JAGDEO trying to rewrite Afro-Guyanese history

Dear Editor
IT is easy to bluff any topic with a perception, especially, the recent history of Guyana and the PPP has created a stock history based on victimhood, for its constituency. So based on this simple reality, Mr. Jagdeo has proceeded to propose that the Afro-Guyanese benefited under the PPP more than they had benefited under the PNC. As erroneous as his assertion is, silence now and the absence of easily available literature can serve him a valuable purpose. I intend to obstruct that purpose with this letter and encourage others to contribute, through exploration of dates and literature quoted.

The story of modern Afro-Guyanese history emerged in the context of the timeline from the post-Emancipation years, 1834 to 1900, to 1966 and it is, in its earlier period, one of a brutal duel between the local colonial administration that consisted of former plantation owners and the Afro-emancipated community, who were an emerging business community. It must be remembered that the Euro-colonials, the Amerindians and the Afro-colonials were the only legitimate colony core group in what legally constituted the colony population from 1623 to the 1860s , especially on the coastal belt, while the Amerindian remained in the hinterland. The indentured immigrants at that time were not considered for the moment subjects of the colony. The Portuguese were the first to be fitted into the colonial scheme as adopted honorary whites, with the intention of using them as auxiliaries to smother the existing Afro-Guyanese businesses. I dealt with that period in my July 27, 2018 column in the Chronicle.

Colony
The first and only group to surprisingly advocate a definition of the colony along a specific ethnic dominance position was the push towards India and the Crown by Joseph A. Luckoo and Dr. Wharton to make British Guiana an Indian colony, on the grounds that “Here we enjoy equal rights and privileges in the truest sense of the words –on the principles of ‘Man and Brother” signed by both men. True to the fact that J. Luckoo, the only Indian, was elected to a seat of the Court of Policy through an Afro-colonial vote to the shock of the colonial secretary Cecil Clement. The push that followed was a contradiction to the acknowledged goodwill exhibited, as expostulated in their attempt towards the ethnic redefining of the colony quest.

To accurately deal with Afro-Guyanese history to the present we must reflect from the 1890s onwards. Georgetown was always overcrowded, and existed on a functional social caste system, whereby the underpaid and the underemployed were coupled in a vicious cycle. Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow led the first mass-organised political movement in our history that enveloped the stevedores and the supporting populations of their dependent wards; the BG Labour Union was established in 1919. The ‘Political Affairs Committee’ formed by the forerunners of the PPP deploying Marxist-Leninist doctrine emerged and existed from 1946 to 1949. There were also the BG East Indian Association and the League of Coloured Peoples; the latter two were mainly concerned with middle -class priorities with no holistic agenda. The PPP came into existence with the support of academic, cultural and intellectual Afro-Guyanese in 1951, but by 1954, Jai Narine Singh narrated that Jagan would agree on policy then go home to Janet and return and disagree. Dissention followed, and with the help of Dr Lachman Singh, Forbes Burnham left the PPP In 1955. The record of Michael Swan in his book ‘Marches to Eldorado’, helps to understand the mindset of the leader of the PPP: “During the whole evening, Mrs Jagan lay in a hammock and contributed hardly a word to the discussion. Occasionally, when her husband’s eloquence was in spate, as in his remarks on the rise in the power of the East Indians, she would make a quick potent remark which stopped him short on the brink of indiscretion.” Jagan was a creature of the culture he abhorred in the West On Trial; this fact is evident in the state of British Guiana’s pre-Independence.

