Explanations

Dear Editor,

The idea that Indians are voting race because of fear has replaced, in some narrations, one of the politicians’s explanations that was current from the fifties and which had become a standard by the end of the twentieth century. That explanation attributed Guyanese ethnic prejudices to the ‘divide and rule’ policy supposedly practised by the English coloniser.

Neither explanation, fear or colonialist manipulation, has any validity. But each may be seen as simple items in the history of ideas that we as a society advanced over time.

The history of ideas in a society generally does not represent the random preference for one sociological or philosophical construction over another, nor the arbitrary selection of one sequence of historical events (and its telos or objective/ends) by peoples or their politicians. For, generally, ideas arise and find favour when they respond to particular sets of needs for explication, justification, exculpation, vindication, mobilisation, self-celebration at the collective or sub-collective levels, etc. They are discursive drivers embedded in a narrative that is frequently self-serving and self-reinforcing. In an area as sensitive as race, in communities emerging from the short night of domination, the selection of ideas, myths, legends and the other components of the several narratives that are elaborated in a multi-ethnic setting as explanatory schemes, must be examined for their political or cultural utility. And therefore must be evaluated in terms of the uses to which they are put by the group or sub-group that generates them. The preceding must be borne in mind to fully comprehend what now follows.

M Maxwell, in a letter published in your newspaper on Feb 16 and entitled ‘It is time to give courage a chance’ writes that Mr Khemraj Ramjattan of the AFC was correct in saying that Indians should not fear Africans, and then Mr Maxwell seeks to prove that the sentiment assembling Indians around the PPP is fear. He states that my contention that fear is not the dominant factor is erroneous and that it ignores recent (post-fifties) Guyanese electoral history. He places the commencement of racial trends in voting to the riots of the sixties.
Mr Maxwell now needs, to prove his point, to let me know whether, prior to the riots of the sixties, Indians or any others voted race and if so why.

We may assume that prior to and immediately post the grant of universal adult suffrage in 1951, hence during the short period when Jagan and Burnham were together, the popularity they (PAC/PPP) enjoyed was due to racial unity and the absence of the necessity for ethnic voting.

For ease of research I will refer Mr Maxwell to an article by Hazel Woolford that was supposedly carried by the Chronicle on April 30, 2000 and is now posted on the website ‘Guyana Caribbean politics.’ It says that in the early days of the PPP “Jagan controlled the rural Indian votes while Burnham exercised a strong influence on the voting patterns in the urban centres, particularly Georgetown.” And “The major consequences of the Burnhamite and Jaganite PPP split were that one witnessed a return of racial voting [my italics] with calls for Apaan Jaat as well as demands for the partition of the country.” Hence we may also assume that political mobilisation around race pre-dates the sixties riots which Mr Maxwell cites as the point of departure for the racial votes. If Mr Maxwell has evidence to the contrary he may cite it in response.

Prof Raymond T Smith, one of the anthropoligists who studied the Guyanese reality in the fifties has written, “The danger of racial identity politics was evident to everyone in the early 1950s.” In describing the consequences of the Jagan-Burnham split and formation of two separate parties he notes, “From a purely local perspective many of these party loyalty realignments represent a realignment along racial lines.” He quotes a US State Department document written in March 1961 that estimates that “The election seems likely to hinge mainly on personalities and to be decided by voting along ethnic lines…”

Hence the ethnic vote precedes the sixties riots that Mr Maxwell imagines as their starting point. A re-reading of The West on Trial by Dr Jagan also documents that politician’s sensitivity to the dangers (or rewards) of racial voting even before the riots which were generally seen by our leadership as exacerbating the latent racialisms rather than creating them. Mr Maxwell is therefore limited by the reduced horizons of his historical knowledge of the period and his misunderstanding of the phenomena on which he comments.

The evocation of fear as the motive force has been given a fuller treatment by Ravi Dev and the ROAR commentators, who acknowledge that racial voting preceded the riots and therefore are forced to attribute that fear to anthropological factors. According to Dev, in his Aetiology of an Ethnic Riot, the Africans are portrayed as having a different rapport with physical violence than Indians. In this portrayal Indians are felicitously depicted as having a tendency to turn violence inward, unlike Africans in the post-emancipation period. The evidence is stretched to include a portrayal of the colonial police, mostly black under white leadership, violently beating back Indian protestors in the early 20th century.

