YESTERDAY the Women’s Progressive Organisation (WPO) celebrated the life of one of the most courageous women of this country – a woman who, albeit posthumously, should be bestowed a national award.Rakesh Rampertab writes the following of her: “An extraordinary sacrifice by an ordinary woman: Kowsilla, aka ‘Alice’, of Leonora, who was killed on March 6, 1964 when her body was severed in two by an estate (PNC) scab, Felix Ross, who drove a tractor through her and who was later acquitted. A mother of four at the time, and the sole breadwinner of her family, Kowsilla was an executive of the Leonora branch of the WPO and, as a leader; she paid the ultimate price by displaying the highest order of defiance for her belief in adequate wage for adequate work.”
In February of 1939, a weeder named Sumintra and two other sugar estate workers were shot dead at the Leonora Estate by the Colonial police when they resisted working for the plantocracy for starvation wages.
This precipitated a movement that led to the establishment and recognition of the Man Power Citizens Association (MPCA) which was supposed to be a representative body negotiating for rights of the sugar workers.
However, as time evolved, the MPCA became more of a pet poodle of the sugar barons and a supporter of the PNC and the rights of the workers were still being flagrantly abused, which gave rise to the Guyana Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU) and a struggle for recognition for a trade union that really represented workers.
The WPO had become a vibrant force that motivated women, long subjugated under the yoke of traditional mores and a work regime that wrested long hours of unremitting labour from them with little pay and no benefits to agitate for their rights and to dream of a better life that offered a promise of a bright future for their children.
They were forced to live in sqalour and acute poverty in a cycle so vicious that their children were offered no hope of escaping a similar fate. And then emerged Dr. Cheddi Jagan and his wife Janet, who began a mass movement that eventually led to a national landscape that transformed the socio-political dynamics whereby the working class were presented with a vista offering limitless opportunities based on the premise of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work; until Burnham, once Dr. Jagan’s trusted ally in the freedom struggle, joined forces with the colonials and split the base of the struggle.
Divide and conquer was the strategy that the colonials used to subjugate nations under their oppressive yoke, whereby they identified those willing to trade their souls for power and riches in return for their harnessing the working class citizens into subjection and submission to fill their coffers.
Until today the consequences are peoples divided unto themselves; and it is the sole factor that has poisoned the national psyche into a ‘them’ and ‘us’ syndrome and created an inhibiting agent to national unity and optimal exploitation of Guyana’s potential for growth and development.
A quarter of a century after the murder of Sumintra and her colleagues another woman paid the ultimate price in the struggle for freedom, justice and equity.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Kowsilla’s death at the brutal hands of a PNC scab; and the observance of this landmark in Guyana’s history should make us pause and reflect on the way of life in then British Guiana was; the way it evolved into brutal domination and oppression under an L.F.S. Burnham dictatorship, and the freedoms that we enjoy today as a nation.
How much more could we achieve if we strive as a united people reaching for a common goal of peace, progress and prosperity instead of fighting among ourselves; if only to honour the martyrs and national heroes and heroes who spilt their blood on this country’s soil so that we, their descendants could walk in freedom.
This, however, can only be achieved if we liberate our minds from the hatred infused into our psyche – first by the colonials, then by the dictatorial forces.