THE late television anchorman in Jamaica, Wilmot Perkins, opined that Guyana was the head of the West Indies. It is where the brain is, he said. Jamaica, he said, was the tail. He was expressing admiration for our country, this place that has produced some fine minds; and he was, at the same time, doing what the best West Indians are so good at – self-deprecating humour. The best of us are very good at poking fun at ourselves, at not taking ourselves too seriously. The Jamaican novelist, John Hearne, had the same opinion of Guyanese, although he was not very good at poking fun at himself.
In the West Indies generally, the two major sentiments about Guyana and Guyanese are that we are a nation that produces some fine minds; and that we are a nation that betrays itself by wasting our natural bounties, so generously given by the Creator. The two things seem to contradict each other. If, indeed, we are a nation that produces (or produced) some fine minds, then one would think that those fine minds would be employed to prevent the waste of our natural gifts: our rivers, our forest; our flora and fauna, our animals, our vast savannahs, our expansive and fecund land, our part of the Atlantic. We have so much, and we use so very little of it; and the tiny bit that we use is used in the most ordinary and unimaginative ways. We simply do that which has always been done in the same ways.

As a nation of bright people, we ought to be breeding cows and exporting meat. We ought to be developing new ways to run businesses, to farm and fish. We ought to be a nation creating new ways to heal the sick, new ways of teaching and learning, new ways to build roads, to electrify our country; new ways to guard against crime of all sorts, to protect our womenfolk and children, new ways to help our elderly and our handicapped, new ways to generate medicinal plant pathologies. We ought to be making scientific and technological discoveries. We ought to be producing world-class athletes and poets and novelists and scholars in all fields. If we were indeed a nation of fine minds, we would be producing music.

We ought to be able to do it all, but we do not seem to be able to. Instead, we have become mere consumers of other people’s creativity and genius. In his address at the Ministry of Education National Awards ceremony last week, President David Granger was on cue when he declared that his administration wants an education system “that will produce citizens of quality who will be happy to remain here at home to build our bountiful and beautiful country; we want a system that will extend access to the information superhighway to support the education of our young people”.

For President Granger, in order for us to live up to the John Hearne’s assessment and for Guyana to survive it cannot be left behind the rest of the Caribbean and the rest of the world in education. It must as he said “at the minimum keep abreast with international standards”.

Ask many of our citizens which country has the best medical system in the world. You will hear “Cuba” or Trinidad or some such place. Never Singapore. Never a Scandinavian country, not because places like Cuba and Trinidad are bad places, but because our standards are so low and these places are all we know. And that is all we know because we have stopped wanting to know. We have become quite comfortable in our ordinariness. And yet, Hearne and Perkins from Jamaica may be right. It is simply that we must stop this self-betrayal. There are people elsewhere – exactly half way on the other side of the planet who believe in us. Let us, therefore, begin to believe in ourselves and push ourselves to greater things.