A few weeks ago, one of my favorite newspaper reporters asked me the following question—Dr. Hinds would you consider yourself a left-wing political activist? I quickly answered in the affirmative, but the question has been on my mind ever since. Nobody has ever asked me that question before—I have since wondered why the reporter asked. Am I really a left-wing political activist? What is a left-wing political activist? Thanks to the influence of Eusi Kwayana and many others I have met along the way, I have tried extremely hard not to take myself seriously—sometimes I think I try too hard. So apart from describing myself here and there as an independent, I have not labeled myself.
I first got involved in political activism in my village while still a schoolboy, initially in village politics and shortly after at the national level. . As I look back over those five decades or so, I wonder what my life would have been without political involvement. Along the way I have interacted with many of the shapers of Guyana’s political destiny–some more closely than others. I have allowed myself to be consumed by the political world, often at the expense of other aspects of life.
It has been a life full of joy. Coming from the social bottom, I couldn’t anticipate where I would end up. I give thanks every day for the opportunities I have had to rise out of the ghetto of chronic poverty and everything that comes with that condition. But that joy has been tempered by the disappointments and political setbacks along the way—the murder of Walter Rodney, the self-destruction of the Grenadian revolution, the squandering of the 1992 moment in Guyana, the hijacking and eventual mismanagement of the 2015 opening and finally the seizure of the soul of Guyana between March 2 and August2, 2020.
As I come to grips with the fact that I am no longer a young man, I wonder whether the revolution that enticed me into a life of politics would ever come. I wonder what went through the minds of the Grenadian revolutionaries when in four short years they destroyed the dreams of four hundred years and more. I fluctuate between anger and frustration over how Mr. Granger and his top co-leaders in five short years threw away everything we had worked for since Emancipation in 1838. And I am still in shock at how naïve and callous many of the Guyanese elites were when they turned the opportunity for reconciliation during the five-month impasse in 2020 into a naked grab for ethnic power brewed in recolonization.
I read in the newspapers the complaints and crocodile tears for the mangroves and the environment from some of those men and women and ask what hypocritical, spineless and shameless human beings are they? How can you install in power known killers of mangroves and then turn around and mourn for the mangroves when they are killed? Are you naïve or callus or both? How can you install in power a one-party ethnic government and expect national unity afterwards? What kind of fool are you or do you think the rest of us are fools? How can you aid externally driven Regime Change and complain of sovereignty afterwards? How can you knowingly install men and women of greed to power and complain about official greed today?
Many innocent and naïve persons of all stripes who allowed their self-absorption with purity, pureness and democratic abstraction to lead them into the unholy den of Regime Change are too ashamed to show their faces. They are not as boldface as those cited above, but they are equally responsible for taking Guyana backwards. I now realize that some of them were never real left-wing activists. And now other real left-wing activists must once again jump into the trenches to save Guyana from another political nightmare. When will it ever stop?
More of Dr. Hinds’ commentaries can be found on his website guyanacaribbeanpolitics.news and on his Facebook page Hinds’Sight. Catch him on Facebook on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:30 pm for Politics 101 with Dr. David Hinds.
