Nope. The Guyanese Preacherman, a red skin fella was talking about people like u. HATE MONGERS.  

Too bad your late friend didn't bite your head off you old serpent

Bro, Africans in guyana are mainly of Igbo and Yoruba stock. They Youruba have a religion is similar to Indian in that they think that god is in all things. I had a friend who had a shrine to his uncle. I asked him why. He said he knows his uncle better than god and god in in every thing so he feels comfortable speaking to his uncle.

Animist religions from voodoo to Santeria are variants home grown in the west and are widely believed in latin America and the Caribbean. In Brazil it is fused with Catholicism into a parallel faith that is worshiped and supplicated no less than its christian counter part. One cannot be prejudiced against religious beliefs since all of it is weird as hell even christianity

i HAD TO TAKE STOCK OF MYSELF. I realized that Lucifer was close by in you.

Suh, I quickly cover myself with the redeeming blood of Christ. And apologized for dem descriptive words.

I know one thing for sure. You have been here perhaps close to 20 years bashing East Indians. And every so often, I take you on. I will chase ur azz around exposing ur racists rants. I goan mek u 2 b a nice Guyanese fella-things taht makes us stand out as a unique people.

Suh YOU cussing but Lucifer close to me? Lissen you old, senile rass. You're nothing but a damn hypocrite and poser.

LMAO. . Ah finally mek yuh rass run mad. LOL.

HEHEHEHEHE Siggy you make Iman deadin with laff here banna. I gaffa try dat.

I gonna cuss up dem boys an cover myself wit some blood an see if I get fix up an everything aight.

So, any virgins for us here, or dats a whole nother ball o wax?

A Nigerian juju is going to get a grip on you for calling down curses on black people.

Just now you will be screaming for a long, thick and stiff PNC pole, just like your fellow Indo racists Cobra, Yuji, and Rama.  Your bigotry is just as vile and putrid as theirs.

Now run off and tell those Africans that you think that black people are violent, lazy, and want nothing other than other than living off Indians and that we are demons.

The Nigerian juju is beginning to get to you Siggy.  Told you not to bring down curses on people, as when people wish evil on others it often falls on them instead.

Your screams that Lindeners should walk naked has been remembered.

Siggy you are the one with the racist rants, saying that black people have demons on them, and wishing that Lindeners live in hell fr the rest of time.

As we sit here Nigerian jujus are now beginning to take over your brain.  I warned you and you didn't listen.

Afro Guyanese are heavily of Congo and Ghana stock with some Liberia/Sierra Leone thrown in.  Throw in the Bajan descendants, and then you get the Igbo. 

Not sure how many Yorubas came to Guyana, as they were mainly sent to Brazil (Bahia).  During the peak periods of British/Dutch involvement in the slave trade the Yoruba empires were top dogs and so were the ones selling others.  The Yorubas were enslaved mainly in the 19th century.

Well after 7 pages of dialogue about serpents, juju men, nigerian pastors, jukka and so on there is only one thing left for me to say about indian racism, and black racism too for that matter. Racism on both sides can only be eradicated completely when these old racists like Seignet, Susie the brahmin, rama, cobra, and so on die off. They get old and die out.

In them meantime though, the government has to enact controls such as hate crime legislation, equal opportunity in employment, anti discrimination laws etc to reign in these old bigots and keep their vitriol from spreading. This, followed by educating the nation about tolerance in our society. The old bigots like Seignet, Yugi the brahmin, Rama, Cobra can rant and rave in their house but learn that in society they need to play by the rules or be sanctioned. I'm sure Yugi the brahmin doesn't wax eloquent about the deficiencies of black man in his canadian province.

We have to look for the young ones who are more tolerant (it appears) and are moving away from this bigotry, thanks to their western exposure. The old bigots will just die out over time.

A BIT MORE OF AN OVER VIEW. Will write more as soon as I get half an hour of continuous time block to concentrate on it.

Dear Editor,

To address any problem, you first have to recognize it. Unless, as a nation, we are prepared to recognize the truth that political power in Guyana has derived its strength from playing the game of racial politics, we shall never confront, never mind overcome, the problem.

Our new government, has taken the first critical step. It has created a Ministry of Social Cohesion, it seems, in recognition of the problem. The Roundtable to address “Social Cohesion for Lasting Unity and Peace” to be launched on Thursday by the ministry is, it appears, with the admirable intention of publicly confronting the problem.

