Dear Editor,
I am one year and two months older than Professor Joycelynne Loncke. I was born on 24th November, 1939 and she on 3rd February, 1941. We grew during the same period and inculcated similar traits from similar heritages. I did not notice or meet her until the early 1970s. Our parents were in Pan-Africanism, education and music – my mother was the church organist everywhere we lived in Guyana. Clem Duncan told me in 2019 that Joycelynne’s mother “lived in an African world. My mother also ‘lived in an African world’. For example, in 1934, my mother Cornelia Eletha Lyte, won a Best Speaker’s Cup, Dr. J. A. Trotman Prize, at a Negro Progress Convention NPC competition before she married my father in 1935. Here is the cup. As a teenage boy, in the 1950s, my weekend duty was to shine that cup and return it to a table in our living room for visitors to discuss Africa and African events.
What were the traits inherited by Joycelynne via her parents? Her parents and my parents were born in the first decade of the 1900s when Pan-Africanism was born. The word, Pan-Africa, entered European dictionaries in 1900 when Henry Sylvester Williams organised the first Pan-African conference in England to discuss the state of civilisation in Africa. Who is the Guyanese African who attended the 1900 conference of ‘all Africans’? If you walk through King Street, Georgetown, at the corner of Charlotte Street you will see a street sign – Hon. E. F. Fredericks Street. Edmund Fitzgerald Fredericks attended the 1900 ‘All Africans’ conference and Joycelynne had knowledge of this via her parents. When E. F. Fredericks returned, he formed the Negro Progress Convention NPC, with 19 branches all over Guyana, by 1931. Fredericks also started the Fredericks School of Home Economics. It was Professor Dr. Joycelynne Loncke who asked me to rebrand King Street to Hon. E. F. Fredericks Street at a meeting of Pan-African Movement (Guyana Branch) two or three years ago. The revolutionary idea of rebranding was dear to Professor Dr. Joycelynne Loncke.
The early Guyanese Pan-Africanists who challenged European colonialism around the globe were E. F. Fredericks, his friend Dr. Nichols Bruyning and Norman Cameron, author of ‘Evolution Of The Negro’. Also, those who fought for the British in faraway places like the Gold Coast and South Africa. According to Guyanese, Ras Makonnen, in his book Pan-africanism From Within, “Cousin Eleazor and Uncle Brown, who had served during the first war in the Gold Coast and South Africa, returned to tell the story about our relatives over there in Africa”. Other early Guyanese Pan-Africanists were David Talbot, A. A. Thorne and Gorin, the gold miner. Do you know that fifteen African lawyers of Guyana defended H. N. Critchlow over his strike action within the union movement? They include Fredericks, Elmore Edwards (from Grenada), the young Sharpies, Eleazor and Davis, the solicitors.
Do you know that D. M. Harper of the British Guiana Trade Union Congress was Guyana’s representative at the famous 1945 Pan-African Congress? He wrote a supplementary report on problems facing people of African Descent in the Western Hemisphere. Do you know that Dr. Peter Milliard of Guyana and the International African Friends of Ethiopia IAFA, welcomed Haile Selassie in England when he went into exile? And, the 1945 Pan-African Congress top officials were: Dr. Peter Milliard – Chairman (Guyana), Ras Makonnen – Treasurer (Guyana), George Padmore – Political Secretary (Trinidad and Tobago), Kwame Nkrumah – Political Secretary (Ghana), Peter Abrahams – Publicity Secretary (South Africa) and Jomo Kenyata – Assistant Secretary (Kenya). Dr. Peter Milliard died soon after the end to the Congress.
One of the decisions the 1945 Congress came to was that “organised Christianity in West Africa is identified with the political and economic exploitation of West African peoples by alien powers”. I’ll come to that later with respect to the Mercy Residence Centre that took away Joycelynne’s phones, 636- 2460 and 226-0261. Let me quote from Pan-Africanism from Within again. “Like the Jews, the members of the African diaspora could not completely forget the land of their origin – even though the blacks were never Zionists to the same extent. They did not have a religion to bind them in exile like Judaism, or Hinduism among Indians abroad; nevertheless we do have these peculiar racial characteristics (woolly hair) and we could not run away from our common heritage. We were bound together also by the universal proposition that the devil was black; that evil was characteristic of blackness. To combat this you did have a movement which, if not a religion, was certainly a powerful intellectual ferment. Pan-Africanism. This is still in its infancy, but its scholars are beginning to chart the full dimension of blackness at home and abroad in the Americas and Caribbean, in Indonesia, New Guinea, the Philippians and India, and soon enough the picture of our dispersal will be complete. Then, with the full evidence of our past, it will be possible to create a new concept. We shall be regenerated and more ready for the great task waiting for us”.
