Dear Editor,
The case of the late saint, Ms Neesa Gopaul, is one of our foulest experiences. No doubt it has sent a shiver throughout the country’s population. Perhaps it has stiffened young females and made them even more alert to dangers than they have been. I hope also that it has sent another kind of shiver through all males. It is healthy for us to feel a shiver when one of our kind in gender also is accused of a cowardly and selfish crime. It is not only selfish but self-hating.
Crimes against women are not a poor people’s thing. As far back as 1993, says an online source, the United Nations first denounced domestic violence and declared that it was known to exist among all classes and all educational levels. What a scourge!
The UN pronounced plainly on this form of oppression almost half a century after its foundation.
As for Neesa Gopaul, she joins the ranks of gender martyrs.
I have read much on the grave Ms Gopaul incident. The Red Thread letter should be of much practical use in dealing with all kinds of complaints by people in a weak situation, without defence. It tried to show that there were laws on the books, but the laws had not been properly brought into force with persons and procedures known to the public, or empowered to act. The statement called on the minister to not only talk of protocols that were not applied but to make the protocols known to the public now, so that members of the public can know when they are being pushed around.
I welcome the way all Guyana condemned what appears to be this most shameful episode. I am glad that two misunderstood teachers had gone across the river in their own time to do what was within their power.
But what about us, the men? We have to look at ourselves in the mirror before we can dare to talk about women. What the mirror shows is not welcome. It seems that too many of us, whatever our gender preference are quite rabid and need re-education. The worst aspect of this is that we seem to think that we are entitled to what catches the eye. Those who are lucky can educate the self against this desire. Those who are not so lucky need help, and need it early, or in time. It is the kind of sex education all male teachers can do.
To come to this point is one thing. In these days of widespread social corruption we can find bright spots and ugly spots in our various ancestral cultures. No continent is without this male scourge.
While the raping of three hundred African women in one week by African militias is reported daily from the Congo, Ms Arundhati Roy, a teacher of this age, defends the women of an Indian city, who sleep on the streets, where “they are raped,” in a country with the second highest rate of economic development in the world. She does not spare her “own” since she wants to see things corrected.
Last Month Congolese women called for truth about the thousands of rape victims in their country and for action to stop the war against women. “A 40-year-old Bay Village woman asphyxiated Saturday was the third woman slain in the past five weeks after receiving a restraining order intended to keep her spouse away from her,” reads an October report in the USA. Women have no hiding place. Those who answer correctly that women also beat men have to admit that such cases are more the exceptions that prove the rule that men also dominate domestic violence.
The experience of the half century shows how those who unlike Walter Rodney were dazzled by mere independence and remained blinded can ignore abuses as we worship buildings and money piling up in banks and new structures cursed by corruption, not only of those who engage in it but those who tolerate it with excuses and scenarios. We have a President who could fail to register his marriage and can at another level have a junior presidential officer who had been shielded, as an insider of the political family, from answering allegations of sexual harassment. We have a President who had promised not to “lynch” his minister. They are all too powerful to realize that where friends of the government are above the law, we have a Trick State, not a republic.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
