LET’S’s quote one of the leading personalities in the anti-oil lobby, a woman lawyer by the name of Melinda Janki. “A country’s success depends upon brain power – the ability to make the right decisions in an unstable and ever changing world. Brain power requires well educated people. You don’t need to be educated to be a Member of Parliament or a minister or President. You only need to be able to read English with ‘sufficient proficiency’ so you can participate in the National Assembly. MPs can sit there, screeching incivilities at one another, voting for legislation that some of them do not understand. Test all future MPs and presidents so we can see if they are up to the job. The test must include critical thinking.”

I replied to Janki ( Sunday, March 10, 2024, “Confronting ignorantly based narratives helps to educate people”) because I knew since I was a 16 year old boy working in the PPP’s bookstore (Michael Forde Bookstore) and stealing the philosophy books to go home and read them, that there is no intimate connection between ignorance and non-education. Ignorance comes from the shape of one’s mind and is not missing in the person who attains deep education. I believe some of the most ignorant persons since the 19th century can be found in 2024 among educated Republican law-makers.

In part one, I will examine a leading educated name in the Mulatto/Creole class whom I have known since he was 16. So, I am aware of the history of his social class standing. Part two will examine the appalling, incredible, degenerate, miasmic ignorance that is contained in the editorials of the Stabroek News. Let’s start with Dr. Nigel Westmass.

I am educated and I have lived my entire life in Guyana. I have studied this society as an academic and I have been politically active for more than 55 years with 35 years of media experience. In all my life, I have never encountered the following words penned by Dr. Nigel Westmass: “Martin Carter is, arguably the most insightful and deepest of all Guyanese thinkers.”

When I read that statement, Melinda Janki’s nonsense about the nonsense she sees in the government flew immediately into my mind and believe me, I rushed to the keyboard to pen this column. Let’s repeat Westmass’ statement so it can soak in and after it soaks in, I hope that you will conclude with me it has to be one of most nonsensical utterances an educated Guyanese ever made about something or some person in Guyana. Here it is again: “Martin Carter is, arguably the most insightful and deepest of all Guyanese thinkers.”

Martin Carter never wrote any compelling, insightful, profound, formidable, transformational, thought provoking essay, book or unpublished manuscript in the areas of history, sociology, economics and political theorizing pertaining to Guyana. There is no body of work in these areas of scholarship from which one can draw a conclusion about Carter’s thinking.

When you think of Westmass’ statement against the absence of this body of work, then Westmass’ opinion becomes asinine. It is from a body of work that you draw your conclusions about the skills and thoughts of an intellectual. You can conclude from this body of work whether the intellectual was brilliant or phenomenal.

If Carter is perhaps the extraordinary thinker he was in his reflections on the ontology of Guyana, then where are the writings from Carter based on his output? For you to be arguably the deepest thinker about Guyana’s ontology you have to be a brilliant scholar whose work has dissected the travails of history, culture, sociology and political economy of Guyana.

I taught for 26 consecutive years in the Faculty of Social Sciences at UG and I can say with prodigious assertiveness, that none of my colleagues who taught in the areas of sociology, comparative politics, political economy, Caribbean Studies and economics ever had any work by Martin Carter on their course outlines because there was no work from Carter to put there.

Carter excelled in Guyana in the area of poetry and is regarded as a fine poet and there is no doubt whatsoever that in the courses on literature, he would have been on the reading lists of UG lecturers but to say that he could be classified as a profound thinker on Guyana is not only nonsense but asininity. You can never be recognised as having made a contribution to the historiography of Guyana if your work does not include the methodology of class analysis. I don’t think Carter was capable of a class analysis of 19th century Guyana. Carter was more profound than Rodney? Really!