Dear Editor,
I asked your readers and you kindly to overlook the length of time it has taken me to raise an issue included in Conversation Tree by your columnist Ralph Ramkarran and published in your newspaper since February 2024. It was his comment on the recent book by Dr. Clem Seecharan, Cheddi Jagan and the Cold War.
We are lucky to have people like Mr. Ramkarran, Dr. Hinds, and other scholars who continue to engage in disputable political, historical, and constitutional issues. Only recently did someone read to me the part of Mr. Ramkarran’s article dealing with my strong response to an argument made by Dr. Cheddi Jagan at the 1966 conference in New Amsterdam of the People’s Progressive Party.
The statement, which I can quote from memory, gave the PPP leaders contemporary reasoning for advising the Party’s conference to decline the urging of a small number of executive members of the PPP to change its position and to move the party towards joining the impending West Indian Federation. Mr. Ramkarran responded to Dr. Seecharan’s treatment in his book of Dr. Jagan’s argument and my later response in 1956.
In his comments, Mr. Ramkarran implied or said that I regarded Dr. Cheddi Jagan as racist and referred to some of my written arguments as exaggerated. As the world knows by now, I am at a ripe old age, typically marked by failing memory. It is because of this human failure typical of my demographic that I respectfully ask your columnist, Mr. Ramkarran, to bring to the attention of your readers the occasion or occasions on which I, a Guyanese inflicted with writer ‘sitch, described Cheddi Jagan as racist.
I have often commented on Dr. Jagan’s responses to issues involving what we call Race. I have also been asked by people everywhere interested in the politics of Guyana whether, in my opinion, Dr. Jagan was racist. I know what my answer has been, as I am a child of the era of anti-fascism and believe I have convictions arising from that age about racism, which I do not confuse with an interest in racial affairs and outcomes.
Bearing in mind the likelihood of a failure for self-excusing memory, I ask Mr. Ramkarran kindly to remind readers, including me, of the occasions on which I have described Dr. Jagan as racist. I know that in a book by Frank Birbalsingh, An Oral History of the PPP, Ms. Jagan is quoted as saying that in a reply to Dr. Jagan in 1963, I called him a racist. At the time, I did not think it productive to challenge the statement, although I knew it was due to someone else’s faulty memory.
Even now, I can recite the gist of my response to Dr. Jagan’s invitation to a conversation. It included the sentence, “All I have is my little Black soul.” It was a time when the PPP leader wanted to be seen as a person willing to consult widely, and my reply was defensive since it was a moment when people were positioning themselves in the good graces of likely winners. I wanted nothing to do with that kind of relationship.
In political life, we drift into excesses despite our basic groundings, and I may not be free of this failing. Therefore, it would help me if Mr. Ramkarran could justify his sense of how my evaluation of Dr. Jagan amounted to what he has claimed in his comments on the aspect of Dr. Seecharan’s book.
I can repeat, if necessary, the response I have given to scholars and others who have posed to me over the decades the question of whether Dr. Cheddi Jagan was racist.
Yours truly,
Eusi Kwayana