The ROAR idea is moreso ridiculous since Indians should, logically, have hated the whites who ordered the repression. And since black policemen were also suppressing and controlling labour unrest and agitation by Critchlow, etc, and arresting early PAC/PPP activists, blacks should also have hated those other blacks. Hence the picture of African police as specifically anti-Indian and fuelled by racial animus works only if we can prove that black forces of the law had a unique focus on Indians. It also ignores at its peril the fact that the interaction between Africans and Indians, (from the time of the introduction of indentures and outside of the rare industrial violence,) would have put the Africans in the roles of fellow workers, nurses, teachers, doctors, lawyers, dispensers, estate bookkeepers and artisans serving Indians, when Africans had cause to interact at all on the estates where for a long time the Indians were cantoned. There is no documented history on the estates of systematic assault and aggression directed against Indians in the context in which they normally interacted. Cutlass-armed Indians as a ubiquitous majority on the estates would not have been cowed by fears of black agression. Indians seemed to have been busy with other problems of adaptation. There is, then, in no colonial report or other document of the time, any evidence at all to support the fallacy of a primordial African-on-Indian violence with which the Dev analysis is infected.

What the fallacy served to facilitate was the effacement of Indian culpability in the construction of our racialised condition. It displaced the natural and due portion of blame from Indians themselves and projected all responsibility wholly upon Africans. It is a disculpatory mechanism that serves to dispense Indian-Guyanese of any complicity at all in the racial problem. The idea being that they only suffered, and so quite rationally withdrew behind the ramparts in fear. This, then, is the utility of the lie in the narrative.

The colonial manipulation explanation was perhaps the generally accepted politician’s platitude prior to the security dilemma fallacy. It attributes our ill-will solely to British divide and rule policy, as it served to exempt us all of any real guilt. It offers us, as an image of ourselves, the picture of an ignorant manipulable horde, forever locked in the negative programming of the white man long dead and long gone.  Our portrayal of the guilty included the malevolent politician leading the other flock and exploiting this ignorance. While the ‘divide and rule’ explanation has its own adherents, it is defective because it transfers political conditions from continents such as India or Africa onto Guyana. There was no need for divide and rule in Guyana. We did not have princely kingdoms and a British Raj colluding with them to share the spoils. We were a motley bunch of generally leaderless and hand-to-mouth estate workers with a nascent middle class. Never an empire-shaking threat.  And the fact that has to be taken into consideration is that Indians were also voting race in nearby Suriname, which was never under British ‘divide and rule’ politics. As Indians were doing elsewhere.  They vote ‘group’ in places where they were never beaten up by Africans, such as Trinidad. This narrative device, one concludes, served to bleach Indian, Portuguese, African, etc, of guilt. But no one really believed it. It was for public consumption and a form of social politeness.

The fact remains that, as Hermanus Hoetink who studies Suriname has surmised, Indians vote group solidarity for other reasons. And, generally, for reasons I have mentioned elsewhere, all immigrant groups, in certain conditions, seek to empower themselves politically for progress and protection. The fake sociology behind the other explanations ignores the evidence of a global tendency and seeks to subject facts to ideology that serves, basically, to sanitise the ethnic narratives we harbour and transmit. Sanitise them of any behaviour that is damning of the group or groups in whose behalf we speak.

We make a distinction between the discourse evacuated into the public space – that is the exculpatory narrative sequences for public consumption – and the subterranean or what we in Guyana call the ‘bottom house’ constructs and lies which do not hesitate to blame racial problems on African or Indian (always the Other’s) prejudice. Hence the public discourse and private narrative are also fixed in different registers.  But the simplistic attribution of ethnic adherence to racial prejudice alone shows the limits of populist comprehension of the phenomena we live.

Finally, for the AFC to demonstrate its reliance on a schema that demonises Africans, if that is what Mr Maxwell can be understood to say, proposes to us that the party is far from ready to bring a new and frank discourse to a question that has been mired in fiction and myth. If it is indeed the ex-ROARites in that party who have infected it with these falsehoods then I would be correct in saying that the party is far from immune from the opportunistic disease that such ignorance transmits.
Now what are the consequences of my review? First, it also serves to acquit Indian-Guyanese of the charge that they operate solely from an irrational fear of African-Guyanese, as well as from the suggestion, eminently false, that they would vote for a party of whites or Amerindians if they so chose.

The fact is they did not vote UF, although the UF, non-communist and pro-business, was more in line with their cultural preferences in some ways. And second, this brief review also absolves African-Guyanese. It exonerates them from the demeaning charge that they are by nature inclined to bully Indians, and therefore, in the absence of other factors, would also perhaps vote an Amerinidan party. Evidently neither race votes or would vote for any other mass organisation.

Let Mr Maxwell comment bearing in mind the fact that a false diagnosis can generate no true solution to the problem.

Hence unless we understand and take into account the real factors which I have said include real ethnic prejudice and some fear (second order and subordinate factors), we can make no scheme of solutions such as shared governance work as an arrangement that would better suit us.

Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr