By GHK Lall- Guyanese should listen to Excellency Donald Ramotar. He could sniff out a colonizer from across a continent, and that’s during a tsunami. He has been there, seen them, knew them. In all their stripes. If there’s one Guyanese who is equipped to identify colonizers in a lineup, Don Ramotar is that man.
Excellency Ramotar roared recently: ‘U.S. re-colonizing the Caribbean.’ There’s a troubling undercurrent in the former president’s construction. Most of the Caribbean, perhaps all of it, likes it, and welcomes it. Guyana is no different, with Guyanese leaders hustling to outdo one another to register their surrender to Washington. Behold, the Black Man, and the Brown Man, who have neither backbone nor any ball of their own. They slide like jelly below the white man’s boot.
William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant must be crying in their graves. All the sacrifices they made, all the blood that was shed, all the humiliations endured. Only for the descendants of slaves and semi-slaves (indentured) to surrender liberty for a pat on the cheek and a pot of pee emptied into their open mouths. I have never come across men and women so lacking in shame, so bereft of basic pride, so shallow where patriotic principle is concerned, and so callous about the welfare of the people who put them where they are.
Colonizers and re-colonizers have their visions of how the world should run, and who should run it. I expect that, and make space for that mindset. What is found intolerable and deplorable is when the formerly enslaved, and the formerly harnessed and driven like beasts could now gladly kneel and eat out of the hands of their new masters.
Their oral rationalisations are pathetic. The language of slaves who love their conditions, and crave the whip that lashes all honesty and dignity out of them. The language of the enslaved and recolonized that speaks odes to their colonial masters and live to lick their boots.
Special relationship. Must be a damned house slave made to feel important, given charge of the cutlery and kitchen. One who sells his people to any bidder, and still sees himself as a king of some standing. A king is set to visit these parts. His wealth came from the blood and sweat of people criminally wrested from their homelands, their families.
Now he comes for more easy wealth, with a fixed smile on his face, and a sword at his side. One regional leader is so much in love with himself, he believes that the king comes to him, because of how great he is (in his own eyes), and not for the fluids that flow from the seafloor.
The Old Lion Ramotar is aggrieved, feels a sickening sense of abuse and déjà vu. Indeed, he has been there before, and seen these pirates and plunderers before. He has also seen more than his share of bootlickers and brownnosers from the local realm. He let down his guard. Fooled himself that the last bootlicker and brownnoser were gone. Sad to say, a whole new cohort of gutless, boneless, and testicular-less men have sprung up in their places. They rejoice at being today’s new poodles.
Donald Ramotar lamented the abandonment of Cuban friends of decades vintage. The white man, that predatory pack of old and new colonizers, could ask them to give up their mothers, and men who revel in their impotence would swiftly do so. Guyana’s former president also spoke of the loud silence in the face of intensifying abuses from re-colonisers.
I specify them: Cubans, deportees, Chinese, and oil. Guyana cannot be a sovereign nation, an independent country. Guyanese cannot be sons and daughters of liberty. Not when their leaders are enslaved, and sell themselves for a kick from their white masters. Excellency Ramotar was polite -re-colonizers. I’m am incorrigible: enslavers and predators have taken over Guyana.
