Dear Editor
MY good friend Dr David Hinds, in his latest “Hinds’ Sight”, deals with “The Black/African Guyanese intellectual tradition and a nation of hypocrites”.

He referred to a letter written by Dr Baytoram Ramharack, who had referred to another letter that asked, “Where is the Indian Intellectual” who should be “addressing issues germane to their physical existence?”

Ramharack aspired to offer an answer, but seemed to have created a Rorschach Test for his interlocutors: they read the text but each see something different. Even though one never gave much shrift to the speculations of Freud, one could be blamed for wondering: “projection?”

One of the newly-appointed members of the Board of Directors of the GNNL, in an extended admonition to Dr Ramharack, exclaimed primly, “Prefixing the term ‘intellectual’ with a particular ethnic identity is wholly and utterly to be rejected.” Since the GNNL Board had just confirmed Dr Hinds as a columnist for the paper, I waited a week for a similar “rejection” of Dr. Hinds’s violation of her rule in the aforementioned article. Her studied silence gives credence that “African Intellectuals” do get a “free pass”, and that Guyana might just be a “nation of hypocrites”, as Dr Hinds claims.

From far-off and not then ISIS-violated France, Abu Bakr, writing as a “Muslim”, saw Ramharack: “bemoaning his perceived absence of Indo-Guyanese intellectuals pushing a racial agenda and doing so to national applause”. The irony was obviously lost on Bakr that he was merely confirming Ramharack’s contention: “In sum, Indians are seen as non-patriotic and as anti-nationalist as they come. As a result, Indians who publicly advocate for their community or group interests are viewed as “parochial” because they cling to their “primordial” sentiments.

Dr Hinds agreed with Ramharack who, in reference to the Caribbean, said: “There is no question that an intellectual tradition is firmly grounded in the African community. This has been established over the years, largely complemented by many years of oppression and discrimination and a historical experience that has created shared values and common positions around national issues, be it racism against Africans, reparations, etc.”

But there is another perspective, which I believe was articulated early on by Gordon Lewis. He pointed out that, in the 20th century, there were three main intellectual currents that swept the Caribbean: Marxism-Leninism, anti-colonialism, and Pan-Africanism/ Black Power/Negritude. The first Pan- African Conference in 1900 prominently featured African-Caribbean intellectuals, and this tradition continues into the present. Co-sponsored by UWI, “The Inaugural Pan-African Colloquium” is scheduled for January 2016.

The three currents were all fused in the 1945 fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, which saw Trinidad’s Eric Williams and African leaders like Kenyatta and Nkrumah in attendance. Burnham became a member of the London LCP that was responsible for the papers out of the Congress, and he would have been exposed to the ideological positions.

CLR James, Marxist and close associate of Nkrumah, would mentor our own Walter Rodney during and after the latter’s student days in London. CLR gave us the famous maxim that we ignore at our own peril today: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.” When Rodney returned to the Caribbean, he wrote in 1969: “Black Power in the West Indies means these three closely related things: 1) The break with imperialism, which is historically white racist. 2) The assumption of power by the black masses of the islands. 3) The cultural reconstruction of the society in the image of the blacks. These are the areas with which we, as black people, must concern ourselves hereafter.”

To his credit, he did “include” Indians in the category of “black people”, but as I pointed out, two decades ago, the ambiguities and contradictions in that conflation were legion; and they are the germ of what has caused Ramharack and others to ask, “Where are the Indian intellectuals”?

This exclusion of the Indian intellectual from the canonical “Caribbean intellectual tradition” must be examined.

Sincerely,
Ravi Dev