Dear Editor,
The Guyanese ‘farmer’ and the Guyana ‘rural areas’ occupy a moral, productive and rather intellectually dishonest space in our city folks mental programmes. The ‘farmer-first’ rhetoric of Guyana policy-makers, politicians and urban dwellers means that we see the Guyanese farmer as frozen in time, seated wisely and calmly next to the fields of rice, cattle, wearing simple clothes, speaking in simple phases of broken Indian and English, and representing the food basket of the nation in the urban commercial centres. Celebrated journalists prefer to use the ‘rural areas’ as their personal dart boards, writing in their ill informed colonial programmed newspapers the picture of the Guyanese ‘rural areas’ as a moral construct, as an undifferentiated monolith, a construct whose main existence is its otherness to the evil inhabitants of Georgetown where people are money-hungry, socialistic class conscious and valueless.
The ‘rural areas’ are portrayed by careerists of poverty, the vote-seeking politician, and the romantic ignorant well to do whose colonially inspired vision seeks the real Guyana in the bubbling streams and green fields of a pre-industrialized idyll. Sadly, this army of Guyanese colonials is doing a terrible disservice to the very people whose cause they claim to protect and champion.
For 28 years these farmers were held in bondage by the PNC, Burnham, Hoyte, Green, and all the others who dressed in suits and ties. They have no idea what hard work is all about.
Yours faithfully,
(name and address supplied)
