Dear Editor,
No new constitutional arrangement, change of government, amelioration and extension of the electoral system or executive power-sharing model, will eliminate or diminish the adherence to race as a prime mobilisation and retarding force for most within our societies. And with it, the culture of racial preference with which we now live – in a sort of subjection.
For these measures to have meaning and effect, they must be accompanied by public education to prepare us for modern citizenship and governance. And there must be certain economic efforts to change the culture of distribution, the re-empowerment of the labour movement and affirmative action where needed.
Nor will new arrangements remove or significantly reduce ethnic suspicion in those hearts where it exists, nor dampen the psychological requirement to feel empowered as a racial group. They will not efface the abiding need for collective hope and the imperative to eliminate all types of race-based grievance. No window dressing, appointment here or there of a leader from the opposite group, or the dreamed of federation of race-exclusive territories will transform our loyalties and transfer them to something larger than the concept of the collectivity as we hold it to signify and demand of us, now. These solutions have been tried elsewhere and, in isolation, have proved of limited utility. One looks at the Singapore case as recently outlined by Fred Collins, at Belgium and Suriname, and at India among others, and concludes that the measures permit us at most a modus vivendi, but not the real cultural change that we aspire to. We seem, then, to have limited our ambition to a modus vivendi.
We will not tomorrow become egalitarian socialists, or absolutist democrats, or environmentalists, except as adjunct philosophies. Adjunct to the fundamental and dominant tendency to ethno/racial identification. It is simply the state of our consciousness, false or real, at this point of our cultural development. And, whatever the new arrangements, we will live the same contradictions and hypocrisies that attend the high-flown words of the founding documents, as are visible in the countries from where the ideas and ideals originated.
In short, while the constitutional change or new governance model would be useful as an instrument of social engineering, it does not guarantee us the objectives for which states are organised along modern lines. Nor will it realise the ideals ensconced in our national charter or comprehended in any social contract. In short, as we bring the same attitudes and mentalities to the work, the results will be the same. Nations with constitutions as lyrical as ours, at the summit of which sit the noblest of ideals, have demonstrated that a Klu Klux Klan can exist, despite the constitution. Or a caste system, or local slavery, or organised theft and mysogyny and corruption. It requires a collective effort of will for us to translate the words of the anthems and patriotic songs into a reality that is ceaselessly concretised by actions in the parliaments and the courts. It needs a group of politicans held to higher standards by a people led by those among them loyal to those higher standards. In short, we need social and cultural advancement.
As we discuss and exchange in the press and salons, we have identified, as ‘the problem’ in a political sense, the lack of consensus and cohesion among the main groups and the persistence of racial competivity streaming out from perceptions of injustice as real as they could be imaginary. The self-perpetuating discord is, as is usual in some countries, seen side by side with the many instances of cooperation, collaboration in good works as in crime, miscegenation in marriage and the existence of an entire and growing minority of progressives spread over all races and class formations. They are often bearers of a counter-discourse that corrects and cures and strives to re-align the reigning narratives. As it is the narratives generated and held by many in each community justify a series of responses that are sometimes read in the reports of visitors to the country recounting the racist remarks they hear in this group of the next.
To propose that any change of a mechanical order, will mystically and rapidly propel us forward in our evolution towards ‘peoplehood’ is to hold out false hopes to the populace and commit errors of prognosis that will disappoint in the end.
For we have always held that, objectively, the problem is not structural and solveable by a redesign of the architecture of our institutions simply. Nor is it essentially philosophical, so that the adoption of a different ideological system would metamorphose us, rendering us closer to our ideal of what was once called a ‘New Guyana Man (?).’
It is not the way our institutions work together and are articulated/coordinated – the engineering as it were – that prevent or facilitate the synergies needed for a coherent nation.
In fact our problems, before becoming material and organisational are, as they relate to our inability to bond, essentially affective and mental. Hence we plead the primacy of the cultural or anthropological at this stage. The subjective. Or something even spiritual in its profundity and import.
And as such we re-affirm our confidence in the human capacity to spin off individuals willing and able to live better together. This is despite the prediction by social scientists like Horowitz that in the case of societies such as ours, the post-colonial condition often sees the exacerbation of ethnic strife and strengthening of fissiparous tendencies. We concede that there are these problems. What are the causes?
We have been holding on to old formulas to explain our problems. We have been attached to clichés about class formation and conflict, clichés about colonialism’s supposed ‘divide and rule’ policy of teaching us mutual racism, and clichés about easy chiropractic solutions by a realignment of this or that organ or some joint of the body politic or mechanistic gears of the administrative apparatus.
A major conceptual error underlies a lot of the discussion on the perceived novelty of power-sharing and the diagnosis of the ills such a new constitutional arrangement could solve.
First, our problem is not only racism. Our racial preferences are mostly just group identity and natural, even laudable, cultural cohesion for the most part. The particles of racism and prejudice arre inevitable given the ignorance of some original cultures, and the immigrants mythologising of his environment.
Nor is the problem ‘ethnic insecurity.’ Security is a subjective existential condition varying with the group and the person. It is not class conflict. It is not the determinism of the material condition and the teleology it supposes. It is simply that we are still inadequately prepared for living in the type of society and the time in which we found ourselves. I will return to this point.
For too long any real analysis of our condition has been held hostage by in-the-box thinking arising from our reflex adherence to explanatory schemes like Marxism that were born in other climes, of other peoples and their histories. The class conflict explanation, dear to many of the traditional leftists among us, is based on a schematisation of a history rooted in the European experience of the transition from serfdom to nation-statehood or monarchism and through these phases to an industrial revolution. The process, dialectical, as it was described, would result in the creation of social strata of given characteristics.
