ON the first day of my West Indian history class at UG as freshman in 1974, the lecturer, Dr. Brian Moore, made some welcoming remarks and warned us not to expect any A- grade because he doesn’t give A- grades. He explained that he had to work hard for what he earned so don’t expect any generosity from him.

The class went into an uproar and three of us became the most vocal protestors – former Chancellor of the Judiciary, Carl Singh, Francis Drakes, who has changed his name to Kimani Nihusi and is now a published historian and me. We took our protest to the Vice Chancellor, Denis Irving, and Moore was reassigned.

What Moore did was not easy to fathom but it is a normal occurrence that some find hard to accept. It is regarded as a psychological complexity but the Brian Moore syndrome is as common as any flaw in Homo sapiens.
In relation to ethnic denial of one’s culture, that is even more difficult to comprehend. The academic world offers an intellectual explanation for self-hate but still it is a line fault in humans that appear impossible to accept.
We rejected Moore’s admission that he does not give A-grades because he had it difficult in life because we thought his attitude should have been the opposite. When you had it hard in life, it compels you to help others because it is in line with the motto that was born when civilization was born – help your fellow man.

You appreciate the value of freedom when your freedom is taken away. You fight for other people’s freedom because you know what it was like to have lost your freedom. You want to bring others out of poverty because you know what it is like to be hungry without any light at the end of the tunnel.
But sadly we live in a world where humans behave so selfishly that you know that the mind is impossible to understand. I buy Gilbakka from the fish pond at Bourda Market. So last month, I was amazed at how efficient this Venezuela guy was in his chores.
He cut and washed the fish in seconds. So I turned to the owner and said that if it was a Guyanese you would never see such alacrity. I was floored when the woman said to me that market colleagues are cussing her down for employing Venezuelans.
You would drop dead if you know the prominent citizens who are against Venezuelans coming to Guyana. And don’t get apoplexy when I tell you that every one of them has children and spouses who are citizens of either Canada or the US.
Forbes Magazine has listed Guyana as the number one country, per capita that sends more citizens to other countries than any other nation in the world. How with that statistic could any Guyanese want to deny entry to people fleeing their countries to come to Guyana to have a better life? How do you explain such a mind?

How do you explain the mind of Suella Braverman, Pretti Patel, James Cleaverly, Rita Panahi, Dilan Yesilgoz and others? Let’s tell you about them. Dilan Yesilgoz was brought to Holland as a small child when her parents fled Turkey and got refugee status in Holland. Now a powerful politician in Holland, she is anti-immigrant.
The parents of Pretti Patel, Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak of the former UK Conservative Government came to the UK as Indian migrants. They came to the UK without any assets. All three when in government passed legislation to reduce immigration considerably, especially from India,
James Cleverly, born in the UK to an African woman, passed legislation when he was Home Secretary in the former Conservative Government in the UK to curtail immigration. You now have to be working for 38,000 pounds in order to sponsor your spouse. But when Cleverly’s father brought over his married wife from Sierre Leone, he wasn’t earning even half of that amount.

Rita Panahi is one of the most known television anchors in Australia. Her parents escaped the Iranian Revolution in 1978 and sought refugee status in Australia. Ms. Panahi is anti-immigrant. The point is that if the White immigration ministers in the UK, Holland and Australia did not want non-white immigrants into their countries, Patel, Braverman, Sunak and Cleverly would never have reached where they are today.
One of the known television personalities in the US is Fareed Zakaria, a brown-skin immigrant from India. Zakaria said he has endured more vicious racism from non-White people than any White person. How do you explain this inverse self-dislike? I guess that is left to another column.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.