Dear Editor,
Your editorial of April 23 and the news of the unhappiness of ‘Operation Rescue UG’ at the lack of progress reminds me very much of a stage in (West) German history during my lifetime. In 1966 the post World War II German economic miracle waned into a recession and occasioned a coalition in the Bundestag (German parliament) of the two largest parties with 90% of the vote between them. We do not have such a coalition now in Guyana; our parties can choose to work with each other when it pleases them, but it might be instructive to look at what happened to the Germans then, just in case our two biggest parties are perceived to be such a coalition in fact even when not in name.
The intellectuals, represented by most students and some professors, started to feel that there was no opposition representing them against a growing authoritarianism that began to become oppressive. Please realize that the leaders of the government and the parents of the students would have been the survivors of the Hitler fascist brand of totalitarianism, and they had mostly done little to free themselves from it, depending instead on the Allied Forces of the rest of the ‘free world’ to do so.
The same student generation of the countries of the Allied Forces also began to rebel against their warmongering elders. Those under the other extreme of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, their satellite Eastern European countries, and China ruthlessly suppressed attempts at similar social upheaval.
Ending the Vietnam war was a rallying point. ‘Peace and Love‘ and ‘Flower Power‘ were the messages and themes. I was too young and untravelled in an age before the internet to know for sure whether it was the Germans who started it first, but the hippie rebels became a fashionable and influential cult. We began in Guyana to have VSO teachers from overseas who dressed thus.
Not everything started by the students was good. The conservative (formerly fascist) Axel Springer publishing house, regarded as an enemy by the student leaders, pointed out in their newspapers the moral decay and permissiveness of the cults.
However, there was also much that was good that was not generally reported. The students who were not lazy found courageous professors who were willing to teach them to inhabit a world they wanted to help build. Environmental sciences and alternative energy technologies began to flourish, unofficially at first. I know this because I later had the privilege of studying Wind Power engineering, one of the new courses, at the Aerospace Institute of the Technical University of Berlin, under one of those professors and his pioneering graduates.
The German situation normalized when politicians, under Nobel Peace Prize laureate Willy Brandt, of courage and perspicacity almost as great as those professors, saw the advantages and took the opportunities.
Here in Guyana I used to cite to my students a notice put up by Lord Rutherford, an early winner of the Nobel Prize, in his research laboratory: “We have no money, therefore we must think.” The ‘Operation Rescue UG’ must do likewise and we do need at least one visionary government politician with the courage to work along with them.
Curriculum reform in science and technology has already been thought out. Some years ago a study was conducted around the turn of the millennium of what the syllabi should contain to address the industrial and scientific needs of Guyanese. Highly qualified young, energetic and visionary lecturers had pushed for such change in 1995.
The UG administration hired an overseas consultant (funded by UNESCO, I think), whose first question to me was why I was not doing his job. I replied that it might be the colonialist mentality still in the UG administration that causes them to think that nothing good can come out of Guyanese in Guyana. He showed me his work when he was finished and I thought it was well done. It should still be somewhere lying unimplemented in UG.
Permit me a word of caution to Dr Patsy Francis. The Minister of Labour only feels he succeeds when he gives you nothing and can boast to his cabinet colleagues how powerful he is.
The temptation is to call his bluff, but the society is complicated and basically lack courage. That is why she would not succeed like that.
As far as I am able to discover, the first recorded instance of the existence of a university in the truest sense is that of Solomon’s at the beginning of the first millennium BC: “Men of all nations came to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, sent by all the kings of the world, who had heard of his wisdom.” (1 Kings 4:34, NIV Bible).
Yours faithfully,
Alfred Bhulai
