Let’s face it – of all Guyana’s peoples, African Guyanese are the least ready for the challenge of shaping a genuine national identity.

We are not spiritually prepared….am not offering up what I have to say with any genuflection at the altar of bigotry; to the contrary…am primarily proposing that the African community must acknowledge a degree of responsibility for our complicity in the recurring historic crime against our generations. Through a complicity of silence, we’ve failed to manifest a “militant consciousness”, an essential element of self-definition with the power to inspire our children with the spirit to reject all notions of inferiority.
African Guyanese children are unlike any others in this nation; their ancestors endured the dehumanization of our past history of enslavement when we were considered no better than chattel; then, following hard on that, our battered psyche was afflicted with…affected by, the further mental assault fueling the psychology of colonial oppression.
Take for example, a child like myself…marched every ‘Empire Day’ to the Rialto Cinema on Garnett Street and Vlissengen Road, to celebrate the Queen’s Birthday; to lustily sing –
Rule, Britannia! Britania, rule the wave! Britons never, never, never, shall be slaves. And –

Here’s a health unto His Majesty,
With a fa la la la la la la,
Confusion to his enemies,
With a fa la la la la la la.
And he who would not drink his health,
We wish him neither wit nor wealth,
Nor yet a rope to hang himself.
With a fal lal la la la la la la la la,
With a fal lal la la la la la.

Imagine that – “We wish him neither wit nor wealth, Nor yet a rope to hang himself”
…am talking about that pre-Independence period when our Politicians; Forbes Burnham, Cheddi Jagan, were stuffing down the throats of the British, their Magna Carta, the foundation document of the English system of common law; claiming to be a symbol of freedom from oppression….was a time when our poet Martin Carter was screaming –
“I will not still my voice, I have too much to claim” and –
“I come from the nigger yard of yesterday leaping from the oppressors’ hate
and the scorn of myself;
from the agony of the dark hut in the shadow
and the hurt of things;
from the long days of cruelty and the long nights of pain
down to the wide streets of tomorrow, of the next day
leaping I come, who cannot see will hear.
Colonial British Guianese children, celebrating the royal birthday, singing those ‘patriotic’ songs…shouting our hurrah’s, urged on by a presiding education official –
“…louder, louder, louder children; you want him {or her} to hear you all the way over there in England – so give it all you’ve got – hiphip Hip-HIP” –
…we screamed our undeveloped throats hoarse –
“Hooooooooooooraaaaaaaaay!!!
Then going home at midday, with the sun kicking dust, we encountered ‘Walker D Nigga’ a hunchback Santantone who sold English sweepstakes.
Intoning – “British man two shilling!”…clutching his sweepstake tickets in one hand…a large stone in the other, he would threaten with that stone (but he never hurt us), the throngs of children stalking him through the noonday streets chanting –
“Walka d Nigga Walka d nigga”…he always asserted firmly –
“BRITAIN YUH FOOLS I AM A BRITISH MAN…IS BETTER THE WHITEMAN RULE WE!…
Believe me – that eccentric old hunchback Walker D Nigga was communicating in his unique way, the philosophy of a surprising number of people who in the (to borrow from the poet Gwendolyn Brooks) ”seduced self-honeying” spaces of British Guianese middle class ‘society’ at that time, felt exactly the way he did.
Thus throughout the era of British colonization, at least in the fifties when I was a child, African Guyanese children were made to mouth in song, such self-deprecatory contempt for the enslaved state of their ancestors (which they, our enslavers themselves, had initiated) while we celebrated in the same breath, our “masters’” pride in their assumed superiority –
“…Britons never, never, never, shall be slaves.

Unless she/he was being taught to think with a militant consciousness, the kind that springs naturally from the genes of a Coramantee warrior such as our National Hero Cuffy (Kofi), who was Coromantin, it is unrealistic to assume that an African Guyanese child’s mind could have survived this assault and matured into today’s adult with an informed sense of self.
Especially since, proceeding from all those slurs we were served by our history, not long after achieving Independence from the British in 1966, we ended up in the clutches of the travesty of the past 23 years of the racist PPP Government. In this “dark time”, another “Season of Oppression” the PPP cabal assumed the role of new masters on a contemporary plantation… thus creating a culture of acceptance which too many African Guyanese seem to have settled into “at the bottom of the ladder”.

The harrowing experience of the African Guyanese past is an accumulation of mental wounds inflicted by the new plantation, heaped on the physical scars of the old. When all this is combined with widespread ignorance of our glorious history before the Middle Passage and the proven fact that all life began in Africa, it is small wonder that Guyana’s people of African Descent have very little sense of their right to claim their uniqueness with pride…ensure that it is fully integrated into the design of our national identity.

Think about it – why is it that you never hear members of any other group in this country denying their origins as African Guyanese do, by declaring, “I ain no Indian” or “I’m not Chinese” or….?

I submit that a lot of work needs to be done within the African Guyanese Community if the APNU/AFC Coalition Administration would really give serious thought to achieving their goal of “cultural cohesion”. For starters, there must be a degree of Affirmative Action for the benefit of African Guyanese youth, stressing the point that AFRICAN HISTORY DOES NOT BEGIN WITH SLAVERY. Also there should be options to arrest the continuing trend of young African youths being paid to perpetrate criminal acts such as the Kaieteur News grenade incident. Such youths are rudderless, with no sense of community or direction; they are victims of history, trapped in the repetitive dilemma of marronage.
Perhaps this process of Affirmative Action can begin by disseminating the introductory African History booklets, 1- 4, compiled by Eric Phillips and Jonathan Adams, Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Guyana Reparations Committee entitled: In The Beginning, Africa Before Slavery, The African Guyanese Holocaust, and The African Guyanese Reparations Claim; and a 5th booklet entitled: Crisis in the African Guyanese Community.

Affirmative action by definition is:
“A policy or a program that seeks to redress past discrimination through active
measures to ensure equal opportunity, as in education and employment”. Also known as positive discrimination, it is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who currently suffer or historically have suffered from discrimination within a culture. Often, these people are disadvantaged for historical reasons, such as oppression or slavery. In 1989, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination stipulated (in Article 2.2) that affirmative action programs may be required of countries that ratified the convention, in order to rectify systematic discrimination. It also states that such programs “shall in no case entail as a consequence the maintenance of unequal or separate rights for different racial groups after the objectives for which they were taken have been achieved”