Following the unilateral appointment by President Granger of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) chair, there has been a heated discussion in the pages of the local newspapers and in social media about the salience of ethnicity in Guyanese politics. While the incident itself is unfortunate, and hopefully the issue will be settled in the courts to which it has been referred, the discussion premised on group identity if not necessarily bad.
The contra view harks back to the old Platonic notion that there is some standard of social, political and even moral “good” that somehow exists outside of our particulars. This “universality” has been rejected through the millennia but it crops up ever-so-often when some people do not concede that whatever “universal” they posit, it had to have been extended from someone’s particulars. And those universalised particulars are inevitably those of the group with power in the society.
The problematic was posed from another angle by the political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, two thousand years later in his foundational “On Liberty”:
“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.”
The “protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion” can only come if the individuals and groups in the society, who differ with the accepted wisdom, can have their opinions enter the public sphere for discussion and debate. And this is where the public intellectuals from the various groups – as they define themselves – have to play their role of interrogating the dominant paradigm and articulating alternative answers to questions posed to the nation towards the creation of a more just society.
In Guyana, it would appear that after a long period of public denial, most persons now accept that in the realm of politics our voting cleaves, more or less, along ethnic lines. This implies, for whatever reasons, people of this country believe that their political interests are secured by particular parties that then inevitably become identified as “ethnic parties”.
In a developing country like Guyana, because politics intrudes into every facet of human endeavour, areas such as culture, and even art, become arenas of political contestation. The public intellectual coming from the several camps – ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, race, colour, geography, etc – is inevitably seen as taking a political position. Not from the Foucauldian thesis that all relations actually mirror “power relations” but from the more visceral one that the public intellectual is seen to support one or the other political parties in the society. In other words, they are seen as “partisan”.
But maybe the need to accept intellectuals speaking as grounded ethnic individuals might be made easier to accept for those that see it as “divisive” by starting with one group that is now accepted as needing to speak for themselves: females. As late as the last century, women in the developed world did not even have the franchise – just as the “natives” in the colonies who were explicitly informed they were “not ready”. Women today not only have the right to vote for their representatives, even in Guyana there is a constitutional stipulation that 33 per cent of the representatives in Parliament must be female.
This was achieved because females honed an ideology (feminism) and agitated for inclusions in the political system. No less must be allowed for all other groups, including ethnic groups.
