Dear Editor,
I just got a piece of composition by Marc Matthews making a point about Obama’s candidacy for what the writer calls “The Emperor wuk.”
He says “Supporting Barak because he is black would be reactionary.”
And, truly, in the world in which we wish to live, “the Emperor” should exist outside and above common categories such as “race” or “class.” Existing as repository of high principles. Progress and Justice. And reigning over a time, remembered or mythological, as expression of a people’s enlightenment, of a Golden Rule – an altruistic benevolence. For even in the most materialistic of schemes the Emperor, be he man or popular party, is held to stand for and defend, and to impose, something timeless and exalted and “conducive to life.”
Which is the point of the piece by Marc Matthews as I read it. Without being insensible to the symbolic and the buoyancy of the Obama candidacy we have to look at the “content.”
The remark about racial solidarity resonates in a special way here because it is what perhaps 80% of our politics is about. We, here, have got to ask ourselves by what series of mistakes or historical determinants we find ourselves in a death struggle against these evils – drugs and armed theft and piracy, the public health problem evident in the numerous and bizarre domestic crimes. All the evils that daily claim fresh blood and leave so many ready to depart us, or ready to kill, ready to march and strike.
There must have been an original sin. A choice made with the wrong criteria. Consequent upon which the retribution due the fathers stalks and falls upon us. And we seem to be perpetuating the evil, convinced that we have got to pardon our own when we so roundly condemned the other race when it messed up.
I am not convinced that men are mechanically and irrationally responding to fear, to an “ethnic security dilemma” in making their political choices. One wonders that it is possible to find an Emperor who is Indian but clean or Black and principled. That the primacy is in the quality of the men or party and not in the other things that compel our vote. I am therefore convinced that men here do not really wish to create for themselves other choices and that, in a democracy, they choose the leaders who are essentially reflections of themselves.
The idea that each of the major races is so confounded by fear of the dominance of the other that it compulsively snatches at the ready hand of the PPP or PNC has been discussed and dismissed. The proposition explains away the real convictions or the prejudice and affinities that cause us, almost reflexively, to vote. It excuses our ignorance and almost criminal complicity with those felons, always ready to be sworn in, that have slipped into the political parties; it sweeps under the bottom house the unclean hope for a chance at racial revenge, the greed for a bigger share of the cake, the personal ambitions without scruples, and all the rest that brings us to the polls. So I am not convinced that we are solely animated by fear and confusion
In the case of Indo-Guyanese we have only to look at Trinidad or Suriname or any of the other ex-colonies where there were no sixties riots and no history of violence, to realise that the argument from fear is inadequate as an explanation of voting patterns. And we only have to look at Jamaica or Barbados with its tribal and trans-generational political loyalties to realise that, for many Africans and for most of us here in the region, the real reason for the loyalty of the mass vote is group identification.
And race was the group marker at the start. And like any other type of herd vote, we get the good with the mediocre with the bad. We have to ask ourselves how did we choose.
And what have those now in power changed?
It becomes evident that the society created first by the colonial powers and then by the PNC – its institutions, its vices and crimes, its lethargic bureaucracy, its corpus of laws, its ideological confusion, its hypocrisies, its orientation towards the comfort of the occupying powers at the expense of the administrative needs of the people – remain essentially intact.
Somehow one succumbs to the conviction that our real problem, of the chain of poverties we endure, is a poverty of the imagination. Meaning that there now seems to have been no master plan. But this is a false impression for everyone has his manifesto and programme.
The real problem seems to be that the rate and coverage of the implementation – the project execution phase – revealed the technical and managerial debilities in some areas of government.
The PPP has got to take its principles and ideas out of the manifesto and hasten to remove the common irritants. It requires a particularly demeaning poverty of the imagination to ensure that the service arms of the government – birth certificate and passport offices, courts, hospitals, etc – the loci of interaction between the mass and the administration is under-managed.
It suffices to read ministerial reaction to criticism of the functioning of parliament or of the prison system, or of the areas of monopoly in the media, to realise that being Black or Indian, in this day and age, is not enough of a qualification for “the Emperor wuk.” We have got to start voting for efficiency. But perhaps the mass of voters have themselves to be educated about democracy, justice, efficiency – systems and principles they enjoy when migrant abroad, but which they are careful to spare their brethren at home. Let the marches therefore continue.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
