I beg you to turn away from shallow arrogance

Dear President Jagdeo,

I have recently returned to a country gripped by the race hatred and race fear that I came to accept as a normal thing as a child growing up, while you were still a babe in arms, in the sixties: Mainly working class Africans and Indians slaughtering each other while an Anglicized ‘raceless’ middle class shook their heads in various shades of horror, sadness, disbelief and impotence. I was part of that Anglicized raceless middle-class. I learned to joke about not being able to take sides because of my mixed heritage. Of course, my ability to extricate myself and flee from Guyana was a product, not of my mixed heritage, but my Anglicization and subsequent education which enabled me to make the flight.

I did not need to backtrack to Suriname; swallow drugs; marry a white man; or buy a false passport. I did it the dull, colourless and undramatic way and ran from hell like hell.

My North American years were instructive. I discovered a culture of African American scholars who understood the centrality of Black people in the creation of human civilization. I learned that the Indus Valley civilization of India was a Black one before the coming of the Aryan invaders; that black people were the moral and spiritual leaders of human civilization for millennium before the European invasions into Africa; that the Greeks travelled to the fount of knowledge, Africa, from which they learned all the arts and sciences they subsequently passed on to their European descendants. I also discovered that those African American scholars held in high repute the Guyanese who laid certain foundations for a way of thinking and being that united morality with intellectual understanding: George G James; Ivan Van Sertima; Eusi Kwayana; Walter Rodney to name some of the more prominent.

But perhaps what was most instructive to me in all those years, was to learn that the phenomenon we call ‘Racism’ was something manufactured by the invaders of Africa. That the division of the Human Race into a hierarchy where white-skinned people were placed at the top and black-skinned people at the bottom was a carefully orchestrated plan to place an extremely insecure group of people ‘in charge’ of world economic and political affairs.

Of course, many of my fellow Anglicized middle-class Guyanese immigrants who, like me, ran like hell from hell, would prefer to point to the Condis and Colins, Michaels and Magics of that great haven of immigrants and say, ‘But no, it isn’t so any more. The Civil Rights movement changed all that.

All you Black Power advocates clamouring for Reparations are out of tune, backwardly bitter, too angry to see the clear light of day. We are now working towards a big interconnected multicultural world where all the races will unite in a great technological orgasm, virtual though it might be.’

Why then does the memory of bleeding or kidnapped African Guyanese children and youth, in or out of British colonial uniform, and the now fresh image of innocent Indian children slaughtered in Lusignan sear my Anglicized middle-class conscience with such awful immediacy that I feel that, run as I might, hell will follow me?

Why do I feel so disappointed with us, Guyanese, whose hymns to children and green landscapes and great beginnings can rend the heart and still the greatest anger? Why did I feel such sympathy when I watched your press conference on this, another day of slaughter, and wanted to reach out to you and beg you to turn now, away from the shallow arrogance only the politically impotent can display, and seek the fount of knowledge; seek those true leaders of the people, your only real bodyguards, wherever in this great big technological world they might be, and draw them around you now.

You are young, Mr Jagdeo. And there is always room for redemption.

Yours faithfully,

Charlene Wilkinson