I READ and listen to almost everything the opposition schools and their surrogates say and write; for obvious reason – it is my work. Two men make me think of Forbes Burnham and Walter Rodney. One is a protégé of Forbes Burnham, Henry Jeffrey, who is in his eighties; the other is a protégé of Walter Rodney, David Hinds who is in his early seventies.
I mention their age because it tells you the era from which they emerged. Jeffrey was a rising Marxist star in Burnham’s eyes. On behalf of Burnham, Jeffrey, as a researcher at UG, submitted a paper in 1975 during my student days, justifying the role of co-operatives as the main vehicle for transforming the Guyana economy into a socialist one. I was present when Clive Thomas referred to Jeffrey’s paper as pure nonsense.
Burnham was smitten by Jeffrey, so he established a school to teach Marxism to PNC cadres and Jeffrey was the principal. It was named Kuru Kuru Ideological Institute, located on the Linden Highway. No one can tell me about the politics and temperament of Forbes Burnham. I have been studying Burnham since I entered UG in 1974 as a freshman. My columns on Burnham in my 38-year-old newspaper career are equivalent to a voluminous book.
Forbes Burnham was not an admirer of a Western concept titled “liberal democracy.” Burnham using his gifted style in the use of the English language, would have dismissed the colonial narrative of liberal democracy in a way that would make you break a rib laughing.
Today, the only Guyanese living in Guyana that extols a concept and political system named liberal democracy, that his master, Burnham despised, is Henry Jeffrey. Jeffrey swung from being an advocate and teacher of Marxism to an undiluted embracer of a colonial, Western invention that is essentially a propagandistic tool to fool the post-colonial world. They only fooled one fool, a Guyanese named Henry Jeffrey.
There is no superior democratic system named liberal democracy. Liberal democracy in Western Europe is not superior to the practice of democratic governance in the CARICOM region. Space doesn’t allow for elaboration because I have to move on to David Hinds. But here is how the “liberal democratic” West tried to fool the former colonies.
What they did was to shape the liberal democratic paradigm as a domestic phenomenon and leave out foreign policy behaviour. That was the catch and people like Jeffrey bought it and Burnham is turning in his grave. So the liberal democratic template is democratic because you have the separation of powers, a free media and competitive elections.
But you are still a liberal democratic country even though you go out into the world, brutalise and dominate other countries, other ethnicities, and other cultures, exploit their resources and participate in genocide. Of course, the media are corporate-owned, and the judiciary is hardly independent and safe from the rapacity of the corporate world.
So if Burnham is turning in his grave over the political ugliness Jeffrey has become, Walter Rodney is doing the same over the political mess that Hinds has become. Hinds has reduced Guyana to a “one dimensional man,” a phrase taken from the great 20th-century philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
All the dimensions of life in Guyana are reduced to racial determinism. Hinds accused me of trying to get Indian people to dislike Rupert Roopnaraine after my critique of Roopnaraine. Then when I criticise Eusi Kwayana, I am coming from a racial position. Every critique by an Indian in Guyana of the PNC is ethnically based. Every African who joins the PPP is an ethnic betrayer. There are no other dimensions in the mental make-up of humans in Guyana.
Now how would Rodney approach this “one dimensional man?” What would Rodney say to Geeta Chandan, then PNC Member of Parliament, who objected to an African woman in the WPA saying pejorative things about the Indian race in Guyana? Here is how Hinds reacted when Chandan objected; “she is a slave catcher, keep yuh mouth outta black people business.” Would Rodney agree that Chandan was a slave catcher?
Let’s end on a black pudding note. Hinds broadcasted that he heard African people running up the East Coast to buy black pudding. So he said, “Meh is a man dat like black pudding baad, so I gwaan to see but it was an Indian woman selling de ting; you left yuh own to buy black pudding from that lady.”
How race came into it? Guyanese not Black people were running to buy black pudding from a Guyanese woman. Readers may not believe this but months before she died my mother made black pudding. I swear on the woman I loved more than life itself – my wife.
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.