Last year was a memorable year in my life. I was not surprised even in the tiniest way as to what happened to me last year. I am in my early seventies and over the long decades I have come to know this country. Three things happened in 2023 to me. One is, I parted company with the Kaieteur News (KN), a newspaper I participated in birthing and that I have written in for 30 years.

Secondly, a part of my life was exposed for plausible criticism with the accusation that I am not the principled, philosophically quixotic person that I describe myself as because I only criticized Mr. Glen Lall and the KN after I was removed from writing. I am going to spend the rest of this column explaining that because I think people who have appreciated my praxis of over 55 years and my 35 year old media career should be given an explanation.

The third occurrence was the complete silence of the society over two negatives. The fall out at KN on Mr. Lall’s dropping my column rejecting the opposition’s claim that there is apartheid in Guyana and the Editor-in-Chief of the Stabroek News, Anand Persaud, referring to me as a PPP lap dog. I will devote elaboration in another column to this third occurrence.

One of the most complex, existential choices a human faces in life is whether to stay within an order or a group or a process and seek changes that are not forthcoming and changes that you think the order or the group or the process must pursue or to remove oneself and become an outsider seeking transformation as a quixotic crusader.

It is not an easy choice and it has its tormenting moments. I stayed at KN but should not have remained because the tsunamic wrongs I saw over my 30 years there should have galvanized the moral veins and conscience in me to leave. Why did I stay? It has to do with my awakening when I became a UG lecturer teaching the first year course in philosophy.

My students did not know or ever heard about Sigmund Freud, Franz Fanon, Jean Paul Sartre and Edward Said. My students did not know anything about the Holocaust. As I settled down at UG in the 1980s, I got two opportunities abroad. But I wanted to teach Guyanese students about philosophy, the golden subject that explains everything about life. Each year, I showed them the movie, Schindler’s List. Many years, I took them late into the night to visit the haunted house at Hague to demonstrate the role of imagination in shaping one’s existence.

The exact psychology in me existed at KN. I wanted to write. I wanted to be a public intellectual that informed Guyana about wrongs that must be righted. I wanted to bring philosophy to the wider Guyanese audience as I did for my UG students. Here is a little story with me and journalist, Denis Chabrol.

It was in 2010 when the Wikileaks cables on Guyana were made public and I recall vividly, it was a Saturday morning. I was standing at Fix It Hardware store on Main Street. He was on the opposite side at Banks DIH outlet. He came over. He told me because of who I were I should stop writing. I am not going into details because I do not want a libel writ from Chabrol. Here is how I reacted.

I pointed to the avenue on Main Street and I told him that should I stop writing, one day he will see me walking in the avenue and will say: “He was a good columnist.” I told Chabrol I appreciated his perception of me but I wanted to write. I stayed at KN and looked the other way because I wanted to write. But it was not as simple as that. I was never a silent human.

I taught for 26 years at UG and each year I was catapulted into a controversy. My quixotic crusade at UG is readily available at Google. What is not available and not known is that over the 30 years that I spent at KN, there were tempestuous confrontations between me and Mr. Lall on the one hand, and me and the editor, Adam Harris on the other hand.

There are two witnesses to one such confrontation – diaspora Guyanese, Dr. Asquith Rose and deputy CEO of the now defunct, SARA agency, Aubrey Retemyer. Anyone who worked at KN will tell you, it was never an easy relationship with Lall. I spoke up and defended my integrity. If you think I should have left KN long ago for moral reasons, then, maybe I should have based on who I said I was. I don’t have the answer but you have an apology.