Dr. Joycelynne Loncke entered the intellectual movement with a passion. She had heritage and she was a scholar. I noticed her in the 1970s wearing wrap skirts with African designs every day in the streets of Georgetown charting the dimensions of blackness. She was employed by the University of Guyana. She knew her African Heritage and she helped several conferences, including bringing to Guyana Professor Ali Mazrui from Kenya, who delivered an unforgettable lecture on Collective Servitude from the Mandingo to the Mandelas. Desmond Hoyte was then President. It was in this period that Professor Loncke began to invite me to meetings. She helped me to become bold and daring. She made me deliver a presentation on sugar at the Lawn Tennis Association Hall. Same sugar lecture in Barbados. There I met David Comissiong, the present Chairman of the Caribbean Pan African Network CPAN. She made it possible for me to take my first journey to Africa. I attended the Black Think Tank in August 1992, in Nigeria, hosted by Naiwu Osahon. It has been rebranded the Africa Peoples’ Union. I, and others, approved the Black Agenda. Guyana made its contribution under the Sub-Section REFUGEES #40 and 41. Bro. Shakir at his masjid in Robb Street, and I at Bent Street and the Highway, hosted many refugees fleeing civil wars all over Africa and arriving in Guyana undocumented. We documented many and in gratitude, one of them gave me his ‘prayer mat’ when he was moving on. Here it is.
In 1993, I was with Pan-Africans at the University of Toronto, Canada, hosted by Charles Roach where we reviewed progress on The Black Agenda. Recently, I attended conferences and met Khafra Khabon twice in Trinidad and Tobago. I presented a paper: Africa is not yet ready for investment by Africans because of visa restrictions and money management principally. I’ve just noticed that Mia Mottley, Barbados Prime Minister, has made a call “All visa requirements should be abolished. Africans and Caribbean peoples should be able to move freely”. (Joycelynne will host an underworld conference). About three years ago at a PanAf meeting in Queen Street, Kitty, I was gifted this statuette ‘the family tree’ for my contribution to Pan-Africanism by Leader, Joycelynne Loncke. Here it is. I think it was not long after I did two ‘gallery presentations’ at the PanAf Gardens on Marcus Garvey and the Grenada Revolution. Joycelynne was an intellectual warrior par excellence and I was one of her generals. She was in the mold of Norman E. Cameron who wrote THE EVOLUTION OF THE NEGRO (two volumes) in 1929 and 1934 and Walter Rodney, who was a prolific writer and speaker. I read that Joycelynne wrote a biography of Norman E. Cameron and in gratitude, we must buy this book and read it – university academics particularly.
Over the recent years, Professor Loncke has approved and pursued so many suggestions by members of the Pan-African Movement (Guyana Branch) to give them confidence in practical leadership. 2014: Informal Technology and Musical Activity (steel band) in Kitty and Mocha-Arcadia, 2016: Akan (Twi) language learning, 2020: Distribution of food from Food for the Poor. Fifty-five families benefited at Christmas time from the distribution of hampers. Through CPAN, Joycelynne and Secretary Yvonne Loncke, also looked for grants to improve the standing of all peoples. But in 2019, just after the passing of her sister and companion, Yvonne Loncke, Professor Dr. Joycelynne Loncke, Leader of the Pan-African Movement (Guyana Branch) was removed from her sister’s room at Medical Arts Hospital to the Catholic Mercy Residence Centre. All members of the Pan-African Movement (Guyana Branch) protested. The Catholics severed her contacts with the world immediately. Her revolutionary activities with the masses were gaited. Visiting her was exactly similar to visiting a prisoner at the Georgetown Jail where you wait on the road or house in Camp Street until called by the gate man. She had to be brought down from her cell and spoke only through a glass door.
Sincerely,
Tom Dalgety