Dear Editor,
Guyana is in the middle of a silent, deadly, social upheaval, referred to by one leading Caribbean economist as the “insertion of criminal enterprise into the interstices of the state”, and the recent extraordinary outbursts against Christianity by two government ministers in Parliament (for which they have not apologized; and which still remain part of the official record of that session) illustrate the religious implications. Similar sentiments about Hinduism or Islam would have evinced a storm of protest!
It is not now very popular to defend blacks in Guyana, the majority of whom happen to be Christians, but in a fledgling democracy we have a duty to address racism wherever it rears its ugly head.
We thought that we had comprehensively addressed the issue of covert and overt racism under “Hindu Nationalism” as evidenced in Guyana in our copious submissions to the Ethnic Relations Commission when looking at Kean Gibson’s Cycle of Racial Oppression in Guyana, but the recent spate of hate-mail against the author demands that all citizens should now take another look at her latest book Sacred Duty: Hinduism and Violence in Guyana, as I will.
History will vindicate Gibson as one of the great iconoclastic thinkers of this generation, and misinformation specialists are falling over themselves trying to confront the ugly truth that her books somehow elicit.
Sacred Duty