Militant support
Nineteen sixty three (1963), Jai Narine further illustrates; “Jagan by now had lost his militant supporters and had himself become a kind of dictator governing the affairs of Guyana as lord and master of it all. He organised protest demonstrations in several parts of the country in the course of which Afro-Guyanese were killed and murdered. This resulted in a chain reaction organised by the PNC and their supporters.” A timeline beyond a letter to the editor is necessary for this period as the disturbances were narrowed by PPP propagandists in 2017/18 to the Linden Massacre, a severe and intended demonising propaganda incident without any references to what had gone before, including the Sun Chapman bombing. Reference to why in July 1963 Colonial Secretary Duncan Sandys would visit villages and implore peace between rival racial groups [I confronted this phenomenon of selective history outburst on a visit to the PSC, from a known friend of the opposition leader]. I cannot narrate that period in the narrow context of a letter, except to highlight that from interviews I have done at Mahaicony, many Afro-Guyanese were saved by the warnings of Indo-Guyanese, before the launch arrived with its machine gun PPP political activists, vice versa happened elsewhere. I will omit other macabre references of that era.

This nation in 1966, including most of the Afro- Guyanese that supported Jagan had deserted him, with accusations of betrayal of principles. British Guiana entered Independence with the memory of the PPP as treacherous and as the national bogeyman. It would be unfair not to mention that the first people to feel the malice of the PPP’s ascension to power were not Afro-Guyanese, but the Indo-Guyanese field leaders of the MPCA, with Richard Ishmael as its head. That union had to be destroyed, so that their own union could come to life and enslave the sugar workers as an eternal, captured political audience.

The ruins of slavery
From independence onward, the fact must be inserted that before independence, this was not a prosperous colony; and to quote Professor Hillary Beckles’ speech to the British House of Commons in 2014, “That Caribbean Governments were left to clean up the ruins of slavery,”. Burnham’s challenge was rooted in nationally burying the nightmares of the PPP’s racial civil war, and of creating the ‘Guyana Man and Woman,’ a philosophical, cultural and economic task to confirm to the nation’s motto of one nation, people, and destiny. His task was to promote ideals with a team of diverse party souls, many of them self-hating colonials and not grounded in any particular ideal, with an opposition that was capable of convincing itself that it was entitled, despite the active memory for the damage it had done to the then colony between 1961 to 1964 along racist lines. With respect to the state of Afro-Guyanese in 1966, this was a period that witnessed by 1972 the formation of CARICOM and CARIFESTA in Guyana; the construction of our major highways; and the building of housing schemes. Mandela Avenue and all the wards east of it were built by the PNC; those efforts would free the third of mainly Afro- Guyanese city dwellers who resided in reservation-type ‘nigger yards’ from the 1920s to the 1970s. Through programmes like the GYC, GNC and the pioneer projects such as the coop societies, a new perspective emerged through training and independent orientation. It must be remembered that we were colonials singing at Christmas, “Moma, moma come and join yuh son here, happy in the Mother Country,” as a former secretary of KAYS Co-op society. At Kuru Kuru, it was Burnham who enabled us despite the colonial bureaucrats whose indifference left us on our own many times.

KAYS Co-op Society
I was at GRB when arson reduced it to ashes in 1977, causing the loss of thousands of jobs and dependants’ incomes. I will not say that political errors were not made, but a local infrastructure was created. Burrowes Art School, Walter Roth Museum, the NIS, the Iwokrama Rain Forest project, the National Cultural Centre, National Film Centre, the MMA/ADA project, crucial sea defence works, the current NCN, overseas training from which many never returned. The fact is that after the 1970s petroleum crisis, combined with PPP sabotage and the Venezuelan border dispute terminating investment possibilities, we suffered but never starved; and when the economic upsurge occurred under Hoyte, an election was stolen in 1992.

From 1992 to 2015, the first era of the PPP, is that they entered government as if it were 1968; ethnic loyalty was flaunted, political impatience terminated the ERP [Economic Recovery Programme] former President Hoyte had launched that was working. As a result, by 2001, we were in a state of decline: in “18 months, 600 firms were taken to court by the Banks.” With respect to the Afro-Guyanese population, by 1996, we were marching in protest against extra-judicial killings; striking nurses were shot with pellets and tear gas; and a social reversal had begun. Members of the ‘Black Clothes’ were above the law; murder was committed against Afro-Guyanese with no possibility of justice; and all efforts were made to terminate Afro- Guyanese contracting skills and reduce them to sub-contractors, by creating through unnatural terms top machinery- equipped PPP entities and raising the bar on qualifying for contracts. Expertise was never questioned. This tender process became and still is the most dismal and questionable area of government process.

