One of the most beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful moment, in Guyanese history
Freddie Kissoon column
Kaieteur News
April 30, 2007
The announcement by Dr. Rupert Roopnarine that he has resigned from the leadership of the Working People's Alliance brings to an end a masterful, elegant, courageous, learning and beautiful moment in the entire history of this country. Perhaps, it was Guyana's most beautiful. The only challenge to this title comes from the activities of the PPP under Jagan and Burnham in the fifties.
But the weaknesses of that formation and the terrible consequences that resulted from it leaves the activities of the WPA as the most romantic journey this country has ever undertaken.
When Roopnarine made his exodus from the hierarchy of the WPA public, it may not have registered on the young people. This is what is so tragic about this nation. The people of a country must know who their heroes are. They must know how their country evolved and how and why they come to enjoy the freedoms they have.
My views on life became pessimistic after I began reading philosophy books. But my pessimism underwent a lower level after I saw what history did to the WPA. Of course, please don't get me wrong. Despite my angst about life and the trauma I suffered at the post-1992 demise of the WPA, I still believe it is a beautiful world, a world worth fighting for.
Those that the WPA touched in the seventies and eighties will never and could never be the same again. The WPA history must be told. I understand one of its finest young cadres at the time, Nigel Westmaas, has written a short history of the movement last year. I haven't seen it and I will ask Moses Bhagwan to post it for me.
The story of the WPA must be told. If Dr. Birbalsingh could find the time to “waste” on those unfaithfuls and infidels of the fifties (I refer to his book, “The PPP of Guyana 1950-1992: An oral history), then, surely, he must see the moral imperative to do the same for the WPA.
The PPP and the PNC never did anything positively immeasurable for this country. The WPA did. The WPA liberated Guyana from the invincible hold Forbes Burnham had on Guyana. I believe in all honesty that despite his brilliant political astuteness and his immense foresight, that given his psychotic obsession with his own greatness and power, that had Burnham lived, he would have destroyed this country completely and that we would have become one of the most pitiful failures of the independence era.
It was the WPA that undermined the omnipotence of Forbes Burnham. It gradually eat away at his power base. After the assassination of Walter Rodney, Burnham became a broken man and just clung to power for the sake of power.
Whatever freedom we enjoy today, the WPA contributed to it in ways that this country must acknowledge. If history was an ancient Greek god that could do whatever it wants to, then that god would have chastised the PPP as Zeus did to Tantalus and rescue the WPA from the wilderness that the PPP imposed on it.
This is a poor country and its migrants seldom go on to be very rich people in Canada and the US. But surely, some resourceful person should do for the WPA what Birbalsingh has done for the PPP.
People don't know the sacrifice some of us make by staying at UG.
At another university, if you want to write a book, you are encouraged and it is financed. Not so at UG. I would like to do for the WPA what Birbalsingh has done for the PPP. One should journey to wherever the WPA leaders are and let them speak with passion and history inside their skins so that the story of modern Guyana can be told.
Such a book will occupy a space in this country that would last forever. The tale of the WPA is a complex one. This is to be understood because unlike its CARICOM neighbours, Guyana is a complex society.
The WPA was born at a time when the hippie generation was dying but some sparks were still left in the worldwide movement owing to the fire that the American invasion of Vietnam had lit. The WPA was born in the seventies when the people around the world had felt that the post-war generation had failed them.
World War 11 should have brought a brave new world but instead the Americans had started their little world wars in every corner of the globe.
The WPA was born in an era where Soviet communism was shown to be bankrupt. Fascism had died in Europe but in Eastern Europe, it took on new life. It is no accident that the last fascist outpost in the world is Cuba.
The WPA was born in the midst of a rising anger of African Americans that their time had come to be recognised as an essential part of American society. But more relevant to the birth of the WPA were the circumstances prevailing in the Third World.
The WPA was born in the era of Fran Fanon. Post-independent countries had failed their people miserably. The white man was replaced by a darker colour but the style of rule had continued. It is within this context one has to see the emergence of the WPA.
It broke from traditional patterns of organisational lines in the Third World. It did not develop as a mass-based party with the biological link to trade unionism. The WPA emerged as part of the worldwide intellectual disgust with the direction that post-war capitalism, post-war communism and post-colonial rule had taken.
In the Caribbean, this reaction was more pronounced on the university campuses. It was therefore logical for the WPA to be led by intellectuals but this is where the complex nature of the WPA comes from.
Specific to Guyana was the alienation of the African middle class with Burnham's increasing authoritarian tendencies. The radical intellectualism of the WPA was joined by the activist frustration of the African middle class. The Indian peasantry and the Indian rural constituencies had come to respect Walter Rodney greatly.
With the increasing penetration of the WPA, Indians had slowly gravitated towards its leadership. At this time the Indians, though they were slow to move towards the WPA, had become somewhat disappointed with Jagan.
One of the things we would never know is that if Rodney had remained alive how the Indians would have seen Jagan. It was clear from my involvement with the WPA that the East Indians felt that WPA was the more likely to confront Burnham.
Roopnarine's exit marks the last thread of connection with Guyana's romantic past.