Dear Editor,
There was a great debate last Friday evening (2007-12-14) in our National Assembly. Our media seem to have missed it – we need our media to bring it to the notice of everyone – we need everyone seeing and talking about that debate – it could become an important turning point in our nation’s history. It could help us turn to a new leaf in our political life, a new page with favourable conditions for the steady growth and development which we all so much want.
Of what debate do I speak? It is the debate on the motion to honour Dr Cheddi Jagan as an outstanding Guyanese, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of his entry into the legislature of our country, on the December 18 1947. No busing down! No fireworks! But everyone quietly, sincerely, even reverently reflecting on how Cheddi contributed to our country.
Scathing criticisms of our politics and politicians and implicitly the majority of us Guyanese, is commonplace with many in the media: whosoever earnestly and honestly want things to be different should welcome and nurture the tentative step of our National Assembly when from all sides we recognized and honoured in unison that outstanding son of our soil.
Politics is necessarily contending and competing, often adversarial. Avoiding rancour, bitterness and acrimony is never an easy issue for any group of people. There is danger even in groups with long histories of being together. Moreso, we Guyanese whom history threw together here relatively recently; each group unto that time with its own integrated culture and world view different from each other, and into different slots here, which have coloured the way we see each other.
I am pained and want to shout out whenever I read or hear the listless description of us as a divided people! When were we one? We were never one. Becoming one was the challenging bitter-cup that fate placed before our ancestors and us. In my view we have been greatly underestimating how much we are to reshape ourselves in becoming one people? Nonetheless we have made significant progress.
I am pained even more, I want to shout even louder when our elections are described as nothing but racial/ethnic censuses by many who know better and should look deeper. One could just as well describe elections in the USA and UK as urban/rural censuses.
Politics arises from people seeing things differently, and accordingly putting different proposals to the group, on what is the problem and what is to be done. Broadly speaking, political groupings form on pre-existing clusterings. One such kind of clustering arises from the different experiences of rural, agricultural people and urban, wage-earning people. This kind of political clustering was starkly evident in the 2000 elections in the USA in the maps on TV which showed where the Democrats won, in coastal, high population density, urban areas whilst the Republicans won in the heartland, lower density, agricultural areas. Recall too the differing decisions of the Supreme Courts of Florida State and the Federal Government. Recall too the make up of those courts and recognize that any insistence that those courts, those judges, were outside the politics of their country would be greatly strained.
Recall too the last election in the UK when the announcer on BBC World was moved to warn that the initial count of say thirty seats for Labour versus six for the Conservatives was not necessarily a runaway landslide victory for Labour. It was just that Labour wins in the urban constituencies where the results are more quickly accumulated and tallied and hence come in earlier, whilst the Conservatives constituencies are reported later! Moreover Conservatives winning more rural constituencies, generally win a greater proportion of seats than would be the case if the UK had a PR system. The UK has not changed its electoral system to PR for greater democracy, but in 1964 quickly changed our electoral system from constituency to PR!
Political groupings often cluster also around different religions when present. Even when there is no hostility as in our country, there is a lack of social continuity. The major socializing activities – births, christenings, marriages, funerals – all take place in some religious context. We are uncomfortable in religious situations with which we are not familiar. Our social functions and socializing in Guyana is as much a religious census and socializing groupings carry through to political groupings hence our elections results could perhaps be described just as well as religious censuses.
The third clustering, which may lead to political groupings, is race and ethnicity. Different races and ethnicities are likely to have differences in religion, in history, in language and in culture. This is problem enough but even more is the problem of the obvious physiological differences and identifying markers of dress.
However strongly we may abhor and argue against profiling, all our science and technology flow along a path of extrapolating, inducing from particular experiences to generalized expectations and behaving as if those expectations were certainties.
The markers of race/ethnicity go beyond signalling a discontinuity, they herd people willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly into groups: each member expected to have the identical, stereotypical characteristics assigned to the group.
In different countries, the main political parties may be formed along the lines of any one of these main kinds of clustering. When politics came to our Guyana, these three main clusterings were all present and significant. However, they were not cross cutting, they overlapped, reinforcing each other. For me therefore, the wonder of Guyana is not that we are a ‘divided’ people, but that we have stayed together as “divided” people and did not rush to partition! For me, we were no more divided racially, than we were divided urban from rural, or by religion. Indeed I believe that a case could be made that the split of PPP Burnhamites and PPP Jaganites was a split not of race but much more a split along the lines of urban/rural sentiments. I believe that even today the differing urban/rural sentiments are still reflected in the positions of the PNCR and the PPP/C. I believe that there are real, normal political differences in the way we of the PPP/C see things and the way the PNCR see things.
