Exactly a week after the “Unite the Right” movement staged its demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparking condemnation for its racist implications, there was a demonstration in Guyana that suggest some parallels with Charlottesville. There, a number of whites marched to aggressively express their disagreement with the decision of the town to pull down the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
To most Guyanese, this may have been a rather arcane issue to rile up counter demonstrations resulting in the death of one and injury to nineteen of the latter members, when a supporter of the Robert E. Lee partisans rammed his vehicle into them. But the issue should matter to us, since, at its core, is the long reach of slavery into the present, surviving as structural racism. While slavery was abolished by the British in their colonies in 1834; in the US, where there were even more African slaves than in the West Indies, it was continued to provide free labour for the cotton and tobacco plantations in the southern states. While there was a widespread debate for the abolition of slavery, the southern slaves dug their heels in and refused to agree to the right of Africans to be free.
It was not until a war was fought from 1861 to 1865, between those who wanted slavery abolished, (the Northern states) and those that wanted to maintain it (the Southern states), and after the latter were defeated that African Americans became at least free. General Robert E. Lee was the leader of the Southern army (the Confederates) who fought against the Union forces. The present battle over whether to maintain or remove his statue in a state that fought to retain slavery is thus a trope for a larger battle — as to where exactly does America stand on the question of the enduring legacy of slavery/anti-African racism.
Guyana is connected to that battle because the ideology used to justify the enslavement of millions of Africans in the US by whites was the same ideology deployed in the West Indies to justify African slavery here on the sugar plantations. The Biblical story of Ham and the curse by his father Noah — that his descendants become slaves — was interpreted by whites to identify Africans as those descendants and therefore mandated that they be slaves. The Mormons, for instance, explicitly quoted this passage from Genesis to justify their position on slavery.
Fighting racism through the hundreds of years following slavery has taught us that all kinds of oppression can be, and have been, justified by arbitrary interpretations of texts that may not necessarily be relevant to the circumstances in which they are now applied. There is the matter of time, place and circumstances being changed, and compelling one to relook at older interpretations with new sensibilities. Even the Mormons had to re-examine the interpretation of the “curse of Ham” by 1978 and jettison it.
We now arrive at the demonstration in Linden, where it was reported that one group of citizens marched against homosexuals being possibly given the right by the Government to engage in same-sex intercourse. The latter would have to change the present law that was written by the British in the 19th century and justified by Biblical citations similar to the one used to justify slavery. Ironically, the British changed their law on the subject right after we received independence.
Because President Granger had declared that he is “prepared to respect the rights of any adult to indulge in any practice which is not harmful to others,” the action in Linden was intended as a broadside against him.
While, as in America, free speech is guaranteed here, right thinking citizens must condemn boot-strapping justifications to oppress fellow citizens who may be simply different from others. If it was wrong to oppress some for the colour of their skin, why is it not so for oppressing others today for the object of their love?
