Remembering Cheddi Jagan
Cheddi Jagan - The Intellectual
by Hydar Ally
In my previous article, I referred to some of the factors that shaped the political and ideological outlook of Dr Cheddi Jagan, whose life and works are being celebrated this month. I made the point that Dr Jagan’s “world view” was influenced by a constellation of factors, which included his early years in the sugar plantation where he saw first hand the inhuman and degrading conditions in which the sugar workers lived on the estates. According to Dr Jagan, there existed ‘two worlds’ on the plantation - the ‘world’ of the rich and powerful and the poor, and the world of the poor and downtrodden.
Other factors which impacted on his consciousness were his experiences in the United States of America during his years as a student of dentistry. Dr Jagan saw and experienced for himself the exploitative and discriminatory character of the capitalist system, especially with respect to minority groups.
He successfully demystified and ‘deglamourized’ life in the United States, which is often projected as the ‘land of plenty,’ where there existed as he puts it, “two chickens in every pot and a car in every garbage.” America is undoubtedly a rich country, but the riches are highly stewed in favour of a handful of Americans, while the vast majority of people has to contend, as it were, with the ‘crumbs that fall from the master’s table,’ especially the Blacks and the coloured, who were pushed to the bottom of the social ladder due to an unjust reward system.
Another important factor that influenced the thinking of Dr Jagan was his exposure to the literature of radical thinkers such as Marx, Engel’s and Lenin who provided him with a theoretical basis on the class character of the capitalist system which was inherently exploitative and anti-worker. These, along with other developments, such as the independence struggles of India and other developing countries fired his imagination and strengthened his resolve to become not simply an ‘arm- chair’ intellectual but an active participant in the change process.
Dr Jagan was possessed with extraordinary powers of intellect and reasoning. He was able to correctly define global trends and understood the dialectics of change and development. He was utterly convinced that the current system of capitalistic production relations could not solve the problems of humanity and could only lead to greater impoverishment and human degradation.
Dr Jagan was the author to several scholarly publications, which included the ‘West on Trail,’ in which he exposed the intrigues of Anglo-American vested interests to deny political independence to the then colony of British Guiana and to destabilize the PPP administration, with the active collaboration of local reactionary forces that included at that time the PNC and the United Force along with a section of the labor movement.
In his other works, such as the “Caribbean Revolution: Whose Backyard?” he showed how the current models of development based on unbridled capitalism and uncontrolled market forces were leading to the underdevelopment of Caribbean and Latin American countries. Dr. Jagan demonstrated by way of hard facts and figures how ‘aid with strings’ was resulting in a net outflow of resources out of the region to the major industrialized countries, in particular the United States of America. In order to liberate themselves come out of this vicious cycle of debt accumulation and balance of payments difficulties, developing countries were forced by circumstances to borrow money which in turn led to unsustainable debt burdens, not to mention the political and ideological undercurrents to which these countries were subjected to.
Dr Jagan was a strong advocate for debt relief and a New Global Human Order, one that puts people at the centre of developmental activities. Unlike some pseudo- academics that hide under the clock of academia, Dr Jagan’s writings reflect profundity and depth of analysis, which suggested workable prescriptions on this way forward.
This is a quite unlike “intellectuals” whose only claim to academia is to churn out useless articles based on gossips, lies and half-truths. Some of them have no credible publications to their names and their research profiles are at best minimal. The University of Guyana is basically research-oriented and to the extent this is lacking the university is operating sub-optimally and to an extent is failing to live up to its mandate as a major catalyst for change and development.
And for those who conveniently may wish to forget, it was Dr. Jagan who established the University of Guyana from which many of the ‘critics’ graduated and currently work.
Last Friday night in Parliament gave
hope for a better futureSunday, December 23rd 2007
by Samuel A. Hinds
Dear Editor,
There was a great debate last Friday evening (2007-12-14) in our National Assembly. Our media seem to have missed it - we need our media to bring it to the notice of everyone - we need everyone seeing and talking about that debate - it could become an important turning point in our nation's history. It could help us turn to a new leaf in our political life, a new page with favourable conditions for the steady growth and development which we all so much want.
