Dear Editor,
The hold up in my response to Mr. Skinner’s letter captioned “African Guyanese are not engaging their energies on the right issues” (07.12.02) was the result of my desire to include in my response the central argument of my letter captioned, “Breaking into the East Indian bloc is difficult because of their greater cultural cohesion,” (07.11.27). That central argument was omitted from the letter as published because of an incorrect attribution of the premise on which my thinking was based. Stabroek News correctly removed the incorrect attribution.
I now restate that central argument more emphatically than I did before. In its present formulation, the argument is as follows: Africans have a sacred right to resist being ruled by another race. A right is an exceedingly strong claim. It cannot be over-ridden by a majority or even by a super majority. Such a right is inalienable. It cannot be taken away.
Extending the inalienable right from the African individual to the African race, requires recall of the brutal imprisonment, terror and premature death to which Africans, as a group, were subjected. From the depths of the horrors of the bottom deck of the slave ships, the separation from kith and kin, the loss of language, the whip lashes of cat-o’-nine-tails with nails in the ‘lashes’ to cut the skin, African society has emerged from the African holocaust, the most brutal suffering imposed on mankind, and is struggling to create an African future.Africans have a right to create that future. They will have necessarily to share that future with East Indians, Amerindians and Mixed races but it must be a future in which the distinctiveness of Africans and African culture must stand out.
In my Nov. 27 letter, I had drawn much the same conclusion of a right from the negative imperative uttered in 1997 / 1998 that East Indians must never be ruled by Black people again. Continuing from that negativity, I agreed with Mr. Ogunseye that, by the same token, East Indians should not rule Black people. In effect, no one race should rule the other. What will work is shared governance. That was the approach implicit in Brother Kwayana’s call in 1961 for joint premiership. It is an approach that does not require Westminster electoral subterfuges to dethrone the PPP. There is no need to appoint an East Indian head of the PNC to draw East Indian support from the PPP.
What will work is an agreement at the national level that an African purpose driven society (fulfilling the dreams formulated at the bottom of the slave ship) will co-exist with an East Indian purpose driven society, with an Amerindian purpose driven society and a Mixed people’s purpose driven society.
There will be many instances where the various purpose driven societies will merge and a true national society will emerge. But the mergers will not be forced. They will come from the security that racial distinctiveness exists and is encouraged unlike the present situation where the dominant culture pursues dishonest subterfuges to suppress Africans who are deemed racist (the code word is Afro-centric) when they return to the dream before and during and after the brutality in the belly of the slave ship. This approach to dealing with the racial problem faces up to the fact that the country is comprised of different races and that harmony in co-existence cannot be achieved if a fundamental aspect of existence, namely race, is ignored.
The plantation, in which we still largely reside is premised on a perpetuation of destructive rivalry between the races. Moreover, the plantation is inflexible. It is the only form of a modern corporation that does not envisage product diversity nor hierarchical mobility. A cane cutter starts to cut cane at sixteen and ends his working life in that unchanging servitude.
The society has not escaped from the anger of the Africans who were brutalised at the bottom of the slave ship. “Forget the past,” we are told. That is easier said than done. The past lives on in our bones. We will forget the past when we dismantle the plantation and recognise that we should build the political and social economy from collaborative and co-operative entities which should comprise the foundations of the society. The field operations of the sugar estates should be transformed into agricultural co-operatives of sugar farmers, co-ordinated by farmer agencies, working to deliver the canes to factories which are also co-operatively owned. This will liberate the sugar plantation and bring collaboration instead of destructive competition to the production mode. It will take a decade, or perhaps more, but it can be done.
Similar approaches are necessary in the rice peasantry and in the African villages. The rice peasants need larger plots to earn a livelihood that will encourage domicility. They should also, as with the sugar co-operatives, be allowed shares in the rice mills which should also be transformed into co-operatives from their present mini plantation social and production relations.
The African villages can revert to their preference for orchards and mixed agricultural activities. They can modernise their holdings for the same purpose of long term viability and develop processing and food preservation facilities for overseas markets. These village co-operatives can reach higher in the processing world to manufacture high quality health foods that can hold their own with the best from Brazil, the U.S.A., Japan and Europe. The present pattern of entrepreneurial investments in processing without collaborating with suppliers is not sustainable. The sky is the limit in the collaborative approach and it can all be based on the efforts of village and community councils that will be the building blocks of the social and political economy. The problem we must face is the role of the state.
Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Stiglitz, described how the U.S. government intervened in the economy. “The conventional wisdom that the United States development was the result of unfettered capitalism is wrong,” he said.
“Historically, the U.S. Government played an [even] larger role in the economy in promoting development, including the development of technology and infrastructure. In the nineteenth century, when agriculture was at the centre of the economy, government created the whole system of agricultural universities and “extension” services.
Huge land grants spurred the development of western railroads. In the nineteenth century the U.S. government funded the first telegraph line; in the twentieth, it funded the research that led to the Internet.
“The United States was successful partly because of the role that its government played in promoting development, in regulating markets and in providing basic social services.”
This model of government intervention requires capable leaders, bright and honest public servants and institutions that work. Those criticising Africans for lacking development ideas should point their finger elsewhere.
We are proud of our development ideas. But our ideas perish in the hands of those members of the plantation that thrive on exploitation of their fellow human beings.
Yours faithfully,
Clarence F. Ellis.
