Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 29, 2009 Letters
Dear Editor,
One of our prolific writers, the deep thinking and erudite Freddie Kissoon verbally lambaste me for not writing to fill the many gaps that exist in our Nation’s exciting journey from the 20th to the 21st Century.
He is right, and in the interim, I will try to comment on issues, which come before the public.
In SN, June 23 edition, under the headline “An issue orthography,” Harry Hergash refers to a letter by Miss Gitanjali Persaud, captioned “No published accounts of evidence of communist funding of the PPP prior to 1969,” a comment by Eusi Kwayana refers to a book by Dr. Kean Gibson.
Let me refer only to the use of the emotional phrase ‘Apan Jhaat’ and ignore the argument about the pronunciation.
What I know is that the PPP leadership peddles this racist phrase, a divisive project as a crusade, which up to today has left serious scars on our society, longing for harmony and racial understanding.
I have had experience of going to otherwise quiet communities and hearing in response to logical arguments against the then extremist of the PPP leadership, a simple response ‘Apan Jhaat’, which meant in our circumstances “vote for your own race – no matter what.”
Mr. Hergash is correct, for I recall as a schoolboy in my father’s drug store, the lawyer Daniel Parbudas Debidin visiting my father in his drug store and inviting him to chair a public meeting held at St. Thomas’ School in Kettly Street. My father secured the permission of headmaster Herman A. Stephens and duly chaired a representative gathering which consisted of Indian and African Guyanese.
I distinctly remember that my father, who was then perhaps the most popular personality in the Charlestown/Albouystown area, as he begins the meeting, my father urged the assembled gathering to support Debidin’s political ambitions.
I distinctly recall while Debidin was speaking he launched into an appeal to the Indian
Community by speaking in Hindi. Because of my father’s long and beautiful association among Indians in southern Georgetown, he understood a spattering of local Hindi and it was clear at some point that Debidin used the term ‘Apan Jhaat.’
My father was upset and refused thereafter to support Debidin, because my father Wilfred A. Green was passionately committed to Afro/Indo oneness.
It is this phrase that the PPP Leadership used as a campaign slogan in the 50’s and 60’s. Unhappily, half a century after, the residue is still with us.
Hamilton Green, J. P.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
Apr 19, 2024
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