I read Abena Rockcliffe’s recent piece on the death of Don Singh multiple times, searching for any semblance of common sense, balance, intellectual depth, or even logical flow. I found none.
What I found instead was a painfully incoherent attempt at moral grandstanding, an essay that introduces the concept of “black supremacy” as if it exists in Guyana, as if it has any relevance to the lived reality of black Guyanese people, and as if the small number of Guyanese who feel a sense of vindication at Singh’s untimely demise require her condescending lecture.
Let me be direct; Rockcliffe seems incapable of defining what “black supremacy” means in the Guyanese context because it does not exist here. It is a phantom she has imported from American academic discourse and clumsily draped over a local reality it does not fit.
The Convenient Amnesia
Rockcliffe writes of black supremacy as if black Guyanese hold any meaningful power in this country. She lectures about the dangers of “getting lost in the process” of using supremacy as a vehicle to dignity, warning that we might “become like our oppressors.”
But what oppression is she even referencing? The kind where black people’s ancestral lands are seized and redistributed to the politically connected? The kind where the justice system operates with two sets of rules, one for the connected, another for the rest? The kind where black professionals in the public service are forced to survive on starvation wages while ministers and their cronies enrich themselves with impunity? The kind where government contracts are awarded exclusively to the friends, families, and favourites of the ruling party, locking black businesses out of opportunity?
This is the reality Rockcliffe’s essay conveniently ignores. This is the abyss into which black Guyanese have been gazing for decades. And it is not a theoretical abyss, it is the very real, very material experience of marginalisation in a country where political power has been consolidated along racial lines.
The Man and His Campaign of Cruelty
Don Singh was not merely a political commentator. He was a weapon, a digital assassin deployed by the People’s Progressive Party to target, humiliate, and psychologically terrorise those who stood in opposition.
He called President David Granger “Cancer Man” as that dignified leader endured painful cancer treatments. He published an uncomplimentary, degrading image of Hon. Amanza Walton-Desir, an opposition parliamentarian, on a stripper pole, a deliberate attempt to reduce a respected woman to a sexual object for public consumption. He created a fake death announcement for Nazir Mohamed’s elderly father while the man was still alive, weaponising the most intimate human grief for political sport.
This was not robust political discourse. This was cruelty elevated to a methodology. This was a campaign of dehumanisation carried out with the implicit blessing of those in power.
Yet Rockcliffe asks us to extend grace to Singh while offering none to those who have endured his abuse. She lectures about reciprocity while refusing to acknowledge that Singh’s victims were merely responding, in their private moments of schadenfreude, to years of systematic psychological violence.
The Missing Conversation
What Rockcliffe’s essay fundamentally misses is that the response to Singh’s death is not about racial supremacy. It is about the cumulative weight of political oppression that Guyanese, particularly black Guyanese, have endured.
When people feel a sense of vindication at the death of someone who terrorised them, it is not because they have embraced supremacy. It is because they have been dehumanised for so long that any crack in the machinery of their oppression feels like justice. It is because the formal systems, the courts, the police, the regulatory bodies, have failed them so consistently that the only justice they can imagine is the poetic kind.
Rockcliffe writes, “I haven’t faced the extreme.” She should have stopped there. Because her essay demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand the extremity of what others have faced. She speaks of starting a new life in Denmark rather than “fighting fire with fire”, a privilege available only to those who have somewhere else to go.
The Real Supremacy
The real supremacy operating in Guyana is not black supremacy. It is the supremacy of the politically connected, the racially favoured, the economically powerful. It is the supremacy that allows a man like Singh to operate with impunity for years, weaponising the internet against political opponents, knowing that the state would never hold him accountable.
It is the supremacy that allows government ministers to attend embassy galas while their party’s digital attack dogs terrorise opponents. It is the supremacy that allows the PPP to position itself as the inevitable future of Guyana while systematically excluding and marginalising those who do not fall within its ethnic tent.
Rockcliffe’s essay is not an act of intellectual courage. It is an act of deflection, a way to avoid the uncomfortable conversation about who truly holds power in this country and how that power has been abused.
Gazing Into the Wrong Abyss
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Rockcliffe invokes, famously warned that “he who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
But Rockcliffe is gazing into the wrong abyss. She is fixated on a phantom threat of black supremacy while ignoring the very real monster of political oppression that has consumed this country. She is so concerned about people “getting lost in the process” of responding to their oppression that she refuses to acknowledge the oppression itself.
The black people of Guyana do not need lectures about supremacy from those who have not felt the weight of the system. They need solidarity. They need recognition. They need a society that acknowledges the deep structural inequalities that have shaped their lives.
And they need a media that tells the truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable, even when that truth implicates the powerful, even when that truth challenges the comfortable narratives of those who have never had to gaze into the abyss.
Don Singh is dead. We do not celebrate his death. But we also will not pretend that his life was anything other than what it was, a sustained campaign of cruelty enabled by a political system that rewards loyalty over humanity.
If Abena Rockcliffe truly wants to discuss supremacy, let her start with the supremacy of political impunity. Let her start with the supremacy of ethnic favouritism. Let her start with the supremacy of a system that protects its own while destroying its opponents.
That is the abyss worth gazing into. That is the conversation worth having.
