Remembering Cheddi Jagan
The Measure of the Man
by Dale A. Bisnauth
It is the measure of a person’s worth that his/her contemporaries can scarcely be written or spoken about, except in comparison with, or contrast to, that person. It is a measure of a person’s achievements that his/her words and work provide the material that the less endowed or the less recognized can only write about. It is the measure of a person’s greatness that even after his/her demise, his/her stature and accomplishments remain the canon by which other persons’ achievements and worth are judged. Such a person of worth, achievement and stature was the late great President Cheddi Jagan - the man, the politician the Head of State.
Anyone who is moderately literate in historiography knows that an ongoing preoccupation of those who set themselves the task of rewriting history, is to seek to change the significance of the facts of the past, by reconstructing the contexts in which events occurred, or by re-introducing lesser actors in the original set, with significantly enhanced roles. This process is known as revisionism. Ostensibly, the objective is to put a correct perspective on things of the past, the motivation - which is never without bias - is to put a new perspective on past events, in keeping with what is believed to be a more acceptable contemporary world-view. Remember that the motivation has its own inbuilt prejudice, however much the revisionist may scream that it is not so.
Actually, it is also the measure of a person’s influence that the revisionist would seek to discredit a person’s worth in order to reduce that person’s influence on the present generation. American history, which I taught for a brief period at UG, is replete with revisionism. Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and even Martin Luther King, Jr., are a few icons on which revisionists have been chiselling away. It is as if mediocrity cannot live with greatness unless it reduces it to its own size: mediocrity. They have done it toMuhammad. Maybe, this is the estimation of our generation: that we cannot live with greatness and are therefore condemned to bicker about in mediocrity. Except that one notes that a new saint has emerged: the so-called “free” media.
According to their acolytes, the press and its workers are sacrosanct, that is, most sacred; its sacrosancity must not be violated. Who says so? And who will impose sanctions on the violators? It seems to me that only yesterday one used to hear about the “yellow press” and about their measly-mouthed contributors. Is that tribe extinct? I suspect not. And if the media were so sacrosanct in the sense of “sacred”, why is there a need at all to have them adhere to a code of conduct? I suspect that it is because they cannot be trusted among themselves, by themselves, having long corrupted truth into propaganda, that they need something beyond their individual selves to help them to toe some line, and some cant about their sacrosancity to make them feel omnipotent. I believe in the free press in the sense of the availability of as many as possible sources of information and analyses.
Readers themselves will judge as to the truth of what they hear and see. And the people will decide, when they feel compelled to do so on something significant to them. Otherwise, the people can afford to use the media as they see fit.
What significance is there about who introduced Cheddi Jagan to whom, or what? The greatness of a man or woman is not in his/her roots, but in his/her fruits; not in his/her pedigree, but in what he/she has become, sometimes in spite of that pedigree. And in this plural society of ours, not in his/her commitment to pursue the interests of his/her racial/ethnic segment, but in the commitment to growth and development of the total society. That was the genius and greatness of Cheddi Jagan. Isn’t it ironical that politicians of both sides of the ethnic/racial divide criticize him? On this side they criticize him for abandoning the interests of “Indians”, because he was not culturally Indian enough; on the other side, they criticize him for advocating “apan jaat” politics. This, in itself, is testimony to the greatness of the man; meaner men cannot understand his complexity.
A lasting testimony of the man, Cheddi Jagan, was the tribute paid to him on the occasion of his death, by the tens of thousands many of whom had not heard or read his The West On Trial or had come in direct contact with him. His critics may question even the genuineness of his humility, or aver that he often spoke scathingly about many people, but the people turned out in their thousands to pay homage to him and to shed a silent tear on his demise. From every walk of life, from every region in this country, from overseas, from every race and religion, from every age group except perhaps, babies, from every political party and persuasion, they came by foot and by every available means, to say thank you to Cheddi Jagan, to honour the best, and to signal that they, instinctively, recognize the best in themselves that, at a time like that they could rise to admire. The people spoke.
There were the silent thousands in Georgetown who patiently snailed their way to view the body in the casket. Who can forget the thousands who lined the route on the East Coast of Demerara and the West Coast of Berbice. There was not a single village where there were not people, the old, the young, the middle-aged and children. They waved their flags, many black, they waved their fare-wells, some wept openly. And, at Albion, a whole night, the whole of the next day and into another night, they came in never-ending, patient, often silent queues to pay tribute to and to honour Cheddi Jagan.
Such was the measure of the man. Rabindranath Tagore says it best for us: “Yours is the heaven that lies in the common dust, and you are there for me, and you are there for all.” Peace!