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Help me sing these songs of freedom!
It never ceases to amaze me how decent minds cannot understand the level of shocking and abysmal political degeneracy that many PPP leaders have descended to. Is it that they do not want to for some cultural reason? This cultural motif has dented their psyche so the mind becomes incapable of comprehending and appreciating the values we as humans ought to cherish.
It is not that I have anything personal against many talented people like David Dabydeen, definitely a fine scholar or Rickey Singh, undoubtedly a sound journalist. But can’t they see what the PPP is doing to Guyana?
I am truly nonplussed at how many Guyanese could have lived through a system where no respect was attached to the importance by the leadership in government to observing the laws of this country and power was used in the most undemocratic manner. Yet today they could watch identical forms that characterize that system under Burnham’s rule and sing songs of praise to a similar regime in Guyana in 2008. Why?
Is it the zeitgeist, meaning that the cultural norm today is for world citizenry to support authoritarian governorship? Is it cultural identity which Samuel Huntington, the brilliant American scholar, refers to as the “clash of civilization”, meaning that the world is now divided on the lines of culture and we humans no longer have an interest in philosophical issues but want our culture to dominate?
Is it that we are living in strange times where the concepts of liberty, freedom and democracy that so characterized the Age of Enlightenment no longer have importance replaced by cruder values?
How could anyone who has lived under tyranny or has observed and studied the atrocities of 20th century dictatorship around the world have even a modicum of appreciation for the PPP as a party after what Clement Rohee, a highly placed official of the Government of Guyana and a cadre that resides in the upper echelons of the PPP’s hierarchy, disparagingly wrote about Walter Rodney in the Good Friday edition of the Kaieteur News. Here is the evidence of the decayed political character of the PPP.
For those who believe in freedom and witnessed and read about the long struggle for freedom and justice against the colonials and the dictatorship of Forbes Burnham, here is a picture of the tragedy of Guyana. I quote from Rohee; “Recall for example, the WPA in the late 1970s of which Tacuma Ogunseye was part. That organization was oriented towards spectacular type activities and heroic symbolic acts, but the movement also had a subterranean side, in which Walter Rodney himself was involved, and which resulted in his demise.”
One of the most beautifully inspiring moments in Caribbean history of the struggle for the entire gamut of human rights, including the priceless privilege of voting for the leader of one’s choice, has been put down by Mr. Rohee as “spectacular type activities and heroic symbolic acts.” This is the way thousands of Guyanese have been repaid for fighting for the post-1968 liberation of Guyana.
The list of tragedies will pierce the heart and soul of every decent member of world citizenry who was familiar with what Guyana had become under the administration of Forbes Burnham. Many died including Ohene Koama, Edward Dublin, Father Bernard Darke, and Walter Rodney.
Many were jailed including David Hinds, Tacuma Ogunseye, Moses Bhagwan, Jinnah Rahaman (for treason). Many were disfigured including Donald Rodney, Dr. Josh Ramsammy and John Williams. Hundreds were persecuted on false criminal charges. Thousands and thousands were victimized through dismissals like Andaiye, Bonita Bone, Ali Majeed. The list is endless.
Clement Rohee classified the dire struggle of the WPA to free Guyana from the bondage of tyranny as “symbolic acts.” No heroism of the WPA was conceded by Mr. Rohee even though mothers and children had lost their fathers in the struggle.
I once taught the daughter of Ohene Koama at UG, and many days I would just gaze at her as she left the classroom and wonder about the cruelties of life. She didn’t inherit the Guyana her father fought for. But others did. Others whose parents contributed absolutely nothing to the moral elevation of this country.
Immediately on reading what Rohee wrote about Walter Rodney, I recalled a statement from Ras Tom Dalgetty once made about seven years ago. I have known Tom a long time going back to my teenage days. He was a huge supporter of Walter and helped the WPA in tremendous ways.
I remember when Brian Rodway, one of my political heroes (from the WPA) had to find a home quickly because he had to move out, Tom came to his rescue in Bent Street, Wortmanville, two corners from my Durban Street home. Tom’s position is that looking at what the PPP has become and what it has done to undermine the freedoms Walter fought and died for, it would have been better if Walter did not confront Burnham in the relentless way he did.
This is a psychological dilemma that every one of us from the seventies and eighties has to grapple with. And the process is not confined to the rest of us who were in the WPA. There are also the priests from the Catholic and Anglican churches. The leadership of the GHRA including people like Mike Mc Cormack. The trade union movement including those like Lincoln Lewis and so many others who now have to live with forms of dictatorship that are worse than when Burnham ruled.
In last Sunday’s edition of the Stabroek News, I wrote a letter in which I pinpointed five areas of the abuse of power under the PPP that are worse than anything we saw under Burnham. I stand by that theory and will defend it in any part of this country and beyond Guyana.
The freedom fighters from the seventies and eighties are mentally perplexed at what Guyana has become. In their minds is the question: Looking back, was it wrong to have carried the fight so bitterly to Burnham; should we have sought more areas of compromise and maybe Guyana would not have come to what it is now under the PPP?
I may be wrong about them but apart from Ras Tom Dalgetty, I believe Bonita Bone, a brave woman fighter from the seventies, Tacuma Ogunseye, Lincoln Lewis and Clive Thomas may have reassessed their thinking about the fight against Burnham. But undoubtedly, when you think of the evil that has crept into the use of power in Guyana at the moment and when you think of how Mr. Rohee conceives of Walter Rodney, then it compels you to ask the question: Were we wrong to fight Burnham?
As Mr. Corbin and the PNC Parliamentarians walked out of the National Assembly, one saw a glimpse of that evil. The PPP had rejected the proposals of the rest of the Guyanese society on a menu of political change for the prevention of more massacres as what took place in Lusignan and Bartica.
As the Opposition MPs walked out, the PPP members of the House, with contempt and cynicism sang; “Follow the leader.” There was no consciousness of what the rejection meant to the suffering families of the victims of the two massacres. Mr. Rohee’s flippant dismissal of the heroism of Walter Rodney should cause us to reflect on one of the best songs ever written. It is Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song. I leave you with a few lines:

“How long shall they kill our prophets:
While we stand aside and look?
Some say it’s just a part of it:
We’ve got to fulfill the book.”

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