It is a pity that Dr Rupert Roopnaraine’s feature address delivered at the special assembly of the Queen’s College reunion a few weeks ago, was heard only by the QC faithful. For, even though there were parts of the speech applicable to the past and present students gathered in the school’s auditorium, as befitting the occasion, there were others quite relevant to our national situation.
In this newspaper’s report on the speech, we highlighted Dr Roopnaraine’s appeal for a return to “those ancestral values that accorded great importance to such inclusive values as sharing, solidarity and togetherness.” This would be, he posited, “a foundation for… constructive social change,” based on “moving relationships from those defined by fear, mutual recrimination, and violence toward those characterized by love, mutual respect, and proactive engagement,” borrowing from John Paul Lederach’s book on the building of peace, The Moral Imagination.
In other words, Dr Roopnaraine was looking to the past – perhaps “fancifully” (his own word), but certainly optimistically – for the essential and enduring principles rooted in our common experience, which would give us the strength to confront the challenges of the future, embracing the collective good and eschewing all that would divide us further.
In invoking the Queen’s College of the 1950s and the early 1960s – arguably a microcosm of British Guiana, before the cancer of racial violence was introduced during the troubles of 1962-1964 – Dr Roopnaraine harks back to a more innocent age, albeit one marked by our colonial condition, akin to the recollections of mutual dependence and inter-racial solidarity, peace and harmony in Buxton-Friendship, so movingly captured by Harry Hergash, in his contribution to the ‘In the Diaspora’ column last Monday.
By reaffirming certain universal values, Dr Roopnaraine underlines what is necessary to underpin our quest for national “renewal and hope”: “It is my belief, and I am not alone in this belief, that if we are to create space for our citizens, within and outside our borders, to come together and work to construct the free and open society built on the fundamental values of liberty, equality and justice and where no citizen shall be enslaved by poverty and ignorance, we must set our face resolutely against the easy reflexes of suspicion, distrust, revenge and recrimination. But we must do more. We must embrace reconciliation and aspire to a higher humanity.”
Superbly put, but although the speech is now doing the rounds on the Internet, how many of us will have benefited from these words and their message of private magnanimity and public civility, two characteristics fast disappearing from our public life and our public discourse?
Indeed, we wonder, where do we locate our public discourse? Where is the “space for our citizens” of which Dr Roopnaraine speaks?
A few months ago, Dr Bertie Ramcharan had proposed the establishment of a Guyana Institute for Public Policy (‘An Institute of Public Policy for Guyana,’ SN, August 22, 2009). This seems to have been frustratingly premature, however, since the institute as yet has no Internet presence or any known directors apart from Dr Ramcharan himself.
Nevertheless, to judge by Dr Ramcharan’s own pertinent and insightful contributions to the public discourse in this newspaper, in which he places his wealth of experience and knowledge as a lawyer, scholar and international civil servant at the disposal of the nation, the proposed institute promises much in its aim “to generate thinking on issues that can help in the future cohesion and development of Guyana.”
We fully agree with Dr Ramcharan that we need a space for “independent public-policy reflections,” given that our “development has been stultified by a lack of national political consensus.” And we also concur with Dr Ramcharan that we need studies, dialogue, debate and discussion on matters of public policy, as the basis for building “national consensus and development in Guyana.”
Now, while the concept of the Institute appears to have a distinctly intellectual bent to it, it must be pointed out that, according to its founder, it will be free to join and “open to anyone,” with a view to making its content available to all or, at least, to all with access to a computer. Such a democratic approach to the spread of ideas is welcome.
But the national dialogue cannot be confined to the type of intellectual discourse being advocated by Dr Ramcharan, as invaluable as it is to our intellectual development as a people. Nor can our discussions and debates exist solely in the virtual space of the editorials, opinion pieces, letter columns and online blogs of our daily newspapers and the forums of cyberspace.
The evolution of our public discourse demands a real space, a recognized national forum, some sort of umana yana perhaps – a meeting place of the people – for not only our intellectuals, but also for our youth, our community leaders, our trade unionists, our civil society activists, our citizens all, to make their own invaluable contributions, in a structured and mature way, to reviving solidarity and togetherness, to realizing constructive social change, to building a national consensus, in an atmosphere of private and public magnanimity and civility.