In1994, Kampta Karran asked me to contribute my views on the subject of Race & Politics in Guyana for a series he published in Offerings on Race and Ethnic Studies. Almost all that I wrote then, some twenty one years ago, is relevant today. Perhaps, you can find the space to share it with your readers.

On the 31st October, 1963, at Lancaster House in London, the then Secretary of State for the Colonies, Mr Duncan Sandys, at the end of a Constitutional Conference discussing Guyana’s Independence with the leaders of the PPP, PNC and United Force made this assessment of our country which holds true to this day:

“All that you have told me at this conference and all that I saw in my visit to your country last July have convinced me that there is one problem which transcends all others ‒ namely the growth of racism

“That is the curse of British Guiana today; the whole life of the country is poisoned and weakened by mutual suspicion and fear between the two predominant racial groups, the Indians and the Africans. This state of tension has become acute in the last few years and has led to racial murder, arson and violence.”

Duncan Sandys was simply describing the reality of Guyana at that time. He went on to give his opinion as to the reasons for it with which many people may disagree, but which in the main I still accept as accurate.

He said:

“There is no deep-rooted or historical enmity between the races, nor is there any basic clash between them; nor is there any animosity between the religious groups ‒ Christian, Hindu and Muslim. The root of the trouble lies almost entirely in the development of party politics along racial lines.”

Sandys was essentially right though not entirely so. Politics has exploited inherent differences between community interests that have, since we were a colony, defined themselves along a racial divide. In fact British

colonialism itself encouraged this and used it to its own end. ‘Divide and conquer,’ was very much a British method for expanding its empire and enslaving its colonies.

Duncan Sandys went on to describe how, in his view, racism became entrenched in our political life:

“The root of the trouble lies almost entirely in the development of party politics along racial lines. In its present acute form, this can be traced to the split of the country’s main political party in 1955. It was then that the Peoples Progressive Party, which has previously drawn its support from both the main races, broke into two bitterly opposed political groups, the one predominantly Indian, led by Doctor Jagan and the other predominantly African, led by Mr. Burnham. Both parties have, for their political ends, fanned the racial emotions of their followers with the result that each has come to be regarded as the champion of one race and the enemy of the other.”

Those were harsh words and indeed offensive from the British Colonial Secretary to our leaders on the eve of independence, but they were true and they were prophetic.

What of course Sandys conveniently omitted to say was that his government, led by Winston Churchill, had precipitated this division by suspending the British Guiana Constitution and by expelling the PPP government from office on October 9th 1953, just 6 months after it had been newly elected by the great majority of the Guyanese people.

The reasons the British Govern-ment gave at the time were:

“What emerges from British Guiana is a coherent picture of Ministers largely dominated by communist ideas… they are unfortunately all part of a deadly design to turn British Guiana into a totalitarian state.”

At the time, both Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham criticized the immorality of the British decision and pointed to it as the root cause of the subsequent division of the national movement in British Guiana along racial lines.

When Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnhan did split, they did so both for ideological reasons and in a contest for power, but the popular political basis upon which their separate parties developed was, unfortunately, defined by racial allegiance and it has continued to this day.

We have, of course, come a long way since those days when we were actually killing each other along the racial divide and when Mr Eusi Kwayana was driven to seriously argue for racial partition of our country as a solution to the problem.

It is, too, fair to claim that, since 1964, when Duncan Sandys made his assessment, at least in our everyday lives and social contacts, we are progressed as a people to the point where we have learnt to live in peace and even friendship with each other, regardless of our ethnic origin.

The question is, however, have we yet as a people learnt or even recognize that we share a common destiny and a joint responsibility for the stability and development of our own country while retaining the right as a democracy to elect the government of our choice, however irrational the basis for that choice may be.

A simple demographic analysis of our recent election held, now 62 years after the PPP was first returned to office in 1953, underlines the reality that the coalition government received a mandate unrepresentative of almost half of the population and of one ethnic group.

Yes, we have a government which was democratically elected. Yes, the last election was internationally endorsed as free and fair and, yes, sadly, it did nothing to save us from the plague of racial voting and politics based on racial allegiance. Our new government campaigned on the basis that it is dedicated to reform. But Walter Isaacson writing in Time Magazine, published shortly after the US election which followed ours in 1992, pointed out that: “in a democracy successful reformers must have above all the backbone to convey brutal facts.”