The argument about the white man teaching us to hate is, as I said in an essay published a dozen years ago, entirely without documentary support or proof of any kind and is a simple technique to avoid unpleasant truths about ourselves or an admission of our ignorance of social process.
This is the first point. The diagnosis is incomplete and thus inaccurate.
The second point is that we have no common ‘indigenous’ ideology to which we may turn as a reference point for social progress. Dispersed across many religions our conception of social progress is exceptionally colony-oriented and constrained by the epistemology of the times and places we know.
I refer now to recent writing on the subject carried by your paper, that is important for its proposal of a concrete alternative to the present dysfunction of a cabinet arrangement, and to various letters dealing with consocitiational alternatives.
The supposition of these proposals is that we do wish to live in unity, in an egalitarian and just world free of the discrimination and prejudice we have suffered in the past and manage consciously or not to perpetuate. There is nothing self evident in this premise. In fact we may not at all wish, every one of us, to live in the brave new world of the just. In fact what we need to look at is what prevents us, culturally, or as elements in our religiosity, from embracing just such an ideology unreservedly. This then is the foundational point. We may not at all so earnestly hope for the level playing field. The current arrangement could very well serve the purposes of people who feel entitled by past victimhood to the fat of the spoils and who lack the cultural level and preparation to perceive their real condition and move us beyond the trough mentality that has proven to be all that most aspire to.
And this for parties that emerged from the labour movements of the forties and racial mobilisation of the nineteen fifties and never managed to develop wider identities beyond sprouting an arm (youth, women) here or there. What we need to bear in mind is that only our maturation as individual sub-cultures within the Guyana nation could assure us a better future free of the stresses we generate. Without taking this much further we have to note the conditions from which we were brought – prisoner of war or slave in Africa, lower caste labourer in India (and so on for the others) did not offer back ‘home’ better prospects for social and economic progress than the conditions we found upon arrival here.
Back there, some of us were allowed to be more savagely cruel and disdainful of fellow citizens than was ever known or practised here. Here, where we ended up owning the farm and all the improvements upon it. Living on the farm has not always been easy. It is a bitter heritage and patrimony. But in fact it is all we have until we head out for even greener pastrures.
For if in fact if the new arrangements will not eliminate the problems, of what use would they be beyond being tools of social engineering?
First, they serve to define ideals and, when realised, to erect symbols of progress and milestones in our constitutional history. In sum, the ideal of a democracy respectful of diversity is seen in the type of representation that we will provide for. But if representivity is halted at racial representation, the halt serves to declare the level at which our thinking is arrested. Representation has to be extended to other types of interest groups and movements.
Second, the re-engineering of our institutions will inject a modernising element whose lack is the worst indictment of the people who found themselves thrust to lead us. Even more than the PNC, the PPP has had its hands free to improve the efficiency with which services are delivered. It has done well in some areas and badly in some others.
Thirdly by the fluidity and flexibilities the modernisations introduce into the system they lend a dynamic to it that is badly needed at a time when we see that institutions, born a mere forty or fifty years ago, already having the aspect of the tired and outdated in a world of rapid technological and managerial science change.
Fourth they will increase efficiency in the ecomony.
So, in sum, in addition to systems having to change, the bodies that man them, the mentalities that animate these bodies and the social systems that weld them together are all due for overhaul.
It is therefore a given that the leadership we provide ourselves, for it to fulfil its historical role, must address, frankly the prejudices and complexes that retard our development.
It cannot furnish us another constitution and legal regime entirely derived from the Anglo-European mentality of the 19th century, perpetuating a cultural hegemony. It must look at ways of acknowledging the legitimacy of the Muslim worldview and what is worthy of adoption in Hindu tradition. It must depart from the self-serving blindness of the old ethnic leaders and state publicly what they said privately. That our ethnic groups need to evolve in their regard of the Other.
It is axiomatic that the need for continual approval and ‘validation’ by the old hegemon must be replaced by the type of self-confidence that empowers us to set our own rules and standards in keeping with norms of equity and human rights. The problem is, will it (the leadership) have the courage to identify and speak directly to the mentalities in us and start change? Are there common ideals held by all on which it can be based? Can we start change beyond the fiddling with the apparatus and the texts? But there will be no change unless we evolve and grow mentally and culturally ourselves. This is the fight. We cannot afford the impotent immobilism of a constitutional reform committe that has made not a single recommendation for progress. Or an opposition constellation that has only recently and after prompting and criticism taken some government agencies to court. We need imagination that goes beyond ideas of protest fixed at the public march that gets out of hand or the sabotage of the tools of production. We need political action that goes beyond the cloudy voting at any party congress or the pulling out of a hat of the idea of power sharing when all is felt to be almost lost.
The politicians need, above all, to be modernising in their thinking. Perhaps they are working but have, in this era when PR counts, been lax in their PR efforts. But for us to change a process of public education and information needs to be started. It must accompany the reforms advocated. Or they will fail.
It must also be shepherded by a just economic system where favouritism and corruption are denied, despite the fact that election of a party means electing all the networks in its wake and the entire culture of preference and precedence in the group psychology it represents. So economic structures of control and affirmative action perhaps need to go with the reforms, or again, we are wasting time and further driving people to migrate.
The change has to continue the process of law reform courageously started by the PNC and continued by the PPP. It is only when these measure are taken as an ensemble that we could start institutional and cultural change.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
