Dear Editor,
Self-control or self-condemnation; self-determination or self-destruction; and self-sufficiency or self-sacrifice are the issues faced by Guyanese society in the fifty years of Independence. It is a tale long on struggle and innovation and, too many times, woefully short on reward and inspiration.
Fifty years of independence has been an unimaginable bonanza for those of the protecting and protected Praetorian Guard that form the inner circle, those who have access, and those who are able to capitalize. For the vast majority of society, however, the emancipation of Independence has been about the bondage of economic doldrums, the imprisonment of personal progress, and the tyranny of obscured individual visions.
The masses should have been dreaming big dreams in this richly endowed land; they have had to settle for the drudgery of eking out a grey, barren existence. The daily grind to squeeze paltry necessities out of an unforgiving environment stretch taut the sinews and spirit of a people and confine them to a harsh gritty reality. It makes them versatile and resourceful and adaptable. They struggle mightily just to survive barely.
Every routine, every entitlement, every feature of daily life for those trapped at the bottom mutates into a Special Forces operation. It calls for some combination of guile, brawn, street smarts, and native wisdom of a constantly developing kind to power past the manmade obstacles and bureaucratic ambushes.
Here are friends and family, colleagues and neighbours, enemies and strangers striving for any thin edge and tenuous foothold in the maelstrom and cauldron that is Independent Guyana. This nation’s greatest strength might still prove to be the resiliency of its diversity; and, no question, that as part of the razor sharp double-edged sword, diversity is its greatest curse, its crippling, perhaps fatal sickness. Enter and re-enter the political leaders and players.
They have made hay while scorching the psyche of its diverse peoples through cultivated antagonisms, pervasive ill-will, and chronic distrust. How to build a nation with such radioactive underpinnings? How to start the foundation? Like J Robert Oppenheimer, having discovered and let loose the nuclear option, the genie cannot (refuses to) be returned to the safety and tranquillity of the bottle. So it is with racial division in Guyana these last 50 years. It is the destroyer of the domestic world.
In the middle of a threadbare economic landscape, there is the monstrosity of politically propelled racial fractures that resist mending, and object to suasion. It is fair to say that no one has really tried seriously and unswervingly.
And so for fifty years and forever, Guyanese ‒ winning or losing, at the banquet table or with the dogs ‒ have wrestled with the enraged, muscle flexing, arms toting monster in the national sitting room, and what is left of the national conscience. No one wants to starve the beast into submission. For five decades and more, it has been fed a rich diet of fear, saturated with suspicion, punctured full of intimidating holes, taunted with all manner of unsettling malice and instigated through endless misgivings.
Instead of the racial beast being starved, it has been fattened and kept in reserve to unleash, as circumstances demand. But all the time it lingers: uncaged, pent up, and simmering. This just might have the terrible distinction of being the greatest achievement and the lasting legacy of the past fifty years.
To be sure, there has been bridge building: There is one in Demerara and another one over there in Berbice; utilitarian physical structures and part of the slowly expanding, graft-plagued infrastructural works and symbols. Yet the genuine perpetual bridge-building ‒ rechristened from time to time as either national unity, or social cohesion ‒ has too often died a premature death from lack of political oxygen and lack of political midwifery. This must be the great irony of Independent Guyana: assisted suicide or euthanasia before birth without measuring the promise, and before envisioning the awesome significance.
So it is every man on his own and left to his own devices. That can be a menu for mayhem, which is the incontestable aggregated reality, the foregone sum of all circumstances. The few constructive and thoughtful Guyanese move forward; the cunning and ambitious carve out their own space; and the criminal and unethical and adventurous operate with their own rules and standards and bow before none.
Unsurprisingly, the old middle class evaporated, while its replacement class yearns for the sanitation and traction of respectability. Meanwhile, the asset-less class expands exponentially: no job, no prospect, no network, no hope, no life. This is the stark overpowering reality that threatens to inundate, if not annihilate.
As if all of this is not enough, there is this peculiar ungodliness, where the churches have become hotbeds of the same social divisions and reflective of the embedded political hegemonies. Whereas the churches should be beacons, they have transformed into immovable and unmoved silos suffused with pride and deficient in compassion. Under the auspices of scripture and the divine, calculating men and women imitate the socio-political realm through dictatorial tendencies and despotic suppression of the flock. They have to be in charge and first, or they will sabotage. When spiritual sanctuaries are buffeted by the winds of dismay and disharmony, then the character and peace of a society becomes increasingly suspect.
Indeed, we are more suspect with each passing decade, whether at the foreign consulates or resident in foreign lands such as Trinidad and Barbados. Our baggage goes ahead of us, and it is not welcomed. It is the same distorted dismal story in the reputable professions. There is the pouncing, grasping, and extricating. Yes, the road is long; there are no brothers, only competition for meagre opportunities.
Fifty years of Independence ought to have been an era of towering accomplishments and fulfilled promise. Well, what does the probing and counting reveal? There is individual achievement, some of a dubious kind (see the lower East Coast); there are monuments to clandestine commerce (see the Georgetown skyline); and then there are the vendors and unemployed and homeless (see everywhere else). And as if to emphasize how slick we are, there are the great libraries of political propaganda (see archives). Last, there is the army of those without hope, without means, and without opportunity.
Given the gifts of this country, fifty years of Independence should have been a blessing and charting, then journeying towards ramparts and far vistas of progress, and of national attainment. A clinical, clear-eyed, coherent scrutiny tells one and all in unambiguous terms that we have not come anywhere near where we ought to be.
On New Year’s Day, there was a small group consisting of members of the diaspora, educators, a professor and a retired army colonel, among others, who all bemoaned the local work ethic, the lack of sustained intellectual rigour and plain common sense, and the absence of intestinal fire. They care. They fear.
After fifty fitful years of Independence, this society should be thinking and coalescing, and projecting and advancing. Instead, there is the self-enslavement of dumbing down, dis-education, and the willingness to be functionally illiterate. There is a blank slate of knowledge, a severely constricted horizon of disinterest in the ancient wisdom of reading and learning. There are gadgets galore, but no books. Can anything thrive on soil such as this?
What have we done? Where have we gone? How high did we aspire? Collectively, what have we realized? After fifty years of Independence, the answers would be neither enlightening nor comforting, but most damning.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
