alliance, Arnold Rampersaud would have been hung by the state of Guyana. The trial was an insidious invention by Burnham to consolidate an ebbing wave of racial support. The strategy was clear and well-thought out. An African policeman was shot by PPP supporters therefore an Indian accused had to pay for the crime. Burnham had the wrong man but he had to play the race card because his game had come to an end, and the Rampersaud trial was the last throw of the dice. Walter Rodney outside the court was more effective than the lawyers inside.
Rodney's essential point about the racist state was driven home hard to the jury. He told them that an African leader without any respect and love for his people were using African Guyanese to hang an innocent Indian man and that was testimony to treating the African consciousness with contempt. Rodney went from WPA meetings in Georgetown to Linden and wherever African Guyanese were located to preach a message of African dehumanization. He told African Guyanese to wash their hands of the Arnold Rampersaud trial. They did. Rampersaud was set free and is present a citizen of Canada. Rampersaud was a very simple Berbician taxi-driver who didn't went to higher level in the education system and therefore was not capable of articulating the finer points of political discourse. But one of these days, if he is still a PPP member, he ought to castigate the current PPP leadership for the disdainful way in which they treated the WPA. It was one of the most tragic mistakes in any multi-racial society. And Guyana is feeling the horrific consequence of this. It is certainly, to my mind, perhaps the second worst political error in judgement in Guyanese history and this opinion here takes in the colonial administrations in the 19th century to this moment in time - the worst mistake being the political directive to kill to Rodney. It is ten years since the PPP has been in power, and in that decade, one has seen the complete shut-out of the Working People's Alliance from even the most infinitesimal space of influence and power. The PPP has washed away the existence of the WPA the way the laundry worker takes out a lip print on a shirt. One must always understand the psychic hurt the WPA leadership felt at being locked out. My theoretical contention about Guyanese politics is that both the Burnham and Hoyte administrations were felled because of the seminal role played by the WPA in the strategic area of Demerara and among Afro-Guyanese communities in the entire territory. My point goes further. I am contending that if there weren't a WPA, there would not have been a free election in 1992. I am convinced that the WPA has been psychically traumatized by the PPP's betrayal but also by the Indian people of Guyana. This is a complex argument and there are merits on both sides. For the Indian people, why should they pressure the PPP into recognition of the WPA and for an accommodation of the WPA when Africans themselves are PNC voters and not WPA voters. There is a point here. There is this paranoia that Indian people have, that a weakening of the PPP opens up the door of power for the PNC to pass through, and any party will be given a try but not the PNC. But the Indian people are possessed of a deep psychological deception which cannot be dealt with here and may be the subject of another article. The Indian people of this country must realize that the electoral choice and attached freedoms that came from October 1992 were not due to the PPP alone.
Here is where I return to my theory. The PPP could not have delivered the coup de gracé. The PPP and GAWU did give Burnham decades of mind-blowing headaches but they could not have touched the PNC's Achilles' heel. That area was the African community. Burnham's murder of Rodney was a deus ex machina. He knew the system was falling because he had lost ethnic support and in Guyanese politics, ethnic support means party survival. By the time Hoyte and the ERP were in full swing, the PNC had lost valuable national support because the pro-democracy forces had been widened.
Indian people then cannot and should not see the PPP as their only godfather because there have been others too. An issue complicating the PPP-Indian community relationship is the clouded period in the middle eighties when a PNC/PPP joint government was being negotiated with Clement Rohee as one of the PPP's principle emissaries to the talks. Mr. Rohee should be pressed into a discussion of this secret moment in Guyanese political history. The iconoclastic theory of Bramharack which questions Jagan's Indian loyalties may well have a hidden theoretical support here just waiting to be explored by Bramharack and others. It would be interesting to hear what supporters of Bramharack theory makes of this moment in 1985.
The WPA has once more risen to ensure the freedom of Indian people and this time some gratitude is in order. The only vocal African voice of anger and denunciation against the tremendous violence being committed against Indian people since the jail break in February has been the WPA with David Hinds leading the chorus. Indian people must ask themselves where are the other African voices. The PNC remains its opportunistic self. The voices of African people in civil society are silent. There is an eerie reticence from the African elites who are part of the power structure. It is only the African voice in the WPA that have rebuked the Buxtonian attackers. It is only the African voice of the WPA that is condemning the ethnic basis of the incessant brutalisation of Indian people. Some of these people risk their lives for this committed position. David Hinds get abuse for the moral stand he takes in relation to the cruelties perpetuated by Buxton.A lot of Buxtonians may be annoyed with Kwayana for speaking out. Even if the PPP is blind and cannot see the resurgent bravery of the WPA then surely the Indian people of Guyana with eyes wide open should see it. Or maybe Indian people have lived all the time in this country with their eyes wide shut