Dear Editor,
“What then is the recourse of the small nation at odds with the great one?” asked the late Makepeace Richmond, an eminent, erudite citizen of Guyana in Stabroek News in 2002. This is a quotation that has engaged the attention of many fellow citizens and others who may have had the experience of a few years residence in our country. Of some great concern, six years ago, when the independence struggle of the peoples of some countries was still being watched with hopeful expectations, the question raised by Richmond has now become a matter of grave importance, raising, as it does, fundamental issues of understanding and morality in the political leadership of developing countries.
Compared with other small countries that have a similar level of historical background, Guyana’s slow or retarded development is a natural result of the general environmental conditions experienced by some of mankind’s early African ancestors who were fortunate to have migrated and settled in areas of that continent that were richly endowed with plant and animal life. Food for early homo sapiens in some of those areas was abundant. It would seem that even with an increasing population food was not a problem in some settlements.
On the other hand, some of the groups migrating to colder terrain or less fertile areas, endowed with animal and vegetable supplies of food inadequate for the increasing population, were forced to move more quickly to some other food supply areas. This inadequacy of food supply, however, was responsible for one of the most important developments in man’s existence – agriculture, sometimes referred to as the science of agriculture. The scarcity of food led to the stimulation of early man’s brain to find a solution to this problem of scarcity of food. Hence the development of the brain and the understanding of cause and effect that initiated the development of science.
The positive results of what must have been tentative experimental actions led to further solutions of other problems and the abandonment of the need to move settlements in search of food. Settlements in more northerly and southerly locations, that is, further north and further south of the equator; away from equatorial lands that experienced the high temperatures from the tropical sun, placed black groups in cold, sunless areas which in time had the effect of rendering useless the element of melanin that nature may have provided many living creatures to allow them to exist in the intensely heated equatorial territories.
In the sunless environment there was no need for melanin – black pigmentation to protect the skin and other animal tissues – so that while black parents maintained their ‘normal’ black pigmentation, over time their offspring were born lacking the physiological ‘devices’ that produced melanin; so that eventually their children were born white or colourless with just a few examples of colour remaining in their eyes and hair.
As it turned out the settled communities in the sun-starved regions – over time with the dying out of the original black parents – were left with a mature white offspring leadership in widely spreading mixture with other population groups. These various related communities later developed into nations with not just white and black citizens, but made up of a variety of people sporting a range of skin shades of red, yellow, brown, white and black (evidence of the variety of food ingested and different conditions of climate they and their parents may have experienced) examining, modifying and changing their world environment in the hope of creating ideal peaceful, cooperative conditions in which to develop their families and communities.
Having developed into reasonably thriving communities, their economies changing from feudalism to capitalism a new more competitive world system of existence, as now exists, created a new type of citizen who was forced to learn the important precepts of capitalism, the basic aim of which was for you, your firm, your state, to achieve superiority in any and all trading and economic relationships you may have with another person or firm or country of your own or any other nationality. This economic system spread rapidly dominating virtually all aspects of the living conditions of the population, wherever possible imposing conditions of domination and inferiorisation in business and community life.
In the relationship between the small nation and the great one with no ‘help’ from a ‘friendly’ state the small nation will be made to perform in the role of a colony of the great one. Conceived as a source of raw materials and labour with an arranged inter-racial animosity guaranteeing that there would be no combined insurgent freedom war against the British, Guyana has had to rise from being one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere and among the most heavily indebted countries of the entire world – not only today, but at any other time through recorded history.
While our economic existence leaves much to be desired, our population – an unusual combination of six-plus ethnicities, employs correct English and a Guyanese English in official communication and general parlance respectively. Apart from this colourful, spoken, unifying communication of our people the assumption and/or belief that the characteristics and abilities of the white or colourless groups of members of our or any population, because of language or colour makes them biologically superior to any other black or coloured members is false and if accepted as valid reduces the strength and value of any proposals or decisions made on behalf of the organisation.
With this as the background situation obtaining in our country any help in retaliation for some harmful act or operation initiated by a super power affecting the interests of a small nation like ours will be difficult to obtain though should the action taken by a super power, a great one, be shown to cause an infringement of international law, any organisation of finance and economics and communications, any international relationships which include diplomacy and diplomatic history, some appeal for punitive or corrective action by the UN may succeed.
Any infringement of natural law may also be considered for international intervention if it can be shown to be a violation of the natural rights of the individual under the English Bill of Rights (1689) and the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), the first 10 amendments of the Constitution of the USA (known as the Bill of Rights, 1791) and the Universal Declaration of the United Nations (1948).
The economic and political status of Guyana, its world standing, does not deserve, it would appear, the support of other governments in any retaliation that may be warranted because of some unjust, possibly illegal, oppressive, greedy action of the great one.
A city in south-east Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, reputed to have been the biblical Ophir where King Solomon had his mines and once thought to have been richly endowed with gold, now treated as a state has recently become the centre of international contention. Some years ago, Mr Mugabe, having been elected head of state expelled nearly all European ‘owners of land’ and returned most of these usurped pieces of land to former African owners from whom they had been taken. Obviously afraid that such actions may inspire others to reject similar and more important measures of injustice and spread to a bigger revolt, the international administrators decided to enlarge the issue in such a way that rejection of the one small item is magnified to include a rejection of all attempts to change the existing system and allow an organised electoral process to replace Mugabe with someone who would open the Zimbabwean population to all forms of impoverisation by bands of international exploiters.
In view of the present Zimbabwe situation, dare we ask whether Guyana will have a similar future?
Yours faithfully,
R O Westmaas
