Joshua Ramsammy, April 5, 1928-February 11, 2009
Dr Joshua Reuben Ramsammy, CCH, former senior lecturer and Pro-Chancellor of the University of Guyana, died on February 11, aged 80.
Dr Joshua Ramsammy, a biologist, was a respected science teacher, public servant and political activist. Over the last 50 years, he became well known because of his solid reputation and as the result of a series of fortuitous circumstances.
Quite by coincidence in 1952, the innovative British headmaster Vyvyan Sanger-Davies had arrived at the new Queen’s College premises on Camp Road which the colonial government had equipped with the best biology, chemistry and physics laboratories in the country. Sanger-Davies introduced the ‘modern’ form for streaming students after the third, a ‘remove’ form to enable arts and external students to convert to science in the fifth, and an evening science class for external students. These changes had the effect of vastly increasing the number of students from Queen’s and other high schools who wanted to study science subjects for their GCE Advanced Level examinations.
When Joshua Ramsammy joined the staff at Queen’s in 1955, therefore, he became part of a team of talented teachers who helped to educate an emerging élite corps of scientists − agriculturists, biologists, chemists, doctors and engineers − on whom this country would rely for years to come. Nicknamed the ‘Swami’ both as a pun on his surname and in recognition of his erudition, he was remembered as a science master, deputy housemaster of Weston House and supervisor of the Educational Tour Club.
Ramsammy had started his career as a non-graduate master at the Grenada Boys’ Secondary School where he taught Chemistry and Botany; he joined Queen’s only after graduating from university. But he was no boring pedagogue. His popularity sprang as much from his unpretentious style as from his learning. He raised eyebrows among other staff members with his unorthodox apparel at a time when all male masters (and boys as well) wore ties, and most would dress in suits. Ramsammy would show up looking every bit like a tropical Leon Trotsky − tall, bespectacled, with his long wild hair, a neat goatee, thoughtful mien and clothed in a khaki bush jacket.
He left Queen’s after six years to take up a position as headmaster of the Tagore Memorial High School on the Corentyne, but spent only one academic year there in 1961-62 during the People’s Progressive Party’s second administration. He then had a brief spell as a public servant for the next two years, working as Education Officer (Science) under Cedric Nunes, Minister of Education and Social Development. While at the ministry, he also served as chairman of the Curriculum Committee, vice-chairman of the Broadcast to Schools Committee and member of the Board of the Guiana School of Agriculture, the Board of Examiners and the Advisory Committee on Television.
He returned to teaching in 1964 at the new University of Guyana which, without a campus, was obliged to use the same Queen’s College classrooms and laboratories that Ramsammy had left three years earlier. He retired from UG at age 60 in 1988 but was granted a two-year extension of service.
Joshua Ramsammy’s world view sprang from his poor, rural roots. Although his Judaic forenames – Joshua Reuben – bore testimony of his mother Katie’s ardent Presbyterianism, he eschewed religious worship, choosing to define himself ideologically as a socialist. Growing up at Albion in the central Corentyne sugar belt, he was attracted by the populist activism of Dr Cheddi Jagan who came from Port Mourant, a mere 5 km away, but with whom he shared a similar “estate background.” He admired what he called Jagan’s “steadfastness in advancing the socialist ideology” but was repelled by the PPP’s doctrinaire rigidity and kept his distance.
It was by another coincidence that he encountered a few of his former students on the staff of the university in the 1970s, a decade of worldwide ferment. Ramsammy became president of the University of Guyana Staff Association and a member of the Ratoon Group; Movement Against Oppression; Civil Liberties Action Committee, and the Guyana Peace Council. Most of these were critical of the People’s National Congress administration and some suited his socialist outlook. The campus became a hotbed of political agitation and relations between the administration and academics became antagonistic.
All indications were that there would be trouble in 1971. After a particularly ugly scene involving a group of radical academics and students at a reception at his residence in January, the Vice-Chancellor Dr Denis Irvine convened a special meeting of the Academic Board to warn of the perils of the politicisation of the campus. Soon afterwards, the administration modified membership of the Board of Governors to tighten its control of the university. Most seriously, Joshua Ramsammy, one of the most visibly militant and vocal academics, was shot by an unknown assailant in broad daylight in downtown Georgetown in October.
Recovering, Joshua Ramsammy resiled and resumed his accustomed activism. He played a key role in bringing four anti-administration pressure groups − the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa, Indian Progressive Revolutionary Associates, Movement Against Oppression and Ratoon Group − together to form the Working People’s Alliance in 1974. Established largely to oppose the PNC administration, the WPA’s ardour cooled when its adversary was voted out of office in 1992. After the 1997 elections, Ramsammy quietly quit, helping to establish the oppositional National Democratic Movement later, the National Front Alliance.
To the surprise of some, he accepted the poisoned chalice of the university’s pro-chancellorship in 1999. If the appointment was intended to be a titular, do-nothing, long-service award to an aging academic, Joshua Ramsammy was the wrong choice. He took up the challenge of the pro-chancellorship by trying to improve the institution according to his lights. But his exertions were unwelcome in the university’s Byzantine bureaucracy. Outmanoeuvred, he was sequestered in an uncomfortable office in Kingston, and encumbered with a vehicle which soon became unserviceable. Departing, he wrote trenchantly about “the abysmally low levels of administrative and academic performance, leading to the virtual collapse of the School of Medicine; major financial irregularities; and the decline in academic standards” by which the university has come to be recognised.
In his long professional career, Joshua Ramsammy’s reputation had earned him the positions of project leader of the Ecology Section of the Caribbean Environmental Health Programme in St Lucia in 1981-85 and member of the Board of Directors of the Guyana Chapter of the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council in 1999. He was affiliated to the Guyana Monitoring and Conservation Organisation which privately investigated the Omai Gold Mines Ltd environmental catastrophe in August 1996.
Born at Albion, Corentyne, on April 5, 1928, Ramsammy received his BSc degree in Zoology and a post-graduate diploma in Biology from the University of Edinburgh, and his PhD from the University of Dalhousie. He was granted a fellowship as a visiting lecturer to pursue research in Marine Biology at the University of Newcastle’s Marine Laboratory. He was awarded the Cacique’s Crown of Honour in 1996 “for his outstanding service in the field of education, his advocacy for the preservation of the environment and his struggle for the restoration of democracy in Guyana.”
Joshua Ramsammy married Ruby, née Newport. She and their four children survive him.