Is the WPA distorting the Jagan presidency for racist reasons?
I felt truly disgusted when at the celebration of life event for Andaiye held at the Arthur Chung Centre to mark her death, the organizers selected Tacuma Ogunseye to represent and speak on behalf of the WPA. It was a disturbing occurrence given the fact that university professor, David Hinds is known to even schoolchildren in Guyana as the voice, image and symbolism of the WPA.
The celebration of life event made a mockery of the woman I knew named Andaiye. If sociologists and psychologists want to research how hopelessly tied to class loyalties are humans then they should study the shape and contents of that event.
The organizers made Andaiye appear as a woman who was pro-African and did not ground with Indian Guyanese and had no Indian intimates.
No Indian friend of Andaiye was given the privilege to appear on the programme. As I watched the affair from my seat at the top tier of the auditorium, there were sparks of amusement in my head because I know the mentality of the organizers. Andaiye was one of the best multi-racial activists that politics produced in Guyana.
It was a disservice to her the way her death observance was organized and the ambience in which it was conducted.
The organizers made Andaiye appear as a middle class elitist whose socialization in life was confined to a quintessential privileged existence of class and colour. Speaker after speaker came from a highly privileged class structure and you could not help asking if Andaiye ever had a dark-skin friend.
But there was a huge irony that reverberated in the place. The organizers chose Tacuma Ogunseye to speak as the representative of the WPA.
Andaiye had no use for Ogunseye and saw his politics as a dangerous degeneracy in the context of what Kwayana and Walter Rodney fought for. I know this because she told me this countless times.
I will provide the proof in the next few lines. Some of the activists who once fought alongside Rodney are still committed to Walter’s legacy. One of those is Moses Bhagwan. I respect this gentleman immensely.
On the announcement of Andaiye’s death, Moses published a letter of eulogy in the newspapers and cited an incident to show the purity of Andaiye’s politics. He said a group of WPA activists including him, Bhagwan were in Christopher Ram’s office. It was the time of the violence in Buxton.
Bhagwan wrote that a certain WPA person came in the room to inform the others of the situation in Buxton and referred to the gunmen as freedom fighters. Andaiye immediately walked out of the meeting.
Bhagwan did not name the individual but it was Ogunseye. Since Chris Ram and David Hinds were present, one hopes Ogunseye does not deny it. Ogunseye has committed and has been committing one nasty, repugnant act after another and Walter Rodney’s close colleagues who are still around, most in the diaspora will not pen even a line of chastisement.
Here is his latest act of political depravity. He wrote in the newspapers yesterday, the following words; “The APNU+AFC coalition government led by President David Granger has the outstanding record of being the only government pre and post-independence that has not engaged in the killing of political opponents.”
This fiction is either motivated by racist sentiments or psychological instability. The Cheddi Jagan presidency 1992-1997 was a far more popular administration than the current APNU+AFC regime. No political critic during the Cheddi Jagan government was ever arrested much less murdered.
In fact, critics of the Jagan presidency had less to fear than the current environment we currently live in.
During the reign of the APNU+AFC regime, a grenade was thrown at the owner of the Kaieteur News, Glenn Lall, which fortunately failed to explode. There are more utterances from ministers of the current government that are likely to incite violence as compared to the Cheddi Jagan administration.
One can factually advance the position that no minister in the Jagan government has ever issued the kind of inflammatory statements we have seen the past eighteen months coming from the president, the prime minister and other Cabinet members.