Of what debate do I speak? It is the debate on the motion to honour Dr Cheddi Jagan as an outstanding Guyanese, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of his entry into the legislature of our country, on the December 18 1947. No busing down! No fireworks! But everyone quietly, sincerely, even reverently reflecting on how Cheddi contributed to our country.
Scathing criticisms of our politics and politicians and implicitly the majority of us Guyanese, is commonplace with many in the media: whosoever earnestly and honestly want things to be different should welcome and nurture the tentative step of our National Assembly when from all sides we recognized and honoured in unison that outstanding son of our soil.
Politics is necessarily contending and competing, often adversarial. Avoiding rancour, bitterness and acrimony is never an easy issue for any group of people. There is danger even in groups with long histories of being together. Moreso, we Guyanese whom history threw together here relatively recently; each group unto that time with its own integrated culture and world view different from each other, and into different slots here, which have coloured the way we see each other.
I am pained and want to shout out whenever I read or hear the listless description of us as a divided people! When were we one? We were never one. Becoming one was the challenging bitter-cup that fate placed before our ancestors and us. In my view we have been greatly underestimating how much we are to reshape ourselves in becoming one people? Nonetheless we have made significant progress.
I am pained even more, I want to shout even louder when our elections are described as nothing but racial/ethnic censuses by many who know better and should look deeper. One could just as well describe elections in the USA and UK as urban/rural censuses.
Politics arises from people seeing things differently, and accordingly putting different proposals to the group, on what is the problem and what is to be done. Broadly speaking, political groupings form on pre-existing clusterings. One such kind of clustering arises from the different experiences of rural, agricultural people and urban, wage-earning people. This kind of political clustering was starkly evident in the 2000 elections in the USA in the maps on TV which showed where the Democrats won, in coastal, high population density, urban areas whilst the Republicans won in the heartland, lower density, agricultural areas. Recall too the differing decisions of the Supreme Courts of Florida State and the Federal Government. Recall too the make up of those courts and recognize that any insistence that those courts, those judges, were outside the politics of their country would be greatly strained.
Recall too the last election in the UK when the announcer on BBC World was moved to warn that the initial count of say thirty seats for Labour versus six for the Conservatives was not necessarily a runaway landslide victory for Labour. It was just that Labour wins in the urban constituencies where the results are more quickly accumulated and tallied and hence come in earlier, whilst the Conservatives constituencies are reported later! Moreover Conservatives winning more rural constituencies, generally win a greater proportion of seats than would be the case if the UK had a PR system. The UK has not changed its electoral system to PR for greater democracy, but in 1964 quickly changed our electoral system from constituency to PR!
Political groupings often cluster also around different religions when present. Even when there is no hostility as in our country, there is a lack of social continuity. The major socializing activities - births, christenings, marriages, funerals - all take place in some religious context. We are uncomfortable in religious situations with which we are not familiar. Our social functions and socializing in Guyana is as much a religious census and socializing groupings carry through to political groupings hence our elections results could perhaps be described just as well as religious censuses.
The third clustering, which may lead to political groupings, is race and ethnicity. Different races and ethnicities are likely to have differences in religion, in history, in language and in culture. This is problem enough but even more is the problem of the obvious physiological differences and identifying markers of dress.
However strongly we may abhor and argue against profiling, all our science and technology flow along a path of extrapolating, inducing from particular experiences to generalized expectations and behaving as if those expectations were certainties.
The markers of race/ethnicity go beyond signalling a discontinuity, they herd people willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly into groups: each member expected to have the identical, stereotypical characteristics assigned to the group.
In different countries, the main political parties may be formed along the lines of any one of these main kinds of clustering. When politics came to our Guyana, these three main clusterings were all present and significant. However, they were not cross cutting, they overlapped, reinforcing each other. For me therefore, the wonder of Guyana is not that we are a 'divided' people, but that we have stayed together as "divided" people and did not rush to partition! For me, we were no more divided racially, than we were divided urban from rural, or by religion. Indeed I believe that a case could be made that the split of PPP Burnhamites and PPP Jaganites was a split not of race but much more a split along the lines of urban/rural sentiments. I believe that even today the differing urban/rural sentiments are still reflected in the positions of the PNCR and the PPP/C. I believe that there are real, normal political differences in the way we of the PPP/C see things and the way the PNCR see things.