With these three main kinds of political groupings, still overlapping and reinforcing each other, how do we engage in intense, political rivalry contending robustly, competing toughly and yet not threaten the continuity and cohesion within our nation? The answer is not easy but I feel intuitively that it would help greatly if we could clean our slate of happenings after the PPP split in 1955.
Life is very much about trial and error: doing, learning and advancing from lessons learnt. Allow me to propose that the route of the PPP Burnhamites was a trial that was an error. It was the route taken by a group which considered itself more urban, more sophisticated, more prepared to govern, and believed that it would do better for all Guyanese than the rural, still “foot-in-the-mud” PPP Jaganites. And the PPP Burnhamites for the most part Christians were very vulnerable to the call to oppose Godless Communism.
For me, there is no gainsaying the fact that the PPP Burnhamites succumbed to that most seductive temptation of doing a little wrong, to avoid a greater wrong! A few actively participated and all tacitly accepted the rigging of the 1968 election for what they considered the greater good for all Guyana and Guyanese; moreso as the equally Christian Americans and British indicated approval of the rigging. But already by the 1973 elections it was becoming apparent that many of the supporters of the PNC were uneasy with rigged elections and did not even go out to vote, leaving it to the rigging to deliver the election.
For me, it must have been an excruciating test for Cheddi to choose in 1973, to wait patiently,
for nearly twenty years as it would turn out, for the majority of the PNC supporters to see the error and futility of that path and turn themselves from it. No doubt deliberate, directed action by Cheddi and the PPP could have degenerated too easily into bloody, racial confrontations and the splitting of our peoples and our country from which there would have been no return.
It was a great price that Cheddi and the PPP paid – but paradoxically he who has paid the greater price to keep Guyana whole has much more invested, has much more to lose if Guyana does not stay whole! The Cheddi legacy for us of the PPP/C is to keep Guyana whole and hearty.
For all the wrong that was done to Cheddi and his supporters by Burnham and the PNC, Cheddi never put them beyond the pale. Indeed, he always spoke about the misguided supporters of the PNC. It seems as if he was willing to consider Burnham also as misguided. Take note of Cheddi’s position of critical support and his reported readiness to talk again in 1985 with Burnham, even, perhaps, if only for the good of the children of Guyana. There is no doubt that Cheddi looked continuously for rapprochement between the PPP Burnhamites and the PPP Jaganites and he was always wistfully nostalgic about the national unity of the 1953 PPP.
At the 1993 Remembrance ceremony for the Enmore Martyrs, the first time that Cheddi was there as President(and the first time I was there), Cheddi recalling that event which crystallized the giving of himself to the political life of our country, it was inevitable that he would reflect on all that happened from that day in 1948 to 1993. After speaking with great emotion for more than an hour he ended, questioning “why can’t old comrades be comrades again?” Some of my friends teased me, “move over Sam, make room for old comrades: you are a just – come, old firesticks don’t take long to light!”
We need to free ourselves from that trial of Burnham that was a grave error on the one side to remove the adrenalin like feelings of guilt which at times sap the energy, restrain participation and at other times feed a suspicious, wild, blind anger in which to hide. On the other side, we need to be freed from the pain of seemingly to be forever having to give in, to pay the price.
Guyana needs political parties which everyone, whether a supporter or not, can consider respectable. We need to be aware of what Cheddi was.
We need to be answer of what Cheddi was aware, that for a political party’s own good there is need for a respectable and respected, matching opposition!
We need to shake hands and free ourselves of the trial that was an error, as we turn to a new page.
Late into the might of Friday December 14, 2007, one could have gotten the feeling in the National Assembly that we the politicians were in the mood to shake hands and turn the page. We politicians were giving the leadership that Guyana needs.
We need the help of our media, to take our country, every one of our citizens along. May everyone watch the tape of that debate and get into a mood for healing and harmony.
Yours faithfully,
Samuel A. Hinds
A Civic, and a citizen
