Dear Editor,
The exchange on Afro-Guyanese “marginalisation” is of a particular interest at this time if only because it is one of the macabre shadows given new life in the wake of the multiple killings at Lusignan and Bartica.
Disjoined from the public discussion that followed these events, it reverts to its old role as a founding concept in the politics we have always known. The fact is that a permanent feature of Afro-Guyanese self-identity, from the days of slavery, has been a perception of the race as disadvantaged, disenfranchised, disrespected.
And there is another fact we need to consider. It is that ours is a politics in which each race and creed can claim victimhood and permanent disadvantage in one form or another.
One cannot dismiss the condition in which Amerindians found themselves, the geographic and socio-economic peripheralisation, as anything other than a form of marginalisation. The Portuguese community, “miniaturised” over time, and forever assigned a minority role in our politics, has its own case.
Indians, Dr Cheddi Jagan is known to have said, sufferred among us during the PNC years, a status similar to populations living under apartheid. An extreme form of social and political marginalisation.
Plus, “everywhere,” Dr Jagan is quoted as saying, blacks are at the bottom of the ladder. It is therefore unconfortable to me that among those boasting fidelity to his intellectual and political heritage are people in a stubborn denial of what he saw as a reality.Flour is banned. No statistics needed to be presented to prove that Indians were further discriminated against by the prohibition. The fact that everyone else ate flour became irrelevant. The marginalisation of one’s own group is taken for granted. Or is pronounced against for political reasons.
Dr. Prem Misir’s use of statistics also leaves one uncomfortable. In a Guyanese publication by Kampta Karran called “Offerings” I read some years ago PPP statistics showing that Indians were only 25% of the PNC cabinet and were therefore victims of discrimination. Later I would read from Prem Misir that blacks were about 25% of the PPP cabinet. This was presented as evidence of inclusion. The same statistics. Only the criteria are different.
The entire discourse on marginalisation needs to elevate itself from the bed of numbers to which Dr. Misir wishes to keep it strapped and to look at the ethno-social impact of each decision and measure the government takes and has taken. Because, as I have noted, the perception of discrimination is what has served as fuel for our politics for a long time. It has cost lives. The solution, it would appear, would be an institutionalised sharing of power and the political cake.
That is race
In terms of creed, it is undeniable that Muslims, despite an SN editorial on freedom of religion, are victims of discrimination. By what imaginable measure of justice do we have to submit ourselves to archaic divorce laws that the former colonisers have themselves discarded, when muslim law is far more progressive.
Marginalisation therefore takes forms more complex than the statistical rendering of who gets a chicken in his pot and a contract. Dr. Misir, who has made this point in his last letter, is encouraged to pursue the legal and social aspects of the problem.
Remember that the whole matter of holidays and marriage licenses for Indians was part of our historic struggle to end some forms of cultural marginalisation.
Afro-Guyanese marginalisation has to be analysed and described in light of its historical and actual manifestations and everyone’s perceptions have to be taken into account.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
