Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Sep 25, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
If you were born at the beginning of 1992, you are sixteen years old. You are probably eligible to enter the University of Guyana. This means that you are mature enough to understand the contents of contemporary Guyanese history.
If the wife of Dr. Cheddi Jagan decided to write an epilogue to her husband’s controversial autobiography, “The West on Trial,.” then that sixteen-year-old person would be given an emotional and tempestuous distortion of Guyanese history— the appropriate words to describe “the West on Trial.”
Last Sunday in her column for her party newspaper, Mrs. Jagan referred to me as a ‘vociferous hate-writer.”
Dr. David Hinds was assessed as “The wildly, extremist anti-PPP character.” Let us forget about the epilogue to “The West on Trial” and release the facts to the sixteen-year-old who would have read that article by Mrs. Jagan last week.
That youth, unfamiliar with priceless territory covered by me and Hinds, would not know of our political background.
They also would not know of Mrs. Jagan’s controversial involvement in certain events that took place in our country thirty-one years before they were born.
Let us briefly provide some notes about me and Hinds, then describe what would now be the forty-seven-year-old events of the sixties that Mrs. Jagan assessed during that time she was active in government.
When we judge what people like Mrs. Jagan was saying about people who criticised the PPP in the sixties and how she paints those critics in 2008, more than forty-seven years after she first adopted her methodology, then we can see how slowly and slowly buried truths are coming to the surface.
Dr. David Hinds was one of the finest radical, anti-dictatorship youths to have come out of Guyana, perhaps second only to Tacuma Ogunseye.
Dr. Hinds was part of the WPA second tier leadership and was jailed by the Burnham Government for three years. While in prison, he almost lost his sight.
Mrs. Jagan cannot point to one PPP youth or mature cadre that was jailed by the Burnham regime for more than three weeks much less three years.
When that sixteen-year-old read last week’s Mirror, he/she would never know that it was David Hinds, and not Mrs. Jagan, who fought for the little freedoms we know enjoy in this land. To classify Dr. Hinds as an extremist anti-PPP activist is a treasonable attack on the moral foundation of this nation.
This man opposed the racist contents of Kean Gibson’s writings and he vigorously denounced the violence the Mash Day escapees perpetrated on the Guyanese people.
I don’t want to say too much of myself. It was Mrs. Jagan as editor of the Mirror in January 1992 who put my photograph on the front page of the newspaper holding a placard when I won the President’s Medal for being the top student at UG. I wasn’t a hate-writer for Mrs. Jagan then because at that time I was denouncing the bad things Burnham did.
When I became a lecturer at UG, Mrs. Jagan’s husband, Dr Cheddi Jagan, couldn’t even enter the campus. I invited him to give a guest talk to my class and almost lost my job for that.
I wasn’t a hate-writer in 2002 when together with David Hinds, Eusi Kwayana and other WPA persons I exposed the dangerous activities of the Mash Day escapees.
On the question of Eusi Kwayana, this is what Mrs. Jagan was quoted as saying about him in her interview published in Frank Birbalsingh’s “The PPP of Guyana, 1950-1992: An Oral History.”
In response to the question of Kwayana being an elder statesman, she said; “He thinks he is. He is tying to be a Black Mahatma. But he really isn’t because the Mahatma didn’t have hatred and viciousness.”
So what are the buried truths now coming to light? They go back to the sixties. Our generation was told about the Argosy and Chronicle being filled with hate-writers like how Kwayana, Hinds and I are described as people with hate forty-seven years after Mrs. Jagan first used that word.
Kit Nascimento, Peter D’Aguiar, Peter Taylor were all categorized as extremist haters of the PPP.
Fast forward the tape to Mrs. Jagan’s article about me and Hinds and you can understand the historical distortions “The West on Trial” contains. In the sixties, when you criticized the PPP Government, you were hate-writing extremists. The PPP were the good guys then.
Today, the PPP are still the good guys and those who fault them are hate-mongers. We are slowly seeing what actually happened in the sixties. People like Mrs. Jagan are unwittingly letting lose the truths of the past. Keep on exposing yourself lady!
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
Apr 19, 2024
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