Last week, responding to a request by Vincent Alexander to “acknowledge that he has long “argued that Guyana is a plural society in conflict, and needs attention,” I concurred and continued, “I also agree with Vincent that “much which is purported as dialogue is but senseless screaming at each other”; but, sadly, I find him “screaming” very loudly lately. He has now become a “memory warrior”, zealously seeking to impose a single, foundational, historical African “TRUTH” (in caps) while delegitimising the views of all other ethnicities, especially those of Indians and Indigenous Peoples. Along with his teleological “fit for purpose” focus, this is certain to aggravate political instability, since it is so exclusionary.
I was asked to expand on my use of the term “memory warrior”, and will do so today, because, as a subset of the wider term “memory wars”, it explains much of what has been fuelling the ethnic tensions in Guyana.
Ethnic politics in Guyana, as we have explained ad nauseam, is driven by two “Ethnic Security Dilemmas”. These were ironically triggered by the introduction of the universal franchise in Guyana preceding independence, which was going to decide who was “going to rule” with the departure of the British.
The 1955 breakup of the multi-ethnic PPP independence movement, which produced Indian- and African-Guyanese-dominated factions, led by Jagan and Burnham respectively, was largely a result of African Guyanese fears of being “swamped and subordinated” by the numerically larger Indian-Guyanese, who were also economically aggressive. As we have emphasised, while Burnham may have had his personal ambitions and acted as an ethnic entrepreneur, the fears he exploited were already existent. Similarly, Indian-Guyanese also had fears of being dominated by African-Guyanese, because of historical factors such as the Police and Volunteer Forces being dominated by African-Guyanese. It is for this reason that elections in Guyana are invariably tense, and can explode into violence if political leaders decide to exploit, rather than mollify, these fears. Groups like the Indigenous Peoples get crushed as the elephants fight.
Ethnic politics of the type practised in Guyana can be reduced to a simple formula: Group Comparison + Group Legitimacy = the Politics of Entitlement. In effect, that people placed in the same environment will inevitably compare themselves, and, from these perspectives, construct boundaries from the differences perceived. These boundaries can be racial, ethnic, economic, gender, etc. In Guyana, the most salient political boundary became race/ethnicity.
The Ethnic Dilemmas, however, are structural factors that have to be actuated by an ideology that impels individuals to act as they do. And this is where the memory warriors come in, to augment the lived experiences of the people. In societies such as ours, leaders of some groups will argue for a greater legitimacy to the national patrimony – including or especially political power – because of prior arrival, greater acculturation to European values and practices, especially religion etc. And this is where the memory war is fought through a “politics of entitlement” by memory warriors, so that the group “winning the war” becomes “entitled” to have all its interests satisfied – especially at the expense of the other groups.
But while all groups will inevitably recuperate their histories – which reverberate in the various communities as narratives that often clash on particulars – memory warriors are insistent that only their narrative is the TRUTH, to the exclusion of others.
In plural societies, there will be some who would deny, or even denounce, these multiple voices, and insist that “all a-we ah wan”: these are the “memory abnegators”. But even though not as prominent or numerous, there are also “memory prospectors”, who accept that there are multiple narratives, and work towards the crafting of a common narrative that includes all. It is in this tradition that we believe we should go forward.
We have dubbed the politics of memory as a “war” because, even though it does not always lead to physical war, it is always accompanied by a psychic onslaught on the “other”, which destabilises the society. We once again call for a national conversation on race/ethnicity in the hope that the memory warriors can become memory prospectors to build a Guyana in which all groups are equitably represented.
