Dear Editor,
Since the furor over his visit to Buxton, the President of Guyana has had a lot to say about race, ethnicity, and national unity. At least we have gotten the chief citizen to begin to talk about this defining phenomenon. He knows that the protest against his Buxton trip had nothing to do with his right to visit that village or the right of Buxton to seek government funds and other resources. Never mind some misguided and malicious people continue to sing those tunes. I repeat: my objection to the President’s visit is grounded in two concerns – one political and the other ethno-racial (cultural).
But, back to the President’s pronouncements on race. The Chronicle (August 28) reported that the President told his predominantly Indian audience at Bath Settlement, West Coast Berbice that David Hinds and other members of the WPA are a disgrace to the memory of Walter Rodney. According to him, “Their policies are built all around race and that was not what Rodney stood for.” Here the President is repeating the PPP’s talking points which have become part of the manual developed by one of the President’s special advisors. I am sure the advisor has read Rodney. The President has been a busy man since his youth so he may not have read enough of Rodney’s writings.
It is simply not true that Rodney was not about race. Most of what Rodney wrote was about race. Whether it was slavery, colonialism, imperialism, underdevelopment, authoritarianism, Black Power or Pan Africanism, race was central to his discourse. He also dealt extensively with class but he never divorced it from race. His multiracial thrust in Guyana was premised on his thorough and frontal consideration of race. President Jagdeo may be too young to remember that Dr Rodney saw the PPP as an integral part of the politics of racial polarization, but he was visionary enough not to allow that conclusion to stand in the way of constructing the necessary broad anti-dictatorial alliance.
President Jagdeo and some of his PPP comrades present Walter Rodney as if he had no racial pride. This is the worst form of deception. Just as Glen Beck is trying to use Dr King against progressive Blacks in the USA, Mr Jagdeo is trying to separate Rodney from African Guyanese who defend and advocate African dignity. He is trying to put Rodney on the side of the new Black accommodationists for whom racial pride and dignity are at best clichés. No, Dr Rodney, in addition to being grounded in a class perspective, was a Race Man. He abhorred negative race which is premised on racism, racial superiority/inferiority, racial discrimination, race baiting and racial polarization. But he celebrated positive race, which is premised on dignity, pride, equality and justice. His seminal How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was about liberating African historiography from White/European distortion and in the process empowering primarily, though not exclusively, Black intellectual, political and socio-economic liberation. His Groundings with my Brothers is still one of the most empowering defences of African pride, dignity, self-love, and humanity. As he said in an interview in 1970:
“What we must try and understand (and this is a point I’m always trying to make very clearly) is that there is no contradiction between saying that, at this particular point in time, a man needs to assert his given identity, so that, at another point in time, he won’‘t he wouldn’t have to assert it… And I think that within our community of Guyana, different ethnic groups need to assert their identity, need to put themselves together, to pull themselves together, and when they have and when they can operate on the basis of mutual respect, which they are not doing, now, then I think that the way will be clear for building a new society, a society of a mixed unity.”
Yes, Rodney spoke and acted in solidarity with the downpressed of the world regardless of race, but this was not at the expense of his African dignity. For him it was not race or class, it was Race and Class. In 1977 at D’Urban and Louisa Row in Georgetown he invoked African dignity and pride to rally African Guyanese against what he saw as a racial conspiracy to hang an Indian man, Arnold Rampersaud. In that same year he also told Africans that it was beneath their dignity to present themselves as scabs to break a just strike by the mainly Indian sugar workers. Rodney always warned Africans about the dangers of propping up and justifying African dictatorship whether in Guyana, the Caribbean or Africa.
David Hinds is no Walter Rodney, but I am a keen student of what Rodney stood for. I am a Rodneyite. I, therefore, see no contradiction between my firm and uncompromising commitment to multiracial nationalism and my equally strong and uncompromising defence and advocacy of African pride, dignity and self-love. The former is not achievable outside of the latter. There is also no contradiction between my commitment to a power-sharing national government, including the PPP, and my opposition to a PPP government bent on domination. The latter is diametrically opposed to the former.
My firm stance against an Indian leader and government seeking to turn Africans into mendicants and an African accommodationist class willing to accommodate and facilitate that mendicancy is consistent with Rodney’s outlook. Dr Rodney heaped scorn on those Indian pandits who once touted Mr Burnham as the reincarnation of a Hindu deity. The Chronicle’s assertion that the President was treated in Buxton like an “African King” is equally racially disgusting.
Yours faithfully,
David Hinds
