OUR national attitude is the ostrich phenomenon, push your head in the hole of optimism and imagine that the predator doesn’t see the rest of you, or that it goes away; it doesn’t happen.

Guyana is populated by the four major groups that inhabit our planet [1] African Bantu; West African phenotype, [2] Asian; Amerindian-Chinese,[3] Europeans; Including Portuguese, and [4] Indo-Asian; East Indians. ‘Mixed’ in reality are mainly Afro-Guyanese of mixed heritage and not a separate people, or bi-racial in any other context. Our definitions that apply to the ‘Six Races idea’ are cultural rather than in account to indigenous origins. We all came here with separate systems of holistic management and spiritual tenets. Matriarchal and Patriarchal, what is tyrannical to one is functional to the other. Where it becomes competitive is when thinking A: seeks to govern thinking B: there will be natural marginalisation especially in a nation that cannot present a timeline in two parts for the past hundred and fifty years by which to measure our achievements and failures. How do citizens from different zones understand the anxieties and priorities of the other, how do they empathize with the concerns that are economical, social and cultural from experience to experience? The answer is they can’t; they will supplement knowledge with assumptions and stereotypes. And many of these assumptions were developed in the early beginnings of Guyana; Brian L. Moore presented the stereotype chart developed for us “A-Buckru, the British white, was a fortune-seeker, course but craving high social status, hospitable, pompous, arrogant and extravagant. B- Quashie, the Black Creole, was a noble savage, very excitable, lazy and improvident, who especially loved music and dance [“to party”]. C- Senghor or Many was the Portuguese immigrant, hardworking but penurious, ‘sleazy’ and dishonest. D-Sammy, the Indian was immoral and superstitious, docile but excitable and vengeful, industrious and thrifty. E- John Chinaman was hardworking, neat and very intelligent, but an opium addict, inveterate gambler, and prone to violence. Such stereotyped images and the high level of social and economic segmentation reflected the absence of societal consensus among the various ethnic groups.” This reflects the 1880’s British Guiana and onwards. Our political scientists have missed the cultural analogy and the continual metamorphosis that occurred and fossilised when the groups gravitated and were coerced into separate social enclaves into the pre and post independence era, with irrational notions and value systems of what was prestigious and what was not; the political parties did not create the dreams but were forced to either transform or exploit the dreamers.

I wish to give two examples from personal experiences, both of expansion of stereo-accepted and of transference and marginalisation. In late 1972/3, the YSM visited areas across Guyana; I recall Jeffery Thomas as one of the speakers, inviting young men to become pioneers in a government project. The lure was the building of a multilateral facility to teach artisan skills; we would participate in the process as pioneers, be fed and receive a stipend fortnightly. The location was Kuru Kuru on the Linden Highway; a few of us had some youth corps experience and we went into this virgin area where with power-saws, cutlasses and tools, we participated in as auxiliaries in the construction of the Kuru Kuru Cooperative College, chicken pens, pig pens and our barrack rooms, and became the Kuru Kuru Agro-Industrial Young Settlers Cooperative Society [KAYS]. The essence of what I’ve just told you lies in the fact that no way Afro-Guyanese or urban Indo-Guyanese youth would have responded to participating in building an agricultural facility; the idea of skill training revolves entirely with artisan training–electricians, joinery-masonry-plumbing etc. No way did agriculture fit into that imagination in 1973. But living it was an incredible, unforgettable experience that empowered us, which some members are still in that field. Burnham had tricked us into a significant awakening.

Born with artistic talents in my case, the compulsion directed me. By the early eighties, I was writing, illustrating, researching and conceptualising a new career. By 1989, the Creative Artist Association was founded; I was the PR person, Castellani House was vacant since President Burnham’s passing. I wrote Dr. Dennis Williams [in] late 1992 on behalf of our group to have it transformed into an arts facility; he agreed and specified that it would have to come with State supervision; we were elated. We prepared for our first exhibition first quarter 1993. The elections came and the PPP/C came into power; state power to many of us was not construed as the promotion of extremely opposing values, and the

transference of propaganda into functional application. I was not at all optimistic, having had a previous experience. The exhibition involved myself, Peter Chester, Mervyn Wilson, Angold Thompson, Seunarine Munisar, Omawale [Yank] Owen John, Kenton Wyatt, among others, Omawale invited Mrs Jagan, based on some revolutionary camaraderie, and she came. After the pictures were taken and the event celebrated, Castellani House became the home of the National collection. A board was selected, we were eliminated from any

participation in an idea that we had initiated. Denis Williams tried to include in that board representatives from our group and Rupert Roopnarine, but Mrs. Jagan had refused. When the 10th Anniversary was celebrated, a booklet was published; we were excluded from mention; this was an act of colonisation with all its evil elements. My previous experience that made me opposing to inviting Janet Jagan was that on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of October 1992, the play ‘SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR’ was held with Norman Beaton as Manoa.

A picture with Mrs. Jagan and Norman was featured in the print media with the erroneous caption that he had returned to Guyana because of the return of democracy. ‘The Shadow of the Jaguar’ was meanwhile kicked out of the Chronicle because it was deemed an Afro-Guyanese superhero. I have told this story before, but it is necessary in the context of perceptions still in existence to retell it for those who have not heard it. If our laws do not transcend the political being at the head and those that think like that ‘being,’ there will always be a continuation of deep inflictions that will lead to even greater confrontations, because we have not reached that state that a psychological evaluation be conducted for all persons seeking political office, and this should be done.