OPINION: Terrence Campbell and Nigel Hughes owe Guyanese Indians an apology

Last Updated on Thursday, 26 December 2024, 10:18 by Writer

By Dr Randy Persaud, Professor Emeritus, American University, Washington DC

The racialization of politics is downright dangerous. Responsible citizens must think twice before they venture down that sordid path. It is clear that Terrence Campbell does not understand this salient fact of political engagement. He crossed a red line when he derisively reduced Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo’s record and style of governance to his supposed “genetic predisposition.”

Now, rather than hide behind the flaccid and inconsequential defences offered up thus far, Campbell should do the honorable thing and apologize. But more than that, he should get Nigel Hughes, the leader of the AFC, to do the same. Mr. Hughes had the temerity to repost Campbell’s irresponsible and highly offensive attack on Jagdeo’s Indian ancestry.

Let me be clear about what is at issue here. Without the slightest provocation, Terrence Campbell stated that “Bharrat Jagdeo [is] genetically predisposed to eating his cake and having it.” The logically necessary implication of the statement is that he (Jagdeo) is “duplicitous,” and further, that the explanation for this “predisposition” is genetic in nature. By simple deductive logic (modus ponens), this also implies that people of Indian ancestry, including Guyanese Indians, are all duplicitous.

I highly recommend Professor Stuart Hall’s famous lecture – “Race, the Floating Signifier” – to Campbell and Hughes. In that lecture at Goldsmith College, London, Hall was insistent that race functions more like a discourse, like a language. One of the first steps in the practice of racialization is to produce taxonomies, that is to develop classificatory systems where humanity is cut up and slotted into distinctive and antagonistic compartments. And further, according to Hall, “[c]lassification is a very generative thing; once you are classified, a whole range of other things fall into place as a result of it.”

What Terrence Campbell did was exactly what Hall warned against, that is, to attribute negative properties through classificatory practices, in this case, to Jagdeo’s ancestry, and then derive generalizations about the Vice President’s behavior from the same supposed genetic code. Both Campbell and Hughes no doubt know that this kind of racial scapegoating has led to immeasurable suffering through world history. It should not be tolerated here in Guyana.

If you think Campbell and Hughes’ vitriol against Bharrat Jagdeo is outrageous, then one must be repulsed by their rank disregard for working class Guyanese of African descent. Campbell and Hughes are elite men of means, men who live the high life, men who walk with pomp and swagger, who flaunt their economic and professional success, the very sort of men that great thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Amié Césaire warned us about.

Fanon, was a French-trained psychiatrist from Martinique who developed some of the most profound insights into the relationship between urban and rural life in the Third World, and especially in the Caribbean. Those insights are particularly relevant in understanding how elitists like Campbell and Hughes see themselves in relation to the urban poor, and worse yet, in relation to the rural Afro-Guyana working class.

Freddie Kissoon has also done some highly original work on the predominantly Georgetown Creole Middle Class (CMC) who, based on economic success, ‘high-color’, education, or family name, see themselves as separate and distinct from working class Guyanese of African descent. These are the very type of men who, only for the sake of weaponizing the political, just discovered existence of pit latrines.

Fanon was deeply concerned that the urban elites, and especially the educated and petite bourgeois ones, would basically sell out the urban working class and the rural poor. Why? Well precisely because the ‘Black’ urban elite, or the Guyanese Creole Middle Class as theorized by Freddie Kissoon, were thoroughly drawn into the lust for political power as a personal tool, and into the cultural fantasies and desires of post-colonial urban jouissance. While jouissance normally carries a notion of painful sensual pleasure, as used here, it refers to the pleasures that the ‘men of means’ derive from being so different from the ‘Black’ urban working class and rural poor. Maintaining urban difference is their currency, their symbol, their motto, their commitments.

These urban-based Creole Middle Class men of means take great pleasure in their cosmopolitan credentials, their foreign exposure, and simultaneously their disdain for the country folk. Let me put it to you bluntly. They do not give a damn about poor Black folks.

The elitist Creole Middle Class venom becomes volcanic when it comes to education. They think it is only them that accomplished something worthy of mention. It goes without saying that arguments without evidence must always be dismissed as mischief. And bearing this in mind, I am obliged to take you back to the elitist provocateur who started this all: Terrence Campbell.

In a December 15 entry on his Facebook page, Terrence Campbell posted the following – “TAKING JAGDEO TO SCHOOL. Not sure what Jagdeo did at Bygeval Multilateral and Patrice Lumumba Friendship University, but Winston Jordon claims he helped him with his papers.” What on earth can this be but urban elitist arrogance!

What Terrence Campbell must be compelled to acknowledge is that while he was busy with chicken issues, Bharrat Jagdeo was the president of Guyana, and, before that, the Minister of Finance. While frying chicken might be exciting for some, Jagdeo has been focused on path-breaking endeavors such as the National Development Strategy, the Low Carbon Development Strategy, and protecting democracy from an onslaught by election riggers, politically-connected criminal gangs, and anti-development insurgents. And yes, the same countryman who went to Bygeval, also went on to be named by Time magazine as one of their “Heroes of the Environment 2008,” and a 2010 “Champions of the Earth” recognition by the United Nations Environment Programme. If you want to talk about economics and business, then you must recognize that the Jagdeo-Ali leadership has amassed US$1 billion in earnings for the avoided deforestation model they developed and monetized. Last but not least, Jagdeo has played a definitive role in the Local Content Act which has allowed at 1,000 businesses in Guyana to start, thrive, and flourish. Compare that record to the 200 taxes Winston Jordan placed on the backs of this nation. Yeah, let us compare.

Terrence Campbell and the AFC leader, Nigel Hughes, appear to be united in their derision for country people, both Indian and African. Campbell’s reduction of Bharrat Jagdeo’s thinking to “genetic predisposition” is shocking and still left without comment by the likes of Aubrey Norton and Christopher Ram. Hughes, for his part, knows very little about the urban African working class, or about the villages and settlements across the sprawling countryside of this great land. Thus far, he has only invested himself in performative display. That, my friend, just won’t do! I commend these words from Amié Césaire to Nigel Hughes: “Beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle…”