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Mar 14, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev
Elder Kwayana (EK) claims that I think he “believes in some guilty race”. (SN 2-24-10) I would not pretend to know what Mr Kwayana believes. I can only follow the argument he has consistently made on the genesis of political violence in Guyana: There is no guilty race, he affirms, but Guyanese political violence began on August 28th 1961, a week after the General Elections, when some Indians of Port Mourant murdered an African PNC supporter, Felix Ross. Every other observer (including myself) has placed the beginning of political violence on Black Friday, February 16th 1962. What am I to conclude? The dangers of the argument became clear when it was used to buttress the diatribe of Dr Kean Gibson.
Mr Kwayana originally made this argument in 1962 (in his booklet, “Next Witness”) after he felt that the British Commission enquiring into the causes of Black Friday was biased. As I stated, “In the booklet, EK states his case about “guilt” explicitly, to expose, “(the coward)” Jagan’s racial insolence and his cold-blooded organisation of the East Indians for the conquest that has always been their dream.” He concludes: “The (PPP) Government, the guilty party in the matter of racial conflict, wished to hide the truth because it wants immediate independence under a constitution, which will leave it free to strangle the breath of the African people and the minorities, to create here an East Indian State, to plant the East Indies in the West Indies.”
Every proposition, as R.G. Collingwood noted, is an answer to a question. The question that confronted Kwayana when he made that claim – whither the African minority in a polity distinguished by ethnic mobilisation? – is still dominating our political agenda today.
In this respect at least we share the problem space of Mr Kwayana, one of our first politicians to directly confront the African Ethnic Security Dilemma. As I emphasised before, “My object in raising the issue (is) not to determine who was “right or wrong” but whether the strategies (are) applicable for our present problem space and if not what might be possible alternatives.”
To understand EK’s answer of 1962, it is vital to understand the circumstances in which he was enmeshed at the time. I would never, ever imply much less “condemn” EK “as an inventor of incidents” as he suggests but would point out that the circumstances that generate a particular question inevitably colour the mindset of the respondent/actor. Why is it, for instance, that EK only records incidents of Indians verbally and otherwise assaulting Africans before and after the 1961 elections, when the newspapers of the time recount both groups as initiators? To paraphrase Nietzsche, propositions as well as concepts do not have definitions but histories.
As one of the earliest supporters of Dr Jagan in the latter’s bid for Parliament in 1947, Kwayana introduced and endorsed him to Buxton even in the face of disapproval from some Africans. Before and after the PPP’s victory in 1953, in Burnham’s quest to assume the leadership of the PPP, Kwayana thwarted the latter’s machinations on several occasions. However, in the fallout of the PPP’s removal from office, Kwayana became disillusioned with several of Jagan’s moves – especially after the 1955 split.
In addition to Jagan’s condemnation of the “ultra-leftists”, which included Kwayana’s friends, his stand on the proposed West Indian Federation (negative) and his 1956 speech to the P.P.P. Congress (to mobilize upper-strata Indians he now defined as “progressive”) convinced Kwayana that Jagan was pandering to Indians, to the detriment of Africans. The final straw evidently was when Kwayana decided to run as an independent in the 1957 elections and the PPP opposed him with Balram Singh Rai. He lost, became even more strident about Jagan and the “Indian threat” to Africans as the agriculturally-oriented development program unfolded and became one of the founders and General Secretary of the PNC two years later.
Between 1958 and 1961, more than anyone else, by utilising the platform of the New Nation in a series of unrelentingly strident articles, EK helped shape the definition of the post 1957 PPP government as a “coolie rice government” that was out to destroy Africans. The remainder of the “free press” all owned by supporters of the opposition helped fan the racial fears. By 1961, with the British promise to grant independence in the next two years, Kwayana became incensed when Burnham affirmed he would support independence under Jagan. He denounced Burnham for selling out Africans and was expelled from the PNC when he proposed either “joint Premiership” or partition. He became a co-founder of the African Society for Racial Equality (ASRE) in the same year to protect “Africans from racial domination”.
After the CIA fomented violence of 1962 and 1963 that inevitably took a racial/ethnic turn in view of the political climate created, EK accepted that he “took charge of the defence of Buxton-Friendship” in 1964 in the countrywide violence that followed the PPP’s attempt to head off PR by calling a strike in the sugar belt. As EK conceded later, it was a defence against an attack that never came, and admitted that in the sixties he blamed “the people” for the faults of “the leaders”.
It is my contention, however, that the organisation of Buxton “for defence” in the sixties set the seeds of the eruption that occurred in the new millennium. It helped solidify a new narrative as to how Buxton could defend the emancipation of Africans earned so painstakingly and heroically in 1838 and afterwards. It was more than ironic that in the latest eruption, EK had to flee the village he had spent his entire life nurturing and defending. The wisdom he had gained by 1978 about the futility of violence to engender political change in Guyana had now made him “too soft” for the new defenders.
In my estimation, in his insistence for speaking truth to power over the years in his quest for his vision of justice in Guyana – even when that power was himself – EK has earned an unparalled moral status. Today, Guyana is confronted by some who are determined to replicate the sixties by their incendiary rhetoric in the press and elsewhere of “fascism”, “dictatorship”, “economic genocide and racism against Africans”, etc to encourage “revolution” against the government. They ignore not only history but our history of the present that clearly demonstrates the different conjunctural space we inhabit and which offers different answers to the question posed.
I believe that Elder Kwayana, from his own analysis of why such a course of action is not just futile but ultimately destructive even to the cause it purports to advance, cannot be silent but should speak out against these provocateurs.
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