Dear Editor,
I refer to Dr Jeffrey’s latest article (March 4, 2015) in SN.
I more or less agree with his contentions. However, I have a problem with this paragraph: “In my view, the racial/ethnic struggle to hold and maintain political power that has been at the heart of both our politics and poverty for over six decades is not based overwhelmingly on the wish of any group to punish the other, but upon the fear, partly natural but also nurtured by politicians, that the other groups will punish ‘us.’”
I can’t help wondering what fear Dr J is talking about that is “partly natural.” I know that the politicians have managed to hypnotize a huge number of the citizens of this country for instance by making us behave as if they own it and rendering us tenants in our own land. But I expect someone of Dr J’s intellectual capacity to be less vulnerable.
Let’s get some facts. Indian and African Guyanese sleep together. In fact, they have been doing so for generations. The evidence is there for all to see. Secondly, as some sociologist pointed out a while ago, this is the only country in which eating the other’s food happens so naturally. Of course, this second observation might not be unrelated to the first: upon waking up after sleeping together somebody must have been cooking. With this amount of natural fear, we should have a tradition of employing food tasters.
Thirdly, it appears we ‘been thiefin’ together. The intermittent revelations of biracial joint forays into banditry are the evidence.
Fourthly, it appears that when an Indian miscreant wants to terrorise a would-be Indian victim or worse, he or she is not afraid to recruit an African. We saw this in the case of the Indian man from Essequibo some years ago who quickly reversed course in calling for his son’s murderer to be hanged when he realized that it was his other son who had recruited the African murderer, and the Panday case recently when the now jailed Indian woman recruited African bandits to terrorize her own relatives.
I do not believe that there are so many gullible simpletons left in Guyana to believe that Indians fear African Guyanese. I suspect that what they really fear is being separated from the levers of power and all that has come to mean after 20+ years of PPP rule. That is exactly what African Guyanese feared after 28 years of PNC rule.
After 50 years of PNC-PPP rule, what we have managed to create in spite of the bright young people of every race that we put out every year, is turn the residue of our people (the best get exported) into political hangers-on, dependent on a political party for survival. The beneficiaries are going to pretend that they believe the PPP’s claptrap about fear of Africans – because it suits them. The fear is nurtured by the politicians; indeed, it is far from “natural.”
I wonder what the Africans in their bosom really think (if they think about it at all). After all, they are supposed to be feared.
Yours faithfully,
Frederick W A Collins
