Dear Editor,
Everyone knows that if I were to remain silent on the fact and symbol of the ‘dinner,’ the stones would cry out!
When I heard by telephone the broken news that the Buxton organizers were dining with the President, several things came to mind. The very first was a passage beginning, “He that dips with me in the dish…” as I pictured a certain dapper dipper in the background.
In the time that they might have spent helping to reconcile the village, and to examine ways for restoring some wholeness, they fell for a quick fix with the President and centre of controversy in Guyana.
Their words before they left here were very responsible, uplifting, seeming, whatever their political views to avoid for the sake of the village, flaunting their party loyalties, if any. Suddenly all that is gone. They went home to Guyana with credibility; they returned with the opposite. They had a choice. They argued about it and made their sovereign decision.
Did their contact person in the PPP think of organizing a meeting with their counterparts in Annandale, Lusignan or Non Pareil, citizens like them? No! they were taken to a group which not only spends publicly owned money, but oppresses all working people, splits trade unions and foments division.
I thought of Nana Culley of Buxton; of Paul Slowe of Beterverwagting; of Shewsankar of Devonshire Castle, Essequibo; Old Rahaman of Le Destin; I have heard of Cousin T and Teacher Enid of Queenstown. My mother talked of Rev Claude Smith, an imprisoned street preacher of Georgetown. I thought of Sissy Babb. I thought of Vivek Parsram and of Doodnauth Tiwari, of Byron Lewis, Veta Griffith, of Mr Craigwell of Victoria, of Una Samuels, of Sydney Sukhu, all for varying reasons, but all people from villages.
There is one positive thing about the decision of the movers and shakers to attend. They took their own decision and did not depend on what others might have done. David Hinds confirms this. Good for them! This liberates some of us in a dramatic way. For decades it has been assumed that young people grow but see life through the eyes of elders. That fiction is now happily exposed. It is fundamental. In our culture, we link flabby social behaviour to images with the mouth and the stomach. When Martin Carter devised, “The mouth is muzzled by the food it eats to live,” the line found echoes and appreciation among thousands who commented on its rightness. Teacher George, one of Buxton’s mentors, used critical terms like “licorish” by which he meant “sweetmouth.” Then there is the drinking of soup with other fitting imagery or images: “What sweeten goat mouth does hurt he belly.”
Yet I am not suggesting that the attraction to the dinner was a matter of greed. It was a kind of social flabbiness.
Then there is the symbolism of State House. From a place of colonial mystery and mystification, it became a place of the brazen, long concealed humiliation of a woman. In its own right, it has also been a place with or without the President’s knowledge, visited by valid and invalid business operators.
Who, for example was Paul Slowe? He was a BV village councillor of the ’40s and ’50s who reminded me in his speeches of Tom Paine of the American Revolution. As a younger man I could listen to his passion, in popular language, for hours. He describes how Bookers estates’ strategy was to recruit him to support their plan for a canal through the East Coast villages to avoid the railways. He warned about the glitter of the meeting venues. His words were, “The decoration alone!”
Paul Slowe went on to show how he did not let his status as an estate employee influence him. He told a public meeting in Tipperary Hall, and again at Bourda Green, “I am head mason foreman for Pln Diamond. I am the biggest cane farmer in Beterverwagting and Triumph. And I disagreed!” People in that list have all been alert about defending their dignity.
If the idea was to play up to President Jagdeo in order to get above any other community, it has not worked. It is going to be no easier for Buxton villagers than for others.
There are some concerns I share about the cosiness of the overseas movers and shakers of Buxton-Friendship origin who were so impressed with President Jagdeo. So much abuse has happened on his watch that he cannot escape blame. The Jagdeo regime is isolated in Guyana, except among PPP supporters. President Jagdeo therefore was very much in need of evidence that he enjoys the goodwill of some section of African Guyanese largely outside of the PPP. He did not seem to get it from other post-emancipation villagers.
But a certain presidential adviser belongs to and is a “true born Buxtonian.” This was a ready-made instrument for the President to use to dress up his image. On the programme of the 170th Anniversary celebrations by the 170th Committee, there is no hint of an item listed as a dinner at State House. It was therefore an opportunistic arrangement. If it did not arise in the fertile brain of Mr Lumumba, I owe him an apology. Because of an almost blind belief in “mattie villager” there is a state of mind, not illegal, but for some of us, resentful that will work to support “our son” even at the expense of more precious things.
When Mr Burnham was persecuting the Catholic Standard and the Mirror, the WPA and Dayclean – not Catholic or PPP – deliberately opened a “second front” with the headline “Who can Libel Burnham?” A libel suit followed against the publisher of Dayclean. Now at a time when Mr Frederick Kissoon has been sued for libel by Mr Jagdeo for defending Africans against alleged discrimination by the regime, up come leading overseas representatives of a leading village to accept unconditionally an invitation to wine and dine with the presiding ruler. So Jagdeo now knows that he can be welcomed to Buxton with drums and posters, while his government is ducking and diving over the established torture of at least two of its young members and the loss of at least one innocent woman at the hands of the state. The movers and shakers can be seen as assuring those in power that abuse has no backlash. Or will they say that the torture is a Nancy story?
In Buxton Jagdeo was nice enough to say he did not want to go into the recent past. The courts have a way of telling people who come before them to accuse others, “You must come with clean hands.” The trouble with Mr Lumumba is that whether his own hands are clean or not, he enjoys a level of protection just as though it was written that allegations against him “shall not be enquired into” by any tribunal.
This way is not the way to progress for any people. The president in 2004 ignored a call from me for a message to the gunmen as a first step. Much later, he ignored a more direct call from Fr Malcolm Rodrigues. At Buxton he is not reported as saying anything sounding like being open to getting the people together. It was pure politrics from the Head of State and Government.
There is another angle to this episode. This is the month of August, the month that sparked the original village movement. What becomes of inter-village solidarity when the movers and shakers of one village are selected by the rulers for the honour and for a grand visit where he cautiously preaches development, while others do not receive the same treatment. I do not think that the Buxton-Friendship visitors left their overseas residences with any such intention.
Soon after sending this letter to a few publications I shall copy it to the 170th anniversary address that had been sending me their uplifting dispatches.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
