Guyana Caribbean Politics

In this article I wish to speak briefly to all Guyanese on the topic in the caption. Unfortunately, I shall have to do what I seldom do, claim some seniority in the launching of the debate forty years ago. David Hinds, political scientist of recent vintage, has discovered and argued that this was before the celebrated Horowitz. After all, scholars have a right to borrow experience from people in the trenches, where I was and have been.

A small group, with Nicholson and me as its leaders, and with him as the learned cultural guru, here in Guyana, and me as the person of action, came to certain conclusions about Africans, about Indians, about minorities, including Amerindians and about relations among them. A weakness was that our plan as conceived did focus on 'the two major races.' Others, however, were not neglected, but were accorded a review or veto role over the proposed African-Indian executive.

Nicholson's preference was for partition. With my greater interest in and understanding of the pysche of each and every Guyanese mass, still an object of close study for me, I proposed that a plan could not begin with an extreme position. People should have a chance to think of a less painful and more generous choice.

To understand the collective psyche of a people, we have to learn to listen not only to speech, but to non-speech, and to a whole complex of responses. Talk shows can be useful, but they are not everything. We have also to have periods when we fade and allow ourselves to absorb universal wisdom, listening with eyes, ears, skin, and the secret tuition we all have to some extent, known as in-tuition.

It was very clear to us in l961 that 'Indians will not accept an African ruler and Africans would not accept an Indian ruler.' We wrote it in those exact words. Nicholson, who had lived 25 years outside of Guyana, mastering many disciplines, had a deep human culture. He had also become very alert against gestures of disrespect, and had a long nose for racial disrespect. He favoured partition on an equal basis, with a free zone and free cities. My own sense saw this as a last resort to avoid ethnic domination, if all else failed. I proposed a solution which had not been heard of before, a joint premiership between the rulers of the Indian and African races. It was a solution, so far as I was concerned, posed by the social and political logic of the situation then before us, and not by me.
All this was before the elections of that year, 1961. It was also an election which the PNC was certain it would win. It received all the votes the Africans could muster, including ours, because we called on Africans to support the PNC, so that they could stand strong in the negotiations for equality. The ideas were proposed through the African Society for Racial Equality (ASRE) - for equality, not domination.

At that time, the partition of India had already taken place (1947), Israel had been created by partition with the approval of the United Nations Organisation, and Cyprus was in agony with the conflict between the Greeks and the Turks. We were not inventing partition. We were inventing joint premiership.

When the l961 elections came, it seemed that the people voted for some kind of joint development of the country, the PPP polling 43 per cent of the vote and the PNC 41.2 per cent.

Recently many have defined power in broader terms and more complete terms than we could see or conceive in those times, the early sixties. Our plan was focused on two leaders. We had no concept of people's power. The active masses had again and again and again played a vital role in change. India and Ghana can be seen as examples of those times. It was, in my experience the civil rights movement and its black leadership in the USA that first gave the people's role a separate political identity of its own - naming it people's power.

Why, we may ask, have these problems of national wholeness remained with us up to this day, fifty years after the split in the anti-colonial movement in Guyana? I would say, "For several reasons."

The split in the national movement, and the idea of 'one leader' meant that each of the two, major parties, based in different races, began to develop its own 'pre-nation' institutions. The intellectuals and academics of the time never accepted this. It did not fit in with their rich book learning or their culture. It just could not be. This had to be ominous 'separatism.' The international movement to which the PPP was linked was made to regard me as racist, never mind that Engels, Karl Marx's co-worker had written, "Race itself is an economic factor."

So the whole group, ASRE, all of us, came to regard joint-premiership, as a means of re-combining two separate pre nations back into one stream with the just aspirations of each satisfied, but only the just aspirations, as each side had other dreams too. Joint premiership then would not satisfy any dream of domination whether by race or ideology. It is my view that the proposal was rejected on this ground. It offered neither leader, neither people, nor race, domination, only human equality, not even equality of numbers.

The proposal in its original form appeared in both the Daily Chronicle and the Daily Argosy in July, 1961 and is still in print in that form.

This was before the August, 1961 election. It was before there was any political violence. It was before 'the sixties.' If the idea had been taken up, or if something better had been put in its place, the sixties need not have happened. When leaders throw aside reason, it seems that non reason takes over, with or without their help.
Do I think that including "partition as a last resort" was a mistake? It is a good question, because although joint premiership was rejected by the two parties and the PNC expelled me for "racism," it is partition that they used to make me an outcast in my own country.

It was some years after this that some gentlemen, who later emigrated, approached me to work out a plan for a possible division of the country. The West On Trial mentions this plan, but never mentioned the proposal for joint premiership - an omission not due to bad memory.

Today, the question of national wholeness is posed from various angles by various persons and interests. It is not posed as who won or lost a general election; it is posed as power sharing; it is posed as inclusive government. The idea of joint premiership is no longer relevant. Yet the present debate poses a long-standing problem in current form. The road choices are the same - steps towards becoming a nation, or steps, expensive steps, towards becoming several.

Power sharing, then, requires first a revolution in the view of power in a multi-ethnic society. It should be seen as an energy for the use of the society and not as an instrument for a single group, or a few groups by any definition. What was posed as racial in l961 cannot be posed in the same narrow way now.

If, then, we are reinventing power it must not remain at the executive level. It must not be the property of men only. It must not regard young people as everybody's subordinates. It must not leave anyone out. There must be no permissible margin of error. It must be and not be based on numbers. It must recognise and empower majorities and also recognise and empower women, working people, indigenous people, minorities, elders and young people. We have waited long, and more issues are at our door.

It can best be done along Walter Rodney's lines of self organisation and self emancipation in a climate welcome to all. The creative Marxist, Rodney, at home preached self organisation of working people, of business people, of religious people, of women, of youth and especially of professionals. Remember?