Dear Editor,
It is with profound sadness that I learned of the passing of Dr Joshua Ramsammy. I knew ‘Josh’ as he was popularly called as a child growing up, as he frequently visited my father’s business place in Port Mourant. I could remember my father reading the Guyana Graphic in the early seventies that carried the headline, ‘Dr Ramsammy gunned down in broad daylight.’ This callous and cowardly act was condemned by many, including an outraged Eusi Kwayana who stated that desperate men will avoid such an act, even desperate fools will; only desperate fools would encourage the politics of guns in Guyana.
Dr Ramsammy was an intellectual and academic of the highest standing who devoted his life to the University of Guyana, even though he had opportunities to move to greener pastures. He was also a militant civil rights, political and trade union activist. He played a leading role in the Civil Liberty Action Committee (CLAC), Ratoon, and was a founder and leader of the WPA, and chairman of the University of Guyana Staff Association (UGSA).
I remember Dr Joshua Ramsammy’s militant presence in the Corentyne during a massive teachers strike in January 1977 to protest the arbitrary dismissal of Science teacher Chetram Singh. This strike lasted just over three weeks and was led by militant teachers the like of Fr Chira, SK Singh, the Drepaul brothers and Swasi Narine Deola, who were later victimized. This began the process of a mass exodus of teachers from Guyana.
In 1977, when the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union called a general strike that lasted 135 days to protest the imposition of the sugar levy that robbed the sugar workers of their profit sharing based on an arbitration award handed down by Justice Victor Crane, the PNC government responded to the strike by employing some 4,000 scabs and arresting, charging and placing before the courts over one thousand sugar workers. Josh along with Father Malcolm Rodrigues, himself a former Physics teacher on the Corentyne, mobilized strike relief on behalf of the sugar workers. Incidentally, Josh’s younger brother, the late Dr Herman Ramsammy, a popular medical doctor on the Corentyne provided medical services to striking sugar workers and their families free of charge.
During my tenure at the University of Guyana in the early nineties I saw Josh more frequently, and he never stumbled in his struggle for free and fair elections, despite the further threat of an assigned bullet and harassment. I served at different levels at the University of Guyana in the ’90s − the council, the UGSA executive − and found the contributions of Josh to be of a high quality and standard.
Josh who grew up on a sugar estate, achieved the greatest academic heights, was a selfless political and civil rights activist and would have set the bar at a high level for the younger generation of the Albion-Port Mourant sugar plantation to follow and emulate.
History might not fully record Josh’s contribution to Guyana, but surely his name will live on in the minds and hearts of thousands of students and lecturers that benefited from his tutoring and academic guidance.
Yours faithfully,
Rajendra Rampersaud
