The Masterminds have made a village
which was not their own into a cemetery

Posted September 20th. 2004 - by Eusi Kwayana.

At last I am joining the number of persons who have expressed alarm or sorrow at the recent crimes on the East Coast, or condemned them, or sympathised with those left to mourn or to care for the disabled.

When the disturbances started many at home in Guyana and also many abroad thought they saw some kind of liberation at work. They poured scorn on those of us African Guyanese who condemned the violence directed first against Guyanese of another race.

One trigger-happy writer even went so far as to hint that we received "benefits" from that position.

Many saw the well known, actual poverty among large groups of Africans, as the cause of, and even the reason for the violent attacks against the "other". I know about the poverty as well as those persons. I have lived in it and shared in it.

If poverty was the cause, why did the Masterminds not deliver fifty, seventy computers, and get teachers to train the youth in the skills needed to use them? Lessons Place would have helped with the language, the mathematics, and the culture including the sex education. No! all that was old fashioned.

I want to leave aside in this letter the attacks on the "other", the stranger, the non-belonger which were so boldly explained away, even defended. I come to the attack on the self, on fellow African villagers. I also am not discussing here the fate of workers in uniform, nor their abuses. I am also not discussing the Phantom . I am trying to show where the Masterminds, by using people they can fool, have landed us. I am dealing with the fiction that the violence was at any time serving an African cause.

When the young businessman, Bryan Hamilton, fell, his killers and their friends then killed his reputation. He became a suspect. But they had first ruined his business, these liberators of Africans, who are without a doubt under- represented in business. Many, perhaps not all of the gunmen, thank God, did not feel threatened by women.

They raped many causing them to suffer this "fate worse than death" in silence. (Fast forward).

Now, days after attacking two villages inhabited by Indian Guyanese, they kill one of the finest examples of the young African generation Nigel Amsterdam, young, gifted, black, industrious and poor. He was a trained manual worker. At a quick estimate perhaps he was the tenth local victim, I am omitting those even assumed to be killed by the police, or by the Phantom, the death squad of the other side.

(Fast forward again). There are liberators attacking residents of Golden Grove and Victoria. These villages, like fallen Buxton itself, are part of the historic village movement of two centuries ago. Victoria should be sacred to the memory of all descendants of the enslaved.

The Masterminds will not understand the bond which has linked the post-emancipation villages all the time, for 200 years, except in cases of drunken dancehall rivalries of the past.

The Masterminds intervened in a bad situation and left it worse, with a smaller population.

Their programme worsened relations with Buxton's neighbours. earned for the village a criminal reputation, endangered women, placed the residents under a reign of terror and fear, destroyed the village as a place for business, created child soldiers, made many of its poor youth into self -paid mercenaries and robbers, destroyed their chances of employment, wiped out several youth with a future, brought escaped prisoners into the village and encamped them there, made a village which was not their own into a cemetery.

Friends remind me that an old man recommended publicly in June 2002 on Plain Talk that an authority figure should address the gunmen in the presence of the public on TV and offer them options. I doubt that the country is still laughing at this foolish advice.

Are the Masterminds taking any blame for the results? No. They cleverly divided their politics into clean work and dirty work and left the poor youth and others to do the dirty work.

Now the names of the offending poor are being dragged in the mud.

The names of the Masterminds are without public stain or taint.

May their hands long remain clean!