With these three main kinds of political groupings, still overlapping and reinforcing each other, how do we engage in intense, political rivalry contending robustly, competing toughly and yet not threaten the continuity and cohesion within our nation? The answer is not easy but I feel intuitively that it would help greatly if we could clean our slate of happenings after the PPP split in 1955.
Life is very much about trial and error: doing, learning and advancing from lessons learnt. Allow me to propose that the route of the PPP Burnhamites was a trial that was an error. It was the route taken by a group which considered itself more urban, more sophisticated, more prepared to govern, and believed that it would do better for all Guyanese than the rural, still "foot-in-the-mud" PPP Jaganites. And the PPP Burnhamites for the most part Christians were very vulnerable to the call to oppose Godless Communism.
For me, there is no gainsaying the fact that the PPP Burnhamites succumbed to that most seductive temptation of doing a little wrong, to avoid a greater wrong! A few actively participated and all tacitly accepted the rigging of the 1968 election for what they considered the greater good for all Guyana and Guyanese; moreso as the equally Christian Americans and British indicated approval of the rigging. But already by the 1973 elections it was becoming apparent that many of the supporters of the PNC were uneasy with rigged elections and did not even go out to vote, leaving it to the rigging to deliver the election.
For me, it must have been an excruciating test for Cheddi to choose in 1973, to wait patiently, for nearly twenty years as it would turn out, for the majority of the PNC supporters to see the error and futility of that path and turn themselves from it. No doubt deliberate, directed action by Cheddi and the PPP could have degenerated too easily into bloody, racial confrontations and the splitting of our peoples and our country from which there would have been no return.
It was a great price that Cheddi and the PPP paid - but paradoxically he who has paid the greater price to keep Guyana whole has much more invested, has much more to lose if Guyana does not stay whole! The Cheddi legacy for us of the PPP/C is to keep Guyana whole and hearty.
For all the wrong that was done to Cheddi and his supporters by Burnham and the PNC, Cheddi never put them beyond the pale. Indeed, he always spoke about the misguided supporters of the PNC. It seems as if he was willing to consider Burnham also as misguided. Take note of Cheddi's position of critical support and his reported readiness to talk again in 1985 with Burnham, even, perhaps, if only for the good of the children of Guyana. There is no doubt that Cheddi looked continuously for rapprochement between the PPP Burnhamites and the PPP Jaganites and he was always wistfully nostalgic about the national unity of the 1953 PPP.
At the 1993 Remembrance ceremony for the Enmore Martyrs, the first time that Cheddi was there as President(and the first time I was there), Cheddi recalling that event which crystallized the giving of himself to the political life of our country, it was inevitable that he would reflect on all that happened from that day in 1948 to 1993. After speaking with great emotion for more than an hour he ended, questioning "why can't old comrades be comrades again?" Some of my friends teased me, "move over Sam, make room for old comrades: you are a just - come, old firesticks don't take long to light!"
We need to free ourselves from that trial of Burnham that was a grave error on the one side to remove the adrenalin like feelings of guilt which at times sap the energy, restrain participation and at other times feed a suspicious, wild, blind anger in which to hide. On the other side, we need to be freed from the pain of seemingly to be forever having to give in, to pay the price.
Guyana needs political parties which everyone, whether a supporter or not, can consider respectable. We need to be aware of what Cheddi was.
We need to be answer of what Cheddi was aware, that for a political party's own good there is need for a respectable and respected, matching opposition!
We need to shake hands and free ourselves of the trial that was an error, as we turn to a new page.
Late into the might of Friday December 14, 2007, one could have gotten the feeling in the National Assembly that we the politicians were in the mood to shake hands and turn the page. We politicians were giving the leadership that Guyana needs.
We need the help of our media, to take our country, every one of our citizens along. May everyone watch the tape of that debate and get into a mood for healing and harmony.
Yours faithfully,
Samuel A. Hinds
A Civic, and a citizen
by Hydar Ally
The month of March is significant in the life of Guyanese, but more particularly for the People’s Progressive Party (PPP). It is the month in which the Father of this Nation, the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan, was born and also the month in which he died. As we all know, Dr. Jagan was born on March 22, 1918 and died on March 6, 1997. No other leader in Guyana has had such a profound and indelible impact on the minds of the Guyanese people as Dr. Jagan did. Despite his extraordinary fame and stature, he remained humble and simple throughout his life. He never allowed the glare of political office to create a distance between him and the Guyanese people. He was also an honest and clean politician who never paid attention to the accumulation of personal wealth and riches.
