NO human on Planet Earth, no matter how much they are engrossed in politics and run for political office can have the feel for history as a person trained in history.
When you are trained in history and you begin to teach history and write history and reflect about recorded times, there is psychic space in you not ordinarily found in non-historians.
The relentless instinct of the history aficionado is to search for things and put them in historical recordings. The history aficionado and the historian write with the country’s historiography in mind.

I began the Freddie Kissoon Show three years ago, and the recording of history was on my mind. I wanted our guests to tell Guyana the stories of their lives so they can be put into Guyana’s history books.

I am always, and I repeat, always uncomfortable when people are reluctant to name people and places. I am always mentally unsettled when they say, “a certain country or a certain place or a certain person”.

Once no libel is involved, then, make the specificities public. The necessity is more pressing when the person is dead. You cannot be sued for libel.
I once wrote at the time, when he was one of Guyana’s leading attorneys and one of Guyana’s richest lawyers, that Rex Mc Kay, when he worked as counter attendant at Bookers Stores stole a box of bicycle tubes was charged and convicted. He couldn’t sue for libel, because I had the Guyana Graphic article.

I wrote that because in a libel writ against me in which McKay was the plaintiff’s lawyer, he shouted out in front of Justice Donald Trotman that I stole books from the National Library. The judge was visibly upset. But McKay thought I was a little quiet boy, and so the courtroom was a scene of loud decibels.

So, McKay was convicted and it is now part of history. All humans have an obligation to enrich history by naming names. Can you imagine that Eusi Kwayana writing about the cowboy trial of the brother of Walter Rodney that Magistrate Norma Jack and Rex McKay turned into a circus refused to name Jackman and referred to her as “a certain magistrate”?
Jackman was long dead, so why the foolish inclination of Kwayana to erase her name from history? Even Donald Rodney, a quantity surveyor by profession, refuses to add to history.
He told me after the assassination of Walter Rodney, a certain big name in the PNC government told him he will see that he is never able to work in Guyana. I asked him if the person was still alive. He said no, but refused to disclose his identity. So, the historian will never know that person.

Ravi Dev, on the Freddie Kissoon Show, disclosed that a very enduring high-level PNC person very close to Forbes Burnham told him he had other ethnic blood in him, and he was glad he wasn’t pure African. Dev refused to name him. Dev could have exposed himself to a libel writ, but since the person is dead, I pressed Dev to name him. It was Haslyn Parris.
Leonard Craig, writing in the Guyana Chronicle yesterday, chose not to name Melly Mel, Rickford Burke and Nigel Hughes. I cannot understand that. The people of Guyana must know what they did.

Here is what they did as contained in Craig’s article. And what they did was made public and thousands of people read what they wrote that it why Craig could mention it.
Craig wrote about the overseas-based person that wrote about someone monitoring his home. This was the infamous Rickford Burke making a false allegation against Mikhail Rodrigues (Guyanese Critic).

Craig referred to Melly Mel, without naming her, about a series of extortion-laden recordings. Craig made reference to the interview Junior Baksh gave to Travis Chase without naming them. Everyone knows what Baksh and Chase intended to do with their propagandistic assistance to Azruddin Mohamed.

Craig indicted Nigel Hughes for something terribly wrong that Nigel did to Priya Manickchand without naming Nigel. He referred to Nigel as a fading political figure. Here is what Nigel did, and I am appalled that Nigel could damage his credibility so deliberately.

The top CXC performer is an African youth with a hairstyle that carries long curls. It was Minister Manickchand that intervened in a hairstyle controversy, and demanded that children should be allowed to wear their hair how they want to.

In praising the youth, she made the point that his hairstyle did not affect his learning ability. Nigel took the Minister’s congratulatory statement about the boy’s hairdo and put an ethnic twist to it. Craig should have called him out.

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.