Hate when it comes to racism is a conditioned, culturally imposed mental disorder, that can alter a person’s sense of reality and contribute to impulses that can override the individual human capacity of accountability and restrict the need to explore differences rationally, since it applies logic that envelopes either science, religion, folk tales or selective history to impact irrational and selective blame casually. Racism implies accusations in most cases to satisfy a discomfort with self, or as a rallying anthem. Evidently, this man-made affliction affects some human cultures more severely than others. But the fact is, that it is dangerous to the individual or group whose dogmas are not laced with similar venomous teachings, and are not directed by the same impulses, and are aware that the condition and its tentacles even exist. Though we tend to look abroad for narratives that refer to conditions which have exploded into a specific cataclysmic course of historical events, we do pretend and ignore that examples revolve around us and we seldom ever want to explore that deceptive side of our national psyche.

The modern poster group on racism are Hitler and his Nazis, but it is a vicious legacy of racism that produced Hitler. The first classifications of racism that impacted on the modern world emerged from a pool of Rabbis and Christian church Fathers who conducted works described as ‘doctrines of the imagination’ that constituted converting certain biblical writings to demonise historical enemies and justify the enterprise of the transatlantic slave trade. These fictions became the gospels that were promulgated using the story of Noah and his sons, and dividing them into different ethnic groups and creating a curse on Ham who is said to be the father of Africans, thus justifying slavery. Populations were eager to justify slavery, thus this story, copied from older similar deluge myths, became acceptable despite the irrational concept of Noah fathering the African, European, and Mongolian races of humanity. The biblical text originated from the Hebrews, who themselves in their original phenotype structure were Africans, constructing an African saga that of course involved Kush, Punt and Khemet. With the adaptation of this text into Rome that enforced this doctrine upon the pagan nations of Europe, and wiping out any ideas opposing to Rome.

With the dominance of the Moors, and following their exit, the text had to be changed, Europe had to be inserted and slavery had to be justified, thus, the creative distortion into the Curse of Ham soap opera. This was not the first time that pseudo-mystical works of imagination were used to subdue peoples for the economic wellbeing of the mythmakers. The oldest case study among humans resides with the Hindu caste system that determines the value of strata of humanity along a separation bar or Varna. But the residue of old beliefs are not erased swiftly, they persist as a callous means to an end.

After the First World War, with the collapse of Europe including Germany that was in a far worse situation, due to the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles that worsened with the economic depression in the US of A, the Nazis came to power and Hitler evolved with a plan for the Germans to overcome the posture of defeat. He declared to them “Germans! You are not second rate, even if the world wishes to have it so a thousand times. You are not second class and inferior. Awake to the realisation of your own importance!” And they were fed the imagination of the master race, along the same line that the English German worshipping mystic Houston Chamberlain had fed the Kaiser, leading up to WW1, the rest is history.

When the Tutsi or Watutsi crossed into Hutu land around the 14th century they conquered the inhabitants of what is now called Rwanda, Four centuries later, first the Germans then the Belgians colonised that territory and immediately accredited special status to this African [Tutsi] tribe of giants. These were people all 6’4” average- the other tribes were much, much smaller in stature. This prejudice was influenced by the age of scientific racism, popular at that time among Europeans. The Tutsi were even classified as Black Europeans. The colonists deepened the rift between the two tribes that exploded in the Rwanda of 1994. In Guyana, there is always exaggerated race baiting that borders on the same fermentation of hate, selectively extracted. One example is the much-touted Linden Massacre of the 1960s. I grew up hearing about this: dozens of people were killed I was told, until some years ago I decided to explore this event and acquire some documents, only to learn that this was a part of ugly history, but part told and exaggerated.

On May 21, 2017, Ryaan Shaw penned an article in the Times that fit the ideal description of absence of research, an intention to remove the facts of the state of the colony at the time and the fact of the murder of the Sealeys’, an Afro-Guyanese couple at Buxton and the mutilation that occurred, that was the impetus for the tensions at Mackenzie [Linden]. That the Inquest was headed by Magistrate Sohan Singh, that the conclusion of the Inquest indicated a lack of blood-lust even after the Sun Chapman bombing. It would have been better if Ms Shaw had read the inquest and its conclusions before writing, and other data that proved the destruction of the Sun Chapman was planned long before those disturbances began. Less than eight persons died including Afro Guyanese, outside of the 40 plus on the Sun Chapman which fits the term ‘Massacre’. That this is disturbing history is true but only with visiting the whole truth can the harbingers of hate be intercepted.