Clueless marginalisation
The PPP through intent and cluelessness, marginalised and reduced this country to a criminalised state. By 2003, the World Bank had declared that Guyana was suffering a “Crisis of Governance.” Health services, education, cultural development and law enforcement were reduced to levels of complete ineffectiveness. It was the first time in the history of this country that the 2008 UN McDougall report declared the Government [PPP] a racist-administrated state. Today, many families are tortured by relatives who are drug addicts; it was under the PPP that the “Black Clothes” and the drug cartels became above the law; that Roger Khan became a hero of that constituency. Under Jagdeo, the gunmen who now torment our communities were indoctrinated. That Bumbala Bacchus came on television and said that “the president seh, I ent know which President that we mustn’t throw de bodies all over the place,” he was part of the Gajraj death squad. In 2015, it was then that the PPP promised that if we get elected ‘Jobs are a priority’; the failed economic legacy exposed a callousness to be feared. Vat, no doubt, was created to boost support for the declining sugar Industry. The herald of the decline of sugar was evident; with the EU sub-venture from 2006, that money was never used to retrain, divert the PPP’s ‘sacred’ cane-cutters into other economic areas.

Instead, it was used to build the Marriott Hotel and affect infrastructure towards that, to change the GBC short wave installation at Plaisance into Pradoville 2, to build a road to the Amaila Falls, and a Tele-cable from Brazil; the latter two total failures. Not a cent went to GuySuCo. With the sum extracted in union dues by GAWU — some $30 million per month — this union should have been in the forefront of diversify training, knowing that the downsizing of sugar was inevitable. I want to interject a necessary condition that this new world requires, that for workers paying over a set years of union dues, that upon retiring a percentage of union dues be repaid. The current finance minister explained that the NIS will have to recover $5.6B which it had lost in 2009, through reckless investments by Clico and taxpayers will have to pay the bill. That was the same period when an assassination was made on Dr. Cheddi Jagan’s niece, Maria Van Beek, Judicial Manager of CLICO for disagreeing with Jagdeo’s assault on Clico. Apart from the Jagdeo era being described as the 14 years of assassinations, and accused of Ideological Racism, the Jagdeo-era left this country with an accusing document by the ABC countries of over 400 Guyanese businesses of interest in relation to money laundering. This was sustained by a statement by the GRA that many business people cannot explain where they got their starting monies from. The APNU administration is now tasked to fix both the human and structural failures of the PPP. The controversial Berbice bridge — intended to cripple the non-PPP New Amsterdam — seems to be the latest addition of failures now directed at the coalition to fix; the ferry service should be restarted immediately. Important is the Ministry of Education programme of no child left behind, that resulted in a generation and more of functional and non- functional illiterates. I was encouraged from a talented youth, with no honed skills, to become a fledgling illustrator/writer under Burnham’s PNC, years later, in control of my craft. It was under the PPP that ‘The Shadow of the Jaguar’ was thrown out of the Chronicle national newspapers because it was perceived to be an Afro-Guyanese superhero. A friend up the coast remarked to me that “every time the PPP run this country, a way is created for the deaths of dozens of Afro-Guyanese.” That cannot be disputed: from 1961 to 2010, explore the timeline. In what capacity can Mr. Jagdeo imagine, from this brief synopsis, on what grounds, that the PPP served the interest of the Afro Guyanese population throughout the PPP’s history? It took the APNU coalition government less than a year to return Georgetown from a capital saturated with the stench of human faeces, which the PPP had refused to do over 20 years. Justice has returned, the GPF is again 70% effective. In 2018, we feel much more secure and much more humanly Guyanese.

Regards
Barrington Braithwaite

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