I KNOW the Guyanese Mulatto Creole class (MCC) from two angles. One is my extensive reading of the literature before I became a UG student. Then, as a practising academic, I delved deeper into this class.
The second angle was my direct interfacing with the MCC through four channels. One was that I was not one of but the poorest, dark-skinned East Indian UG student at a time when UG’s student intake was dominated by the children of the MCC with a sprinkling of the children of petty bourgeois Indians.
I was a literal spectacle at UG – this poor boy from South Georgetown with a pinned-up pair of rubber slippers walking the campus. The MCC students would move off the corridor when I was passing and would look down at my dishevelled footwear and laugh at me. The MCC are snobbish people insanely driven by class and colour and showed open contempt for Indians whom they thought were not culturally suited for a Creole Caribbean country.
The second channel was my activism with the WPA as a UG student and as a practising academic. So, if I know that the WPA was an MCC outfit, why did I stay with it? That is a long story, but I was essentially an anti-dictatorship idealist. I wanted to see the removal of Burnham’s autocracy.
The third channel was my columnist days at Stabroek News. My father worked all his life at three places dominated by the Portuguese and MCC people as a groundsman and I grew up hearing stories from him of how contemptuous this class was of Indians, their culture and choice of clothes. What my father echoed in our house, I came face to face with at Stabroek News. I am still mentally bamboozled and will remain so by the incredibly positive things people had to say about this elitist, racist newspaper.
The fourth channel was my time as an AFC activist. The AFC’s bigwigs were shamelessly dominated by the MCC whose personalities were openly contemptuous of ordinary people. So why did I stay? The reason is the same that I offered above in relation to the WPA.
The MCC’s contempt for Indians reached its apogee with the election loss of APNU+AFC. The mask fell off from the faces of people I struggled with for decades. These people did not want the PPP back in power because of ethnic ideology. The MCC’s world came crashing down in March 2020 and so was my world. The MCC supported the rigging of the election for simply basic racist sociology.
The MCC showed its true colour (no pun intended) after March 2020. They could not imagine that after their ascendency in 2015, they would lose Guyana to an organisation they felt was an Indian outfit and that was banished for good after its electoral defeat in 2015. So, from August 2020, when the Ali presidency came into power, the opposition to the PPP government was not only politically based but culturally deterministic.
The editorial pages of the Stabroek News were replete with this cultural contempt for Indian leadership of Guyana. Co-owner of the paper, Isabelle DeCaires, ridiculed the clothes President Ali wore. Now, the online newspaper, Village Voice, has demonstrated a despicable, sickening manifestation of cultural contempt for Indian political leadership.
The newspaper juxtaposed a photo of then-president, David Granger, taking the salute at a military parade. Granger donned a white turtleneck sweater under a suit, a typical Western wear. By contrast, last week, President wore at his salute, beige trousers with an olive-green shirt-jack. When you look at the two men, Dr Ali’s sartorial outfit is typically post-colonial and relevant to tropical weather. Granger must have been perspiring profusely under that turtleneck.
But Village Voice saw the Granger fashion as superior to Dr Ali and went on a comical rampage, deriding the wear of Dr Ali. You have to see this juxtaposition to understand the cultural contempt Indians have endured since they came here as indentured workers. President Ali cut a more post-colonial figure than Granger, but the MCC writer thought Granger looked better and superior in his Western garb.
President Ali was spared the wrath of Stabroek News for his choice of clothes because the newspaper went out of existence since March. The ridicule of what President Ali wore at the military parade is just another occasion for the MCC to demonstrate its Freudian thinking of anthropological superiority. When I look at that expression of cultural contempt for one of the Caribbean’s most beloved leaders, Mohamed Irfan Ali, I feel immensely justified in the current transformation of my politics. Maybe I was a fool for too long.
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.