Mahadai Das, Heidegger, young AFC Turks and the Übermensch
Kaieteur News – The richest and most absorbing philosophy book – “Being and Time” – written in 1928 was made by a German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had a relationship with the Nazi government even if it was remote as some of ‘ to admirers assert. to this day.
It remains amazing when you think about how great this book is so the author is great as well that he could have been associated with Nazi officials. We will never know why people do the things they do. Heidegger was not a young person like Mahadai Das when at 22 he began to flirt with the Burnham dictatorship.
Heidegger was 40 when he wrote the most profound philosophical essay in intellectual history so he should have known better. But was there something he saw in the rise of the Nazis to power he always thought? Heidegger was a huge admirer of Nietzsche. Nietzsche believed that human society was deeply flawed but still being rescued by a special person who called the Übermensch in his philosophical work, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.”
In his undeveloped political life, he believed that Nazi Germany may have entered a new world. I was at AS and had refused to do National Service (NS) when Mahadai Das became the face of NS advertising. I was around in those days so I knew how Guyanese people felt about compulsory NS.
It is misleading to say that Indians were the only community that hated NS. He made society at large, especially the middle class people who at the time felt Burnham had become a dictator and should be removed. There is no room in this column to expand on NS. I have made thousands and thousands of columns over a 32 year period and offered my analysis of it which I will probably do again. This column is about the naivety of young minds in politics. Sadly, the young, unchanged souls survived in the AFC leaving in droplets; Mahadai Das did not.
I had no admiration for Das at the time when she was the face of NS. The weakness of humans is that we tend to think that all minds are alike and every human being must understand how we understand things in general. I was annoyed at what Das was doing but I was a political animal, not even Das, even though we were about the same age.
I looked at NS and Burnham through political lenses. Das was not interested in politics. Indian literature, poetry and culture were her world. He became the protégé of a famous Guyanese woman, Rajkumari Singh, one of deep devotees of Indian culture. It can be said then that she saw Burnham through the eyes of her hero – Singh.
Isn’t that the way young people function in politics over centuries? People want to belong and they see leaders as the path through which they can become something and can belong. I have seen this on display live when I was a 16 year old beating around the PPP. I have seen this in all the young men who hung around the WPA and admired Walter Rodney and Rupert Roopnaraine. I have seen this in bright ways with the young Turks in the AFC who saw Khemraj Ramjattan and Raphael Trotman together as the Ubermensch.
As soon as the AFC came to power, immediate degeneracy reared its fetal head. I had endless conversations, night and day with five of these young Turks. My students were four at AS and at the time I taught them, I doubt they would have seen themselves in the party leadership structure in government – Marlon Williams, Joel Edmond, Trevor Williams and Leonard Craig. The other was someone I knew moons before the AFC was born – Michael Carrington.
All five were decent young men who think they could play a role in shaping a better Guyana. Their party was in power. They had now come of age. They had something to belong to. But the peak of the AFC’s pyramid was far more rotten than its counterpart in the PPP and PNC. Endless conversations brought them with recognition but they stuck to their party the way Das adhered to Burnham.
Das discovered that Burnham was not the Übermensch but the Anti-Christ. In the end, he was indirectly responsible for her untimely death. The five young Turks in the AFC discovered that Trotman and Ramjattan were not the Übermensch but the birth of nothing. They were lucky than Das. They are still alive.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)