White guilt, Black nationalism, and Indian marginalisation

Dear Editor,
Recent developments in Guyana require careful reflection on the ways in which Guyanese nationhood has been imagined.
My argument is that East Indians in Guyana have never been allowed to belong to the inner core of nationhood. Despite 185 years of physical presence in the country, they have been both inadvertently and deliberately excommunicated from the inside of nationhood, from equal and full belonging.
Instead, the Guyanese East Indian is constructed as an intruder in a country and a region where their history and their very existence are confined and quarantined to the margins. They have been marked absent in their presence.
Further, Guyanese Indians are wrongly blamed for the structural location bequeathed by colonialism to Afro-Guyanese. Unlike Guyanese Black nationalists, Indians have no equivalent of the Black Caucus. How could such a thing happen in a country that was born through a united anti-colonial struggle? How could such a thing indeed happen in a country where the founding figures of the Independence Movement and of the struggle for national sovereignty were built on solidarity across racial groups?
The central argument is that, whereas Africans and Afro-Guyanese have direct access to, and are an integral part of, Western modernity, Caribbean Indians – and especially Guyanese Indians – have been rendered invisible. They have no connection to the discourses of either suffering or emancipation beyond their own articulations of indentureship. Indentureship has not been given the status of a great historical wrong.
India, though ravaged for hundreds of years by Europe; and Indians, though plundered, raped, and murdered by the millions through war and deliberate starvation, have had no place in the historical imagination of the Guyanese creole intellectual class.
Let us proceed with three arguments to establish my theory of East Indian disqualification from the inside of nationhood. Firstly, we should recognize and embrace the fact that there is a global African presence, something that emerged through centuries of struggle. It is not that Indigenous peoples or the numerous countries in Asia did not suffer. They did, and millions perished. But the power and influence of Pan-African universalism is powerful in our minds because Africans were subjected to slavery in the West itself.
Generalized economic exploitation and dehumanization of Africans by Europeans resulted in an almost permanent state of shame by White Americans and Europeans towards Africans.
By contrast, there is no corresponding rhetorical regime of injuries and injustices for Indians. Guyanese Indians do not even fit in the histories of the subaltern school of postcolonialism, which originated in India. These displaced Indians have no emancipatory grand narrative in which to situate their grievances. They belong to neither the East nor the West. They are marginalized to the point where, though they are a numerical majority, they are treated as an ethnic group that is outside of the national mainstream. Why else do you think you never hear an Indian melody in public spaces such as hotel lobbies or shopping malls?
Secondly, global capitalism and successive world orders since the late 19th century have been anchored by Anglo-American economic dominance and cultural hegemony. The Grand Other in the Anglo-American imagination has been the “Black” figure. American world influence has also catapulted the injustices against African Americans to a global audience. Afro-Guyanese intellectuals and politicians locate their own grievances within this transnational paradigm of resistance and redemption. The Caribbean Indian has no such recourse.
Now, based on the first and second points, I argue that because Africans have been in the ‘West’ – even though as the Other – their spatial, intellectual, and cultural proximity to the West has given their resistance to domination greater exposure, saliency, and political priority. A global Afro-emancipatory epistemology emerged since the days of the Civil Rights Movement, and has been rightfully consolidated, at least in Western intellectual circles. Although intellectuals in India have made significant contributions to Marxism, postcolonialism, and other branches of critical intervention, there is no equivalence to the expansive rhetorical repertoire available to Afro-Guyanese.
Moreover, most Guyanese Indians educated in the West in the social sciences and humanities, including this writer, accept the general arguments of African emancipatory struggles. This is precisely why so many Indians (intellectuals and others) had gravitated to Walter Rodney.
We should recognize that “Black” intellectuals have been producing counter-hegemonic knowledge in the West for at least a hundred years. No university social science curriculum today can ignore the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Amié Césaire, Wole Soyinka, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, Bell Hooks, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, or Achille Membe. And then there are iconic names like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Wilson Harris, Chinua Achebe, and Ngugi wa Thiongo, among others.
We should not forget the massive influence of resistance songs by Bob Marley, one of the few global musicians of all time. The global impact of these writers, combined with the historic work done in the Pan African Congresses and in the UNIA through the Garvey Movement, put in place a reservoir of knowledge that can ‘authorize’ discursive moves such as those made by the WPA.
When Tacuma Ogunseye calls for an Afro-led subversion of the state, he takes cover not based on what is happening in Guyana. Rather, he finds an already available alibi located in the sanctified universalism of Afro-emancipatory narratives.
For the past several hundred years, Africans have established a global presence. I am arguing that Africans have constructed a global Pan-African identity, one that is necessarily politicized and massively influential. The practice of “Black politics” in Guyana is constructed within the ambit of this Black transnational identity. The East Indians of Guyana have no such resource or recourse available, because they do not have an equivalent paradigm. White guilt regarding slavery and racism in the US and Europe leaves no space to recognize wrongs against Guyanese Indians. East Indians, therefore, must pay the price for White Guilt.
Afro-Guyanese are quintessentially Western in culture, and this is despite the painful history of Africans in the West well into the contemporary period. Most are Christians. Most became literate at a time when Indians were barely graduating from secondary schools, and a significant percentage lived in urban areas.
Guyanese ‘nation-ness’ was fomented through the systematic exclusion of Indian customs, religious practices and ways of life. Jagan’s victory in 1992 was taken to be a wrongful instance in our historical development. Many will recall that Associate Professor David Hinds advanced the theory that Hoyte, not Jagan, should be a consensus candidate, even though Hoyte was an “electoral bandit” in the language of Paul Tennassee (leader of the PDM).
The PPP victory in 1992 was taken traumatically, because the Afro-modern creole sector of the population felt they have a natural right and a sole right to state power. It is under these circumstances that global narratives of African emancipation became a political resource in Guyana. Afro-Guyanese therefore have a global backdrop in which to situate their claims of suffering, and their claims of the natural right to state power in Guyana.
In the current situation, anti-PPPC activists in the United States have combined with the APNU in Guyana to exploit race to the fullest. Instead of raising issues of policy, they try to connect the struggles of African Americans to the development issues in Guyana. Hakeem Jeffries has been fooled into believing that the African condition in Guyana is like that of the United States. This monstrous distortion must be corrected. The record shows that an African Guyanese was the head of government for 31 of the 57 years since independence. Through its coalition, the PNC has controlled state finances for 34.5 years of those 57 years since independence. White guilt cannot displace this record.

Sincerely,
Dr Randolph Persaud