Dear Editor,
The passing of the great Caribbean prophet George Lamming has elicited very well-deserved praise from West Indians across the globe. Maybe we can honour him in the midst of some very divisive politics playing out in our dear land by recalling his advice to us in the foreword to our own Walter Rodney’s posthumously published “History of the Guyanese Working Peoples”.
“Admirers of Rodney’s earlier work, Groundings with My Brothers, must come to realise that the great emphasis he placed on the moral necessity of Black Power – the ancestral dignity that African peoples must rediscover and keep alive – was only part of a larger assignment in his intellectual life. It was no part of his intention to promote a racial sectarian attitude in our approach to the problems of human society, especially in the concrete circumstances of Caribbean society.
“He takes great pains, therefore, to make us open and generous before the predicament of Indians, to make us register and internalise the fact of their suffering, and the very great contribution they have made in the struggle for the creative survival of the Guyanese people. An authentic history of the Guyanese working people is equally their history.
“This perception of the Indian as alien and other, a problem to be contained after the departure of the imperial power, has been a major part of the thought and feeling of the majority of Afro-Guyanese, and a stubborn conviction among the black middle layers of Guyanese society. Indian power in politics and business has been regarded as an example of an Indian strategy for conquest. And this accusation persists even though, in the fashionable arithmetic of democracy, their numerical superiority might have justified such an ambition for supreme political power.
“…it is one of the most instructive aspects of this book that we are allowed to see how the original force of estate labour, supplied by both groups, would acquire new levels of social function and open out into the emergence of new and distinct class formations.
“The Afro-Guyanese, who had had a longer association with the culture of the dominant European group, now made a huge investment of talent in education. The school became the most accessible means of rescuing their offspring from the enslavement of estate labour. The history of the Afro-Guyanese middle class is the history of the school. Many a black lawyer would have started his career as a primary school headmaster, a position of great status and importance to a mass of unlettered and aspiring ex-slaves.
“But what began as a necessary strategy of self-emancipation would become, in our time, a major obstacle to national liberation. For the mystique of the educated one has proved to be a mystifying influence on the Guyanese and West Indian masses throughout the process of decolonisation. It has been one of the permanent features of the imperial experiment. Education was a means of escape from the realities of labour, a continuing flight from the foundations of society. To grow up was to grow away. Cultural imperialism is not an empty or evasive phrase. It is the process and effect of a tutelage that has clung to the ex-colonial like his skin.”
Being forewarned, the new economy opening up offers all Guyanese a chance of starting over with respect for labour.
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev
