Peter Sam comments on my Walter Rodney post:
I remember going to buy something for my mom one evening, while passing the parade ground near the Promenade Gardens there was a crowd of people and I heard him. There was a white Mazda 616 parked and this guy with an Afro was talking about the tyranny of Forbes Burnham and how “he will be tried for his crimes." If u see people.
I passed and as I was approaching Christ Church Secondary School I saw a group of men running towards the ground with clubs and sticks, these were beastly looking men, psychopaths, men willing to kill for the PNC. I continued my errand, and I heard about it later. Rodney and the rest had to scoot, and the men broke up the meeting.
I remember when the news of Walter's passing broke my mom said “when oil is hot it is still." I believed her and as young as I was I was afraid. It was expected that the Guyanese would have rebelled, this was the time for conflagration, and justice would be served from the hands of the oppressed Guyanese people. I walked over by my neighbour who was a Portuguese woman. (She had four children, three boys and a girl, the two older boys were both my school mates and friends.) I told her what my mom had said, and she told me "Peter nothing is going to happen, this thing will blow away and be forgotten". I disagreed, and she told me about some things that happened in the 60s, the Abraham family was one, and some others too then she ended by saying “just like those, so will Walter’s”. I lived to see that she was right.
I realise we as a people are sufferers in the land our fore parents died for. Nothing has changed. I know of no time when injustices of significance were ever righted. From Cuffy to the Enmore sugar workers who were gunned down, from Paul Bogle to Garvey, they all died in vain only to be resurrected by our oppressors, not the white man, but those who replaced him, “we mattie”.
I am not hateful, I am disappointed in my country, I am disappointed in the Caribbean, and ashamed of most of the independence leaders and the legacy they left. We adore men who have for the most part left us poorer than they took us, Burnham, Manley, and Eric Gairy to name some. We like to celebrate all the wrong people. For a region of “blue water” music and promises to be bread basket to caress men of speeches and “undoers” just shows our emptiness.
Even today we mourn not for a scientist, not for a great pioneer of industry but we mourn the dancers, the talk men, the ones with words, yet for all the dancing and speeches, I can still be chased out like a dog from any Caribbean country, as Black and looking like them as I am. Long live the integrationalist, long live the poets and long live the nothing people that follow them. Haiti? Ask our “brothers” in the Bahamas.
