What would Walter Rodney and Andaiye have said?
Kaieteur News – There is no WPA mandarin past or present from 1974 when Rodney was denied an ASU appointment by Forbes Burnham’s demonic autocracy (really, how could David Granger and Vincent Alexander see this dictator as a Guyanese hero?) Until April 2021 that has written a reflection on the March 2020 rigged election.
Surely even a few paragraphs depicting both sides of the coin – a rigged election meant to deny you the right to have your vote counted – would have been appreciated by the burden people of Guyana. Two great WPA figures are not alive – Walter Rodney and Andaiye – and there is a curious, provocative question of what or how they would have shaped their approach to the rigged March 2020 election.
I know both individuals. I think I’m familiar with their philosophical thinking, epistemological adaptations and deconstruction methodologies. Andaiye, in April 2021, remains the only WPA person living under the APNU + AFC government and who publicly voiced his disagreement with his politics. But she was careful. She never wrote about her feelings but allowed me to cite her as wanting nothing to do with what the WPA had become part of the government.
She was a great activist. I think the organizers (people like Dr. Alissa Trotz, Karen De Sousa, and Joyceyn Dow, the main organizers of the appreciation day when she died) hurt her legacy in how they organized the event. It was an abominable show of racist middle class and unilateral elitism.
There has not been a single presentation by an Indian from the East while Forbes Burnham’s daughters and Burnham’s protégé Rashleigh Jackson are at the forefront. Could Trotz, De Souza and Dow find a teacher, a laborer, a sugar worker to give Andaiye a brief compliment? Dow in her presentation told the audience that Andaiye, in the final moments on her hospital bed, was mistaking others for shouting Rupert Roopnaraine; “Look, Rupert, look Rupert!” That’s the part of Andaiye that I found esoteric. In government, Roopnaraine turned out to be the arrogant, most powerful Minister in the history of this country, a story that people like Trotz and David Hinds witnessed firsthand but refused to tell the Guyanese people.
Trotz, De Souza and Dow Tacuma also chose Ogunseye to speak on behalf of the WPA. He developed a sort of dislike of Tacuma Ogunseye’s politics over his attitude to Buxton’s chaos as explained by Moses Bhagwan in a newspaper letter.
What would Andaiye have said about rigging the March election? Andaiye was in court to greet me, among others, when Mark Benschop and I were released on bail after three days in the Brickdam lock-up period for two minor traffic offenses that were trumped by the then government in 2010. So was Andaiye knew that the PPP the government was oppressive and dictatorial. She was not a supporter of PPP presidencies Bharrat Jagdeo and Donald Ramotar. Her rejection of the PPP’s poor governance would not have led her to accept a rigid election.
Before I describe the shape of her response to election rigging, a bit more expense; two actually. People spread their respect for Andaiye after the 2002 Mash prison breakers began to reside in Buxton and target the people of East India to death.
One of the killers, Andrew Douglas, produced a video in which he represented himself as a freedom fighter for the liberation of African Guyanese. Andaiye wrote a letter in the newspapers denying Douglas’s battle over the liberation of African Guyanese. As an African Guyanese, he intoned, “not in my name.”
The second digestion is sensitive and from his reaction, we will know what character David Hinds has. David told me during the election campaign in 2020, the APNU leadership asked him to be active. He said he sought advice from Andaiye in a four-hour discussion. He said he did not turn down his part in the campaign but advised him to stay clear of rigging an election. I can’t imagine for a fraction of a second that David would deny it so that he denied telling me that President Granger got angry with Clive Thomas and raised his voice on him.
So the answer finally. This is how Andaiye would have addressed the interference with the polls. It would have put it in context in two ways. One would be his philosophical position that you can’t deny people the right to vote and that’s what happened. Second, he would have warned the people that a win does not mean the winner takes a call. Space has come up for a discussion on how Walter would have reacted.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)