Freddy's Peeve Ravi Dev Column
Kaieteur News
November 5, 2006

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I have once again earned Freddy's ire for focusing on “the big theoretical problems” of politics in Guyana and not taking up cudgels on behalf of UG and the myriad concrete problems of the small man – such as “the sugar cake vendor who has been wronged” - in the four columns I have in the Kaieteur News every month. I have often written of the sterility of engaging in polemics so I wish to state up front that in offering this riposte to Freddy I am merely taking the opportunity to elaborate on the posture of ROAR as it relates to the politics of Guyana . I do this because it does have some relevance for our wider political struggle.

After involving ourselves in the struggle for “free and fair” elections during the eighties in the United States , some of us returned to Guyana by 1990 to offer a contribution towards the resolution of our political impasse. How were we to do so concretely? We felt that most Guyanese knew quite well about their concrete problems – if nothing else - from the simple fact of them being forced to experience the said problems. What we saw lacking was the inability of the politicians of the day to come up with a framework to deal with the impasse. And the sugar cake vendors continued to suffer.

The Guyanese politicians – the PPP, PNC and the WPA – had all been nurtured on the tenets of Marxism but their theoretical tool for coming to grips with the fundamental contradiction in Guyana was just not delivering results. That contradiction was “race” - and in not having an effective analytical tool they mostly skirted around it. This avoidance included even independent analysts and commentators. In fact, I met Freddy for the first time because in one of his weekly articles in the Stabroek News in the early nineties, he wrote an extensive feature on the phenomenon of “kick down the door bandits” without mentioning what I thought was the key variable: why were the victims primarily Indians and the perpetrators primarily Africans. I drove over to UG to ask Freddy whether in fact the answer to that question may not be related to the political impasse in Guyana . Freddy suggested that I could write about that angle. (I also had a weekly SN column on politics at that time.)

New Political Culture

Well I did and continue to do so to this day. I would like to believe that we have had some success with our focus. First and foremost we stressed, in my 1990 paper For a New Political Culture - that the category of ‘ethnicity” – based as it is on culture, and thus values, beliefs and practices – was a more fruitful one for engendering social change than “race” which was founded on immutable physical characteristics that no one has ever shown to be intrinsically locked to social practice. We remember the early criticism by those, including Freddy, of our stress on ethnicity but are gratified that today there's general acceptance of the term – with its implications for change. There are still those who resist the inclusion of ethnicity in analyses – and ironically, Freddy has even been dubbed a “racist” for now routinely utilising the concept in his writings.

Secondly, we advanced the mostly descriptive anthropological discourse on ethnicity prevalent in the West Indies by introducing theories from diverse fields that connected it with political behaviour. The insights of Iris Young, Kymlika, Taylor were utilised to deal with the politics of difference whether of identity or recognition. As Freddy pointed out, we introduced our theory of the Ethnic Security Dilemmas to explain political behaviour in Guyana . It was, and remains, crucial for folks to understand the “why” of their behaviour before you can get them to accept the “how” of political or any type of change. Not to understand and to factor into our discourse (political or otherwise) the structural underpinnings of our people's behaviour is to remain mired in blaming “bad” people such as Burnham and Jagan. Or to be “ashamed” of the behaviour of one's people such as Freddy expressed himself of Indians.

Finally, we did not stop at the “why” but proceeded to the “how” of resolving our political impasse. We combined the proposals of Integrative Federalism by Donald Horowitz with the Consociationalism of Arendt Lipjhart – years before the celebrated work of Fisk. We are pleased that some have accepted the Executive power sharing component of Lipjhart's work but note that these same people studiously avoid mentioning the fact that Lipjhart also recommended Federalism for divided societies. They do the same with the recommendations of our own Arthur Lewis. We have continued to adapt and introduce “theory” to assist us in moving forward. To move away from mere polemics we wrote extensively about Habermas' “public sphere” and its use of reason rather than prejudices to discuss differences.
Public Space

The point that we made before, and will make once again to Freddy and to others who may feel that we stress too much theory at the expense of concrete political and social transgressions is that versus the four columns we have available to us monthly, there are numerous others who have columns which describe the woes that the ordinary citizen faces. This is, of course, in addition to the reporters of all the media who are paid to do just that. We have yet to find a citizen of Guyana who is not aware of the abuse of power in Guyana but find many who refuse to lay the responsibility to one or the other political elite. What we do not find yet is a wide awareness as to why such a phenomenon occurs and how we can move beyond such denial. Until such an awareness becomes entrenched, all the railings against the quotidian various and sundry inequities and abuses will be for nought.

As to my role for increasing that awareness, this has long been discussed and accepted by the members of ROAR. In the non-academic language of Heller, there are three types of leaders necessary for effective social change: the man of words; the man of action and the man of administration. Even though most modern political leaders (especially the West Indian ones Freddy would have me emulate) believe that they are all three rolled into one, such beings are rarer than fist-sized diamonds. Adi Shankara and Muhamad are two who come to mind – and a millennium separated and has passed since them.

I, Freddy, accept that I am, in Heller's usage, a “man of words” or - as Freddy phrased it – an “intellectual”. Not in the ordinary western sense, however, of merely cogitating and integrating ideas – but in the eastern additional insistence of living those ideas. Freddy would know it closest as Gramsci's “organic intellectual”. I live amongst the Indian people of which I am part; I formed a political party to protest the moribund political culture of their party – the PPP; I have worked to engage Africans who history have conspired to make the political opponents of Indians and I continue working to try to ensure that “the man of action” will rise up sooner or later. In ROAR, the migration rate has ensured that unfortunately, it will be later rather than sooner. In the meantime, if Glen Lall gives me the a daily column versus the present four per month – I may have the luxury of contextualising the concrete abuses and contradictions that Freddy exhorts me to notice with the theories that he concedes are necessary for their resolution!