Dear Editor,
Mr Ravi Dev’s column in Kaieteur News (February 7) questions my recording of the killing of Felix Ross as a political murder. He thinks that inside me I really believe in some guilty race. If I were near to him I would lean over and whisper, “Don’t look now, but your emotions are showing.”
I surely called Ross, without seeing his card, a well known member of the PNC. Mr Dev looked at old papers and finds that he was killed but it was not called a political murder. He found that the PNC itself did not know whether it was a political murder. These are timely revelations. If Mr Dev had not been born after his time he might have saved Guyana. In Next Witness I did in truth write, “On or about August 28, 1961.” Dr Jagan’s broadcast as noted by both of us was earlier in August 1961, hence Mr Dev’s point that Dr Jagan could not mention an incident that had not taken place at the time of his broadcast is valid. My error played into his hands. He
does not himself give the date of the murder as disclosed by the newspapers. That is not so helpful. I am glad he does not ask for proof beyond reasonable doubt. The man died, but do we want to call it manslaughter? Could he have died in self defence?
I know that Mr Dev is seen by many of us as a gifted guru with much to offer, if he would. Personally I would give more importance to the responses of those who were involved at the time, on any side, friend or foe who were closer to the context in which I was writing, than to Mr Dev’s higher wisdom. I do not remember ever being condemned as an inventor of incidents.
For Mr Dev, the larger point I made was that Dr Jagan, as head of the victorious party did not call on his supporters to cease their side of the attacks and called on others as the Premier of the country to do like him. Although the WPA was rejected in the 2001 elections, as I predicted, by Buxton residents as being too “soft,” yet when hostilities from among them against others broke out in 2002, just because of the way I have embraced the village, I declared in a handbill to offenders and likely approvers publicly, “You cannot be wrong and strong.” Some of us, Ms Sheila Holder, Mr Chris Ram and I went on a hunger strike which the press sidelined. Much later, three of us, Andaiye, Dr David Hinds and I, signed a joint letter, denouncing the aggression and declared the place a terror camp. In Linden in 2002 on International Women’s Day I heard an African Guyanese woman of Red Thread apologise for the rape of Indian women there in 1964.
Apart from election campaigns, we also need political, moral uprisings. Did any of these point to a guilty race?
Mr Dev missed a very important object lesson used as a teaching point in Guyana: No Guilty Race. In the foreword, I recalled an incident, after research and conversations with the reporters. Some Indian Guyanese fishermen had rescued three stranded African women, treated them like queens, cared them and taken them to a place of safety. The rescued women had expressed their gratitude. I said the men should have been given a national honour. I wanted to contrast this with how scores of Georgetown people had beaten Indian men and women in the streets of the city on January 12, 1998. I wanted to shame them and those who did not care. I also showed how Ms Jocelyn Dow, Karen De Souza and workers here and there had protected fellow workers and others when they could and even could not.
And if Mr Dev thinks that I name 1961 as the year of the start of racial violence in Guyana so as to prove Indian Guyanese as a guilty race, why did Dr Jagan also start from 1961? Did he have the same unworthy motive? Mr Dev cannot by mere semantics erase efforts of some of us in racial healing in Guyana, even though he sees our efforts as minor and for me grounded in bad phrasing. I became a political activist to play a part in closing the racial division of which I was aware. I cannot fathom what Mr Dev means by “contextual,” but as a person dealing with real populations in real situations of agreement and disagreement, I know that issues were always in their existing context.
Mr Dev actually said in his celebrated lecture and article Aetiology of an Ethnic Riot that since Africans had a history of violent protest, they were therefore more easily “mobilized along that path.” He said more, less kindly. One who is so strong on contextuality should see that what he offers here is a fixed, historical comparative context, (“more easily”) needing no other trigger. I am not a scholar, but if this is not a stereotype, I do not know what a stereotype is. I resent and reject the idea that I support the idea of a guilty race. I shall have to ask him in conscience, which one?
Some have seen in this phrase a statement that all are innocent in whatever the circumstances. My point is that there have been too many offences, but that they are not committed by a race. I know of maxims common to the two major races of Guyana that entrench this thinking.
Sometimes people of one ethnic group or another come to passing conviction of a guilty race. This happens when members of a race in their own motion commit atrocities or other violations and seem to be supported by the silence of the people of that race. Yet it is always a false conclusion.
I have already made what I think is a reasonable suggestion about the dispute over my claim of statements by Dr Jagan, Mr Burnham and me, on different occasions – that they may be solved publicly.
I am at a self-inflicted disadvantage, not having with me either the GIFT Report or Guyana: No Guilty Race. A friend helped me to confirm some of the topics in No Guilty Race. Those who were not concerned and to some extent present in any years of the sixties may scrutinise the press and may talk with informants.
What will be hard for them is to capture the atmosphere of tension as it rose and fell; the triumphalism of the victors and the bitterness or despair of the losers, of those days on the verge of transfer of power. As far as Guyana was concerned it is my view that foreign intervention has to have a domestic footing. I have tried always to give priority to the home situation.
In 1978 as an introduction to my talk on Racial Insecurity and the Political System, I apologised to the public for my handling of racial issues in the 1960s. There was no other apology, so logically, I was the number one offender.
Mr Dev is not the first to challenge me from the point of view of recognizing race. My friend and fellow villager, Professor Gordon Payne, a sociologist, there and then commented that as a sociologist he understood “in-group and out-group” relations. He noted the classification race as unusual, and I did not ask him to embrace it. Most other sociologists fed me with a long spoon. On the other hand I think that their work is most important. Much undervalued too is the profession of social work.
I have to say too that in 961 I saw the occurrence of political homicide, long regarded as not typical of Guyana, as a qualitative change (a new level) in the political competition. When Dr Jagan in his broadcast said that the violence was “symptomatic,” does Mr Dev think he was talking about – pointer broom assaults? I cannot understand the little attention the major incident received at home.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