Dr. Jagan certainly ranks among the most brilliant and progressive thinkers of our times. He was able to reshape the political and ideological landscape of Guyana in a way no other politician succeeded in doing.
In this and subsequent articles, I propose to focus on the life and work of Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the role he played in the creation of a democratic, free and just society. Since it is impossible to go into any detailed exposition on the manifold contributions made by Dr. Jagan during his long and eventful political career, I wish to deal with three important dimensions of his life - Cheddi Jagan, as a Person, Cheddi Jagan as a Politician and Cheddi Jagan as an Internationalist.
Dr. Jagan was born on March 22, 1918 in a plantation society where both of his parents lived and worked. His early formative years were shaped by the sociology of plantation life. This is how Dr. Jagan described life in the plantation:
“The plantation appeared to me as the hub of life. Everything revolved around sugar and the sugar planters seemed to own the world. They owned the cane-fields and the factories; even the small pieces of land rented to some of the workers for family food production belonged to them. They owned the mansions occupied by the senior staff and the cottages occupied by dispensers, chemists, engineers bookers and drivers. They owned the logies (ranges) and huts where the laborers lived the hospitals and every important building. At one time they also owned and operated a rice mill. Even the churches and schools came within their patronage and control.”
He continued:
“The plantation was indeed a world of its own. Or rather it was two worlds: the world of exploiters and the world of the exploited; the world of whites and the world of non-whites. One was a world of managers of European staff in their splendid mansions; the other the world of the laborers in their logies in the “niggeryard” and the bound coolie yard. The mansions were electrically lit; the logies had kerosene lamps. It was not unusual to hear it said that the mules were treated better than human beings for the stables had electrical light. It was not that electricity could not have been taken to the workers quarters and residences. The owners could easily have generated more electricity at very little extra cost to satisfy the needs of all. But electricity, like so many other things was a status symbol.”
And, adding a touch of humour on the subject he went on:
“There is an interesting story about mules being treated better than the workers. Years ago, on first arrival, a director of one of the foreign sugar companies took his wife on a familiarization tour of the estates on the East Bank of Demerara. “What’s that,?” the good lady asked. “That’s a mule stable, replied the husband. After a while, as the driver drove she remarked: “My goodness, you have an awful lot of mules.”
The above, quoted in full from Dr. Jagan’s celebrated masterpiece “The West on Trial” painted a picture of the sociology of the plantation system and exposes the exploitative and derogatory condition under which the laborers were treated at the hands of the plantocracy. This was to have had a lasting effect on the minds of the young Cheddi Jagan who himself admitted that the raging fire within him and his passion for social justice and human dignity were triggered by the deplorable and inhuman conditions under the workers were subjected by the plantocracy and not out of any known inherited genealogical traits.
In the very opening paragraph of “The West On Trial” he wrote:
“I know very little about my ancestors in India. I presume they were no different from the millions of other peasants to whom it did not matter whether their country was ruled by a Hindu Raja or a Moghul Nawab or the British Government. I have no doubt that like most other peasants they were exploited by zamidars (landlords) and were ground down by poverty. Whatever might have been their struggles against the zamindars or the British Raj, it would appear that there was no rebel like me on my family tree”.
This sense of exploitation and injustice was further reinforced during his student days in the United States where he came face to face with the exploitative and discriminatory nature of the capitalist system. Immediately upon his return to the colony in 1943, Dr. Jagan and his wife Janet, along with a few others, began the process of exposing the evils of the plantation society and the need for it to be replaced by a more enlightened and humane political order. Thus came into being the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) and a few years later the People’s Progressive Party, which not only posed an effective challenge to the old order of things, but also provided for the first time a political alternative to the then existing status quo.
Karl Marx in one of his writings made the point that “philosophers have interpreted the world in several ways; the point however is to change it.” The PPP led by Dr. Jagan has done just that; the Party from its very inception sought not only to interpret the colonial society, but more fundamentally to change it.
