Dear Editor,
The Chronicle of July 12 has a letter by Godfrey Skeete insisting that black people are socialised to attack Indians. It follows this with the assertion, “Yes, Indians are afraid to walk the streets, day or night…” and then claims this is black people’s behaviour all over the world and that worldwide, black youth fill the prisons.
The letter was set on a pretext of targeting Lincoln Lewis and has served as a reminder to Chronicle readers that the sentiments contained in a recent editorial spring from convictions held by many among us; sentiments for which the state-owned newspaper allows itself to be used as a vehicle. For the editors of the Chronicle have repeated, using the letters column, what was first stated in the editorial that raised hackles. A campaign, clearly, has been launched. Mr Lewis was chosen as a figure in this campaign for the reason that, even before the editorial appeared, he has been writing these days in the Kaieteur News against a variant of the same ideas propounded by Ravi Dev.
We know that the ideas about Afro-Guyanese tendencies to violence, expressed in that Chronicle editorial, have been in the public domain for some time. Worse has been written by ROAR activists in letters to the editors of the independent newspapers. Ravi Dev is thus currently showcased in this exchange with Lincoln Lewis, where precisely the mixture of insanity and truth in the editorial is being disputed. Mr Dev’s ‘Aetiology of an Ethnic Riot’ gives a pseudo-intellectual gloss to these absurdities and adds, to complete itself, that Indian violence is turned inward and destructive only of its possessor.
One has to ask oneself what the Chronicle and its owners are out to achieve. Mr Skeete’s letter, coming on the heels of the controversy surrounding the editorial, smacks of provocation. Of an unrepentant core within the society that is pushing the buttons of racial animosity. It is doing so, one hopes, with the objectives of stirring up old fears and calling snap elections, with the aspiration to wiggle itself out of the squeeze in which it is now caught and which has driven it to its own fear of the fires of exposure and condemnation that are sure to come. We say “one hopes” because the manipulation of racial insecurity did not work last November and will not work this time. The Chronicle now ought to be sued for inciting racial hatred.
Mr Burrowes should get out. Mr Ramotar, President and Minister of Information, should show where he stands on this matter by taking further action. Unless of course the order to launch the campaign comes from on high. Mr Edghill now has to prove that the party for which Jesus would have voted would permit him to say something sensible. We have to beware of those stoking the fires of racist hatred and treat them with the contempt they merit. The Ethnic Relations Commission is effectively dead. But there are the courts.
Perhaps what has brought many to a halt is the fact that this perspective on Afro-Indo relations appeared once more in the state-owned newspaper – a Chronicle that is now seen as an organ of the ruling party/government. And it is felt that the abuse it contains reflects not merely some Indian attitudes to blacks, but what the PPP would like to see as Indian attitudes to blacks. It is felt that the aim is simply to perpetuate itself in office to ensure it that predation that it has persuaded itself is its due. That the roots of the eye-pass go deeper and explain the arrests, shootings of kneeling men, brutalisation, Black Clothes atrocities, Roger Khan, and all the humiliations that caused the reaction based in Buxton a decade ago. That the discourse undergirds the heartless marginalisation that refuses to see in a people with a strong tradition of education, any fit to man the embassies abroad. That it explains the neglect of the bauxite communities, the siting of the Berbice bridge, the contemptuous neglect of Georgetown and the disdain for parts of our architectural patrimony that is allowed to rot into disfigurement. That it excuses, in the minds of its hosts, the in-your-face theft, naked graft, retaliatory corruption and the abiding sense of victimhood that are employed to justify it. That the abuse of that editorial is precisely what is whispered at bottom house and proclaimed at Babu Jaan and encoded in the cries from the hustings come campaign season. In short, that the discourse of that editorial has been what Afro-Guyanese have been living and are condemned to live at the hands of their oppressors.
But we must take care to limit the reading of the editorial and the letter that reinforces it.
Not everyone in the PPP or government holds these views. The majority of Indians in this country no longer may be manipulated by racial fear to guarantee the PPP carte blanche to rule. The politics has evolved because the people of this country are no longer inclined to vote either for a PNC that tolerates and applauds racial violence, or a PPP that seeks to profit from it. The PNC, since Corbin, has undergone the internal transformations that gave it the discipline to reject the type of provocation that led to the violence of the start of the millennium.
The PPP is in the throes of its own traumas as internal insistence on new approaches to the democratisation of its organs and clean transparent government exposes its limitations.
The fake sociology and lies of the activists reminding us without fail of the 28 years, of who sufferred most by the banning of which food items, of who got beaten up and robbed more, is disreputable of itself. We must be measured in our response and not fall prey to provocation. Even as we remain firm. With the fall of the PNC many of our brothers in the Indian camp sprouted the courage to give voice to their anguish and to, rightly, reject the tendency of some to see them and their families as easy prey. The reaction was born of the confidence rooted in the fact that they had the protection of a government that was not sprung from the opposing camp.
A certain amount of emotional venting would have been expected. But twenty years have passed. And the issue today is no longer who banned daal, but who steals daal from the public treasury by selling contracts and business opportunities to friends. The issue is what we fear to be the enormous rip-off to which all, Indian, Black and the four others, have fallen victim.
The confused criminality of the black underclass is regrettable. Regretted, above all, by the politicians, religious people and cultural activists who lead them; by their bemused parents and their fellows striving to live an honest life and make an honest raise. And if the issue of criminality is raised we should avoid the tit-for-tat type of response that fixes our Indian brothers in a world-wide web of corruption that goes to the former Panday government in Trinidad, or India’s ranking with Transparency International or Fiji, or the alacrity with which the cookie jar is raided, or the get-drunk-and-beat-your-wife transported by us to Richmond Hill and Toronto.
If the racial stereotypes are evoked, we have to avoid the common characterisations that, in this country, attach cliches to Amerindians as well. In this season where our politicians are working hard on getting the country equipped with systems that will clean it up, we need to be able to continue to see the PPP as a government that, despite the inevitable mistakes, is beyond the cunning ignorance of racial manipulation of which it has been accused.
Guyana is a strange place and the PPP a strange party. It is a collective that, from the time of Dr Cheddi Jagan until former President Jagdeo has, on the one hand, consistently sought the involvement and recruitment of people of all races, and one may say, especially Afro-Guyanese. One has to look at the number of blacks in the front lines of the party and government today and conclude that they have not all been lobotomised.
They get along, or to put it another way, collaborate. The PPP on the other hand has always been perceived as mirroring the Indian angst and transmitting, at some level, the worst of the discourse that this angst produces. Ours is a complex and embarrassing situation. And it is not only up to our leaders to change, but we ourselves who generated them.
The letters and editorials must cease. Those believing black people are inherently violent, and dodging from bush to bush seeking shelter, should now show that they take their fears for real and shut up.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
