David Hinds was the only guest at my birthday party

Jan 03, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

My birthday, on December 30 came and went. I spent it with my wife and only David Hinds I had over. He drank Banks DIH shandy. I took DDL’s Topco sorrel juice. We both had ham sandwiches. We sat on the verandah overlooking what we were taught in primary school to refer to as the “Mighty Atlantic.”
I could tell you what my emanations were to David. I don’t think I am liberty to divulge his thoughts. I will publicize what I said and write about some of the less sensitive things David ruminated on. We both agreed that the longer the no-confidence crisis continues, the more dangerous the implications and consequences are for ethnic stability.
We concur that it was unfortunate what happened to the APNU+AFC regime but the signs were always there. We were in unadulterated agreement that the APNU+AFC engaged in crass, sadistic, immoral contempt of people and actors who helped to change the political landscape of Guyana so that a PPP defeat became possible.
We both accept that if the no-confidence imbroglio drags on the inevitable is bound to seep into the minds of people – APNU+AFC are leaders that do not want to give up power. Can we trust them to accept the results when elections come either in 2019 or 2020 should they lose? Unless you are so biased and dishonest, you have to see such a possibility coming to life.
You can ask David when you see him who the persons were that he named to me that were responsible for removing him and Lincoln Lewis from the Chronicle. He is in Guyana, so talk to him. He said one powerhouse was from the APNU and another was from the AFC who is in the Cabinet.
I invited David Hinds to have a philosophical exchange with me on my birthday on a peaceful, tranquil Sunday afternoon before the vortex of the last day of 2018 began. And indeed it was a serene moment.
David Hinds and I were very young radicals in the WPA in the seventies. My reason for having him share my birthday with me and my wife is because out of the hundreds of WPA personnel and leaders I met from those days, David remains true to the philosophy and principles of Walter Rodney.
I say unapologetically, none from that era who are alive in and out of Guyana have kept faith with the chemistry of the Rodneyite revolution.
Four possible exceptions come to mind. There is Andaiye who lives in Guyana but is not in the best of health. Eusi Kwayana will be 94 in April. Moses Bhagwan is in his late eighties. I don’t expect these three persons to be active with their pen though David did say that Kwayana is agile, mentally.
It would be spiritually comforting to the young generation we have in Guyana if these three Rodneyite stalwarts could lend us their thoughts and reflections as to what is taking place in Guyana and where Guyana is heading.
The fourth one is Nigel Westmaas who I believe needs to make a decisive intervention with his pen.
The rest of the lot, I think are people whose transformation has been more than a hundred and eighty degrees turnaround from their activism in the seventies, a praxis that so inspired an entire nation. How can people with such courage and emotions forty years ago just turn around and throw it all away in the dustbin of the mediocrity of leadership, the nihilism of power intoxication, and the soulless descent into cruel economics?
These are the features of state power in Guyana today. David Hinds stands out remarkably from this self-destructive journey to no man’s land.
When David comes to Guyana for his twice yearly saturation, we have our rendezvous and we dissect the society and look at the physiology of Guyanese politics. David Hinds is an Africanist but I always tell my East Indian friends, he is multi-racial in his psyche and he is a Black man that Indians can trust. The reason for such a biology is because David holds fast to the belief system of Walter Rodney.
One final note; I did say to him that the WPA’s raison d’être for joining with the PNC to form APNU in 2011 no longer exists and I cannot see what logic or rational thinking those who are left in the WPA could advance to the Guyanese people for going into the 2019 or 2020 elections with APNU.
The WPA took Rodney’s legacy and merged it with the PNC for a better Guyana in 2011. Seven years after I don’t see the influence of Rodney on state power.

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