More of this in my next article.
by Dale A. Bisnauth
At the eleventh commemorative exercise held at Babu John, Port Mourant, to mark the death of the late great Dr Cheddi Jagan, former President of Guyana, and, more important from a political standpoint, the founder and erstwhile leader of the Peoples’ Progressive Party (PPP), two very significant speeches were made. One was made by the General Secretary of the PPP, Donald Ramotar, and the other by His Excellency, President Bharrat Jagdeo. The major thrust of both speeches aimed, not so much as keeping Dr Jagan alive in the memories of party faithfuls, but at making such memories both influential and relevant in the contemporary and ongoing “struggle”, in the development of a modern and democratic Guyana. In other words, the political thoughts of the revered leader are to be made “living” and existential.
Thus, Cde Ramotar told the Babu John gathering that Dr Jagan might not be with us in the flesh, but that the “methodologies” that he employed and articulated over years of successful struggle, are enshrined in his many publications, whether of books, or of pamphlets, or of speeches and articles published in print material. The thoughts of Dr Jagan are therefore accessible to the present-day activists, strategists and rank and file members of the PPP. This about sums up the presentation of Donald Ramotar on this matter, as I heard him. President Bharrat Jagdeo struck a similar and, at the same time, dissimilar, note, in his very significant speech. Wittingly or unwittingly, the President demonstrated how a “dead” text, placed within its original context, may be “resurrected”; and, re-contextualized, may serve a dynamic purpose in that new context. I thought that this was brilliant.
An old adage (which I cannot recall verbatim) suggests that text without context is more often than not the function of pretext. That is to say: a person may cite a text without any reference to the context in which the saying or observation was originally made, in order to claim the support of an authority or authority figure, that is universally and, purportedly, unquestionably accepted. Preachers do it all the time; more often than not introducing, as into evidence, a quote on the ground: “The Bible says.” Ask them, who in the Bible said this, on what occasion, and why, in an effort to get at the essence of the “truth” and its relevance to the point that is being made, and the preacher fumbles about in an uncertainty that cannot convince or “convict.” I suspect that politicians also are guilty of that sin which we learnt about in classes in English Literature years ago: Beware of citing text without context.
But the doctrinaire and the dogmatic do it all the time, out of reverence for some, supposedly, hallowed book or manifesto. Sometimes, the attempt to apply a doctrine in a changed and changing context from the one in which it was originally designed, can be downright dangerous. If I may tell a story, from an area of my own interest: religion. In the early 705 BC, Assyria invaded Judah. Jerusalem panicked. In order to reassure the people, Isaiah told them that Jerusalem would not fall since it was by God’s choice that it was the capital of Judah. For a number of reasons, the Assyrians abandoned the siege of Jerusalem. But the doctrine that Jerusalem was inviolable arose and grew in great proportions. A generation later, Jeremiah cautioned king and people that if the rot that had set in on the national life was not corrected, Jerusalem would fall to the enemy. He was laughed at; he was described as a false prophet (preacher) and hounded out of court, on the basis that he was in error since he was ignorant of the doctrine of the inviolability of Jerusalem. In the end, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians. So much for doctrine. Doctrine has its importance, but not when it becomes doctrinaire!
President Jagdeo quoted Dr Jagan’s parting statement: Everything will be alright (or alright). But he added with salutary emphasis, that everything would not be alright if this generation (my word) of party faithfuls does not engage the present problems in the effort to solve them. In other words, the “doctrine” of Cheddi Jagan, stated at the critical time of his impending demise, in order to reassure his party comrades, must not be lifted out of context, and made into a universal principle applicable for all times and situations including ours. Quite correctly, he went on to indicate that Dr Jagan was not the passive kind of person who expected alrightness to come by itself. Rather, he was a man who “struggled” all his life to achieve that “alrightness,” that he desired for his country. He then went on to challenge his audience to become engaged (to “struggle”) at this time, when the nation faces great problems in order that national security and peace may provide the environment in which development would continue. It was a brilliant bit this: an object lesson in which “doctrine” is unfreezed from becoming doctrinaire, and made fluid enough to become inspirational, influential and relevant. Test without context is………….Peace!