If our government of today or any government whom we elect truly wishes to reform our political reality in order to get rid of racism, then it must recognize, first, the brutal fact that we remain a dangerously divided nation. When, the Roundtable meets, we must hope that it will address this reality.

Both of the two political parties in government remain, no matter their campaign promises, trapped in ‘real politics’. It is the politics of having to recognize and reward your hardcore, hardworking supporters who have delivered the government to you. It is the politics of having to distribute the spoils of office. This is particularly so in a coalition government forced to cater to the priories of its separate party interest in order to survive. It is almost impossible to escape from this reality. The APNU/AFC coalition has not escaped it.

So, can we change all of this? Maybe. It will largely be up to a new generation of Guyanese who are dedicated to the idea that we have a mutual obligation to our survival as a people and our development as a nation and that we will only achieve it through mutual respect by reaching beyond and rising above our separate racial origins to be Guyanese.

After all, though we come from different racial and national origins, as a people called Guyanese, we share a common truth, that, excepting our Indigenous Amerindian population, Guyanese, whether from Africa, China, Madeira or India, did not come here of their own free will. We came, either, as slaves or indentured labourers, brought here by the British to work in the plantations. We came as servants of other men’s wills and purposes.

We did not come as a politically and culturally independent people. The circumstances which brought us here were beyond the control of our ancestors. We were thrown together in a strange land to work it and develop it, not for ourselves, but for the British. But the British have long gone. Guyana is our land. Guyana is our home.

We have only one legitimate claim to a national identity. It is that is that we are all Guyanese. Maybe we can begin to change and escape the curse of racism ascribed to us by Duncan Sandys and begin to recognize who we really are as a people and lay claim to our real identity. Maybe then, and I believe, only then, will we achieve social and national cohesion.

Yours faithfully,

Kit Nascimento

I don't know why 50 years later we are still blaming the British for our dysfunctional ethno political environment.  At some point we have to bite the bullet and admit that we are 100% to blame.

Let us hope that the Ministry of Social Cohesions does something other than waging some stupid campaign telling us to love each other.

The problem is ethnic insecurity, and that is where the discussion should focus.  Starting with PPP claims of ethnic cleansing.  Are they valid?  Is the disproportionate % of Indians sent on leave ethnic cleansing on the part of APNU/AFC, or is it ethnic cleansing on the part of the PPP, as most of those who they appointed were Indians?

THAT is where the discussion should focus on.  Further discussion should be an honest assessment of the role of ethnicity vs. nationality among Guyanese of various ethnic groups. The PPP, seeing its support dwindling, waged a highly successfual campaign to mobilize the Indian vote by screaming that Moses "isnt Indian".  

When Trotman said that he is "mixed" did the PNC run aaround LOUDLY telling its supporters not to vote for him because he "isnt black"?  No they found other things to say about him. 

Africans are less interested in "coralling the tribe" than are Indians, and this has a lot to do with how each of the two major groups views the other.  So much so that no one in Guyana can say for sure who is mixed or who is black.  In fact even to determine how Afro Guyanese should describe themselves is in dispute, with "Afro Guyanese", "African", "black", and "negro" all in use, and with some having very spirited arguments as to why they are one and not the other.

This should be the conversation, and not having little kids hugging each other, because that is basically just avoiding discussion of the problem.

Death comes to all, eventually. Do you know when yours cometh. That is how racist think-no respect for their fellow man, eventually they become like gods. Their failings relies of Lucifer for power.

Gheez, some people can post some real nonsense. You taking this discussion too far. You want people to die. Huh.

Riff Raff should juss ban fuh yuh own good. People like u can can kill. THis only a discussion board. It is affecting your mind, sicko. 

The country has never been governed by a serious leader of national unity.

There are SO MANY THINGS that can be done to just PROVIDE. As the saying goes, "Build it, they will come."

Show the way. Instead, these leaders behave like morons.

In less than a year, Guyana celebrates its 50th year of Independence-that is an ideal opportunity to demonstrate the tolerance of a country for its culture and races. 

I am certain, it will eventually be a Black affair. Just like 1966.

Well if Indians attack an Indian who says he is Guyanese, and not an Indian, why be shocked if folks think that you will not be interested?

Its  a known fact that unless an event is dominated by Indians, they have no interest.  Working within a multi ethnic context is not part of your DNA.