A sister remembers
What I remember most about Walter is his love of life. He loved life and lived it fully and this quality of his touched all those with whom he came into contact. Walter displayed the capacity to respect and listen to anyone - whether prince or pauper, adult or child. His love of life and respect for persons helped him to live without the constraints of barriers such as religion and race. It must have been these attributes - love of life and respect for all - that made him so concerned about the quality of life enjoyed by his fellow man. He wanted to at least try to contribute to a process that would provide the average person with a decent quality of life. A life where a person could enjoy the most basic provisions of life, such as water, a house, food for his family, education for his children and adequate health care. After all this is what his parents had done for him. They had given him a decent life and taught him to be decent. He was so concerned about the social and economic conditions of life for the average man that he was prepared from a young age to take up the cause of the oppressed - be it in Jamaica, London, Tanzania or in his homeland, Guyana. His message was always the same - a better quality of life for the poor and dispossessed. His message was loud. The oppressed heard it and they wanted to share his dream. The oppressors heard it and they took away his right to work and ultimately his right to life. For a man who loved life so much, his death was a devastating blow to his family, friends and all those who knew him. Our grief lies not only in his passing but also in the inability of the authorities to bring his assailant/s to trial. In remembering Walter, I remember all the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and other relatives who have lost loved ones due to the callousness or carelessness of another road user, or a bandit, or due to the questionable tactics of the police. As our society seems more and more to be evolving into a less than decent one, it is most significant that the inability to solve the crimes and stem the tide of road deaths and suicides seems to go hand in hand with our country's inability to deal with our national problems and so ensure that the average Guyanese man, woman or child could have a life which did not need drugs or violence to make them get by or did not leave suicide as a viable option. Walter may be given special place in the newspapers perhaps only on June 13, but he occupies a special place in the hearts of many of his fellow Guyanese and in the hearts of thousands of people around the world who met him during his short lifetime. It is these people who keep alive his dreams for a life free from injustice and oppression and continue the fight. Message from a loving sister on behalf of all who cannot be here today.
"You see, we have had too much of the foolishness of race. I'm not going to attempt to blame one way or another. I think more than one political party has been responsible for the crisis of race relations in this country. I think our leadership has failed us on that score. I think external intervention was important in bringing the races against each other from the fifties and particularly in the early 1960's. But I'm not concerned with the present. If we made that mistake once, we cannot afford to be misled on that score today. No ordinary Afro-Guyanese, no ordinary Indo-Guyanese can today afford to be misled by the myth of race. Time and again it has been our undoing." Extract from a speech by Walter Rodney on the Arnold Rampersaud trial.
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