Latest update March 29th, 2024 12:59 AM
Dec 14, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I told Adam Harris a few weeks ago that when I function in the media, the historian is always inside of me. I told Adam that I am not a trained journalist but a trained historian. I explained the possible differences between the two professions – a historian’s drive is to present the facts to posterity and do so in specific, identifiable ways. A historian has no qualms about citing names and places. They are driven by that creed. It would have been unthinkable for the historian to hide his discovery that J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual.
Do you know who brought the attention of the world to Bill Cosby’s rape allegations? It wasn’t any of the 24 women who have now come forward. In 2006 Cosby settled with a woman out of court and that was the end of that. The hurricane Cosby is in could have happened earlier, but an editor from one of America’s most popular tabloid magazines, The Enquirer, dropped publication of an interview with a rape complainant in exchange for an exclusive with Cosby.
Cosby was exposed by a stand-up comedian who was just doing his thing and made a mockery of Cosby’s “rape habits” One of the complainants saw the show on television and said if the comedian could name Cosby then he was helping her as a rape victim and she should help herself by going public. The rest is history.
Months before I raised this difference with Adam between the journalist and historian, I had a discussion with Tacuma Ogunseye of the Working People’s Alliance on the identical subject. I had in mind a column on Mrs. Patricia Rodney, wife of Walter Rodney, and her not so elegant role in the birth of the Walter Rodney Commission, and indicated that intention to Tacuma.
I told Tacuma that I am fully aware of the international respect and sympathy for Mrs. Rodney, but as a historian, I need to write. I am not at liberty to divulge Tacuma’s words but he did say he understood my obligation as a historian. Now that the Rodney Commission has morphed into an extremely dangerous game by the PPP, with all indications so far from the shape of the hearings that the main plotter or organizers will not be named, some focus should be placed on Mrs. Rodney’s initial intervention.
First, Mrs. Rodney should have been suspicious that there may be an ulterior motive by the PPP to hold an inquest after twenty-two years of the PPP being in office. Surely, Mrs. Rodney must have known that the gaps after 22 years will not help the Commission, and they have not helped at all. Secondly, why would Mrs. Rodney trust the PPP to be fair in its approach when the PPP has shaped state power in more bestial ways than when Burnham ruled?
Did Mrs. Rodney trust a government that runs a system in today’s Guyana the identical fashion the way Burnham did? And in today’s Guyana there is an ambience of violence and murder similar to when her husband met his death? Mrs. Rodney cannot be that naïve to think that Walter Rodney was the only victim of the assassin’s hand and that moving hand of death went out of existence after June 1980 when Walter was killed.
How can someone like Walter Rodney’s wife be blind to the nature of a tyrannical regime in 2014, when it was a similar regime that caused her husband’s demise? Mrs. Rodney must be familiar with the feelings of people that her husband loved, who think that the PPP Government is more tyrannical, diseased, and immoral than the Burnham administration. She must know that because they would have told her so. Dr. David Hinds wrote in the newspapers that he fought the Burnham cabal and was jailed, but he believes the PPP cabal is far more depraved and racist.
Thirdly, the historian has to call into question Mrs. Rodney’s judgement in excluding the WPA from the discussion on and subsequent decision to have the Commission. The WPA is on record as saying the Commission was the work of Mrs. Rodney and the PPP Government and the WPA was excluded. How could Mrs. Rodney justify that policy of hers?
Even though she is Walter’s wife, that status does not confer on her exclusive right to make a decision in the format of an inquiry into his death. Throughout history, both the family and the hero’s comrades would have been the people to make the decision. Finally, Mrs. Rodney needs to understand that the dreams of Walter Rodney that he passed on to subsequent Guyanese generations have died. Her friends in the PPP killed them. All is left are living tears soaking the canopy of dead dreams.
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
Mar 29, 2024
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