…and Mae’s
Getting the Mae’s administration to sit down with the parents of the Amerindian boy they humiliated – and representatives of the Indigenous peoples – produced more drama than getting Trump to sit down with Kim Jong Un! In the case of the US and N Korea, the subject was nuclear weapons the latter claimed it possesses – with the capability to land them into US soil.
With Mae’s, the subject was no less tectonic – deriding the culture of the Indigenous Peoples and sending a message that they simply don’t count. While the US and Trump are rightfully concerned about N Korea’s devastating nuclear potential it doesn’t appear Mae’s appreciates its actions reverberate far beyond its school buildings and yard and represents the stubborn fag end of a bomb far more dangerous to the Amerindian peoples than N Korea’s.
This bomb was the narrative bomb hurled by the Europeans – headed by the Dutch – who came to this land, saw the Amerindians living here with their crops and vegetables etc – and yet declared that the land was “terra nullis” – empty land, which they could claim according to THEIR law!! And where they didn’t invoke “terra nullis”, they pronounced the Amerindians were UNCIVILISED so BY THEIR EUROPEAN LAW this gave them the right to take over the latter’s lands!!
Mae’s attitude to the Amerindian boy and the Amerindian groups that were finally ALLOWED to sit across the table from them, represented that premise that Amerindians are still not up to par with the elite they represent. When the Europeans stuck their flags and claimed Amerindian lands, their philosophers concocted the notion of a grand “Chain of being” – which started from the rocks and the trees at one end and ended up with the angels and God at the other. Man, of course, was just below the angels – but there was “man” and there was the White Man!!
The White Man were the ones just below the angels and the other races were firmly stuck below them – with Africans at the very bottom of that totem pole. In that scheme, Africans didn’t even possess a soul…and was therefore beyond redemption. In fact, it was this premise the Spanish used to bring in Africans as slaves and leave the Amerindians to die off from the germs they brought.
It’s therefore the height of irony that the administrators of Mae’s, descended from the mixed offspring of Africans and Europeans, are implicitly using the “Chain of Being” argument to deny Amerindians a seat at the table of “civilised” Guyanese!
Did you notice Mae’s first insisted they’d apologise privately to the parents of the boy…but eventually after pressure made a PUBLIC apology?
There’s hope.
…and GECOM hiring
A firestorm erupted when a GECOM PPP Commissioner dared to point out that the entity’s hiring practices acted to discriminate against Indian Guyanese. Robeson Benn claimed the staff were almost 90 per cent African Guyanese. “Not so!!” shouted the unilaterally-appointed geriatric Justice (Chief?) James Patterson. Without offering any evidence for his assertion, Patterson immediately adjourned the meeting. He’d probably exhausted himself with the exertion of shouting!!
Anyhow, when the meeting reconvened he unilaterally declared Benn couldn’t speak any further! If there was any doubt why Granger plucked Patterson to head GECOM, that’s been cleared! After all, any reasonable Chair would’ve told Benn he’d look into his charge.
Later, PNC Commissioner Vincent Alexander offered two contradictory assertions. On one hand, he claimed the African-dominated imbalance in ethnic composition was always there – like with the public service. But on the other hand (according to the Chronic) the ethnic imbalance was in favour of Indian Guyanese!!
Now without including cooks and bottle washers, your Eyewitness hopes a list of the GECOM employees will be released.
…and vandalising Victoria
Ah…how ungrateful can we be!! After slavery was abolished under Queen Victoria, we named the first village we founded after her – Victoria.
Yet we’ve now doused her statue with paint. Even as her Ambassador’s reforming our security system!!
