Dear Editor,
I join in offering my sincere condolences to the family and relatives of David de Caires on his passing.
This lion of independent thought will be sorely missed for his gifts of compassion, excellence, and protracted struggle for an open press.
David de Caires, his social background, long association with the legal system and proclivity for the printed word in tow, was considered ‘conservative’ in the ideological sense, but his conservatism was guileless, without rancour and was impinged upon by Guyana’s history and local traditions, inclusive of the formal imprint of the left on the nationalist movement and country from the 1950s. One only need read the journal he founded and edited, New World (a fortnightly publication), to understand the measure of his balance towards and critical appreciation of the various strands of thought that emerged from Guyana and the Caribbean.
I remember most of all, the special Guyana Independence issue of New World in 1966, with the very concise exposition by David de Caires and Miles Fitzpatrick, ‘Twenty Years of Politics in our Land’ where they critiqued the birth and decline of the nationalist movement. But de Caires’ overall ‘Guyana’ philosophy is also very well summed up and captured in this paraphrase from his open letter to Wilson Harris in New World, circa 1966: “The problems here are, indeed, profound and not regional in any sovereign sense… what we have been really trying to do, and it may be a measure of our failure that you have not seen it, is to arrive at some understanding of our own society which is not based on imported clichés or on models which may not be appropriate here for cultural or other reasons. For example, we hear continually of free enterprise when we have very few entrepreneurs who can perform the functions the European and North American industrialists had in their own societies at an earlier period and in a different situation. We hear of socialism when what we have in fact are populist parties with charismatic leaders in a country with little industrial development. To dispel these myths and focus on ourselves is extremely difficult, given the colonial mentality and the cultural void that definitely exists…”
With the end of the New World Fortnightly, his restless democratic spirit had to fill the void in some form. He achieved this twenty years later along with others, in the founding of the Stabroek News. I can’t recall where I was in Georgetown in 1986, when he handed me a gratis copy of the inaugural issue of the new paper, but I do remember his eyes brimming with excitement and joy over the project, and what it potentially meant for press freedom and the country. And he was mostly right; Stabroek News was a mighty participant for freedom and debate in Guyana and has served the reading public very well.
Throughout his adult life, de Caires has been true to the principles of press freedom, open debate and has always retained the view, constantly the editorial theme of his New World journal − that Guyana’s problems could only be solved by a broadly based national movement. He held this position almost to a level of panic. His multiple contributions and yearning for a national ethos that appreciated the complexities of social and political life will be fondly remembered.
Yours faithfully,
Nigel Westmaas
