Hinds’Sight The African Guyanese community must recapture its Emancipation Spirit
Dr. David Hinds
Dr. David Hinds

LET me straight off wish my African Guyanese brethren and sisterin a happy Emancipation. It feels good to hear more and more Black people using the word Emancipation, and celebrating its meaning. Like most African-centered phenomena, it has been a struggle to insert Emancipation in the popular consciousness. It has always pained me to see Black people run from their blackness, but we seem to be slowly coming home.As the Christian song goes, “Come home, Come home, ye who are weary come home, calling all sinners, come home.”
There has been no bigger sinner against the Blackman since emancipation, than the Blackman himself. Most Black people don’t seem to understand that you can be all you want to be–socialist, capitalist, Muslim, Christian, non-racist, multiracial–and still be Black. In a highly race-centered world, race is a central part of one’s existence, especially when that race happens to be a historically subjugated one. As Walter Rodney said, if someone uses your race to dehumanise you, then you must use your race to affirm your humanity.
I believe in the brotherhood and sisterhood of mankind. But my brotherhood to those of another race is a mere sham if I deny my own racial identity, or, worse yet, hate it. That’s why it hurts when I see Black people in white circles, trying to act whiter than whites, or in the case of Guyana, blacks in the PPP behaving more Indian than the Indians. As the calypsonian, Chalkdust, so accurately puts it in one of his most profound calypsos “Though slavery done…there are some black people still providing whites with jokes…How can a Barbadian be more Yankee more than a Yankee…Them people laughing at we”
While 177 years after Emancipation, Africans have a lot to be proud of, we still have a lot of work to do to emancipate ourselves from self-hatred and cultural blindness or “Mental Slavery’. African-Guyanese are guilty of derailing the foundation left by their ancestors. Somewhere along the way he/she lost his/her way. Somewhere along the way he lost faith in his ability to overcome. Somewhere along the way he dumped the emancipation spirit and stripped himself of his cultural clothing.
Every race has its strengths and they must be celebrated, but progress is premised not only on celebration of strengths, but on recognition of, and struggle against, weaknesses. That is one of the profound lessons of Emancipation. So, as we celebrate Emancipation, we must be conscious of the challenges facing the African Guyanese community; they are enormous. There can be no doubt about the tremendous contribution of the African Guyanese in humanising, nurturing, and holding Guyana together; a contribution that must always guarantee them a permanent role in the governance of the country. As is the case with other races, there is no Guyana without the African-Guyanese.
This Emancipation anniversary is a good time to start correcting some of those wrongs. The African in Guyana must begin the task of self-love today. He must begin sending his children to school again. She must begin to engage in productive economic activity both individually and collectively. He must support Black endeavors, not out of spite against another race, but out of genuine intra-group solidarity. She must join African cultural organizations.
Whether in Guyana or the Diaspora, the African man and woman must organise not simply to put a Black party in power or to keep an Indian party out of power, but more importantly, to recapture his/her cultural balance. He/ she must fight not for racial/political domination, but for equality of opportunity, equality in management and equality of outcome. Being insulting and aggressive to, and jealous and contemptuous of other races do not lift your race. Being anti-Indian is not the same as being pro-Black.
How much longer will we continue this delusionary existence? How much longer will we continue to dance to the drum of defeat, while ignoring the drum of progress? I humbly submit that the African-Guyanese come to his/her senses, the better. So, Mr. and Miss African, ACDA, Cuffy250 and all the Pan-Africanists-Afrocentric elites and believers, after the Emancipation celebrations, it’s time to get to work. Don’t wait for next August, the task of emancipation is constant.

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