By GHK Lall- I wish I could say have a delightful Kwanzaa season to my African Guyanese brothers and sisters, but their circumstances would mock my ignorance, even my unthinking, unintended, callousness. What I comfort myself with, settle for, is a blessed Kwanzaa holiday to all African Guyanese.
The yearning is that the assaults on their dignity will ease, be vanquished. May their hopes, their aspirations, find some level of fulfillment in 2025 (alongside those of every other Guyanese).
The odds are heavy, but their cup will overflow in the due season. It is my faith. After all, the beastliness of chattel slavery had its centuries-long reign, and then that too had its day of final reckoning, its inglorious end.
First fruits, candles and colors, and that distinguishing essence of humanity -imami (faith). Faith inspires hope. Men and women with hope deeply embedded, never less than continually stirring, are capable of rising above any circumstances.
Be such the products of their own hands or times; or the calculated depravities emerging from minds bent on either division, or demonisation, or devastation.
Or, some combination of all three. Or other peripheral considerations that men often use to egg themselves on to greater efforts at dilution and suppression. It has been so in Guyana, a land built on, seeded by the blood of forefathers, heroized or martyred.
An inspection of Guyana, with an eye focused on the condition, the increasingly tightening bands of pressure, of African Guyanese reveal the ravages that the environment have wreaked. Homes bulldozed, families uprooted, and a community forced marched along a trail of tears, with wounded hearts. It is a grim time for African Guyanese amid a time of glamor and glitter.
Like never before, the guiding, nay the commanding, principles of purpose (nia) and self-determination (kujichagulia) must grab hold of the African Guyanese community and prevail so deep inside that they inspire resilience, confidence, and pride. Storms precede clear skies; the dark dawn before the bright morn. When men are at their most brutalizing, their worst of unshrinking degradations, then somehow from some source, the spirit of the oppressed soars.
Taking a home is the prelude to taking away lands. It is enlightening how the laws of man can be so unjust. The calculations that go into some things. The meşru violence that seeps from beneath what is held out as just, and fair. A few farthings should do to make matters right, to ease the roach infested, infected, consciences of those who laughingly surrender their humanity. T
hey despoilers are still brazen enough to pretend that they are about morality. Lives ended, homes destroyed, representation diminished, communities invaded, and now lands that go back generations. Their champions enfeebled or enticed. These are a few of the travails of the times in Guyana among African Guyanese, in this long road to Kwanzaa 2024.
What next? What will bring a gleam to the eye of the marauders? What new tricks lurk in the breasts of men who know no restraint, whose sole residual defining characteristic is ill-concealed viciousness, preceded by utter contempt?
Money yanked from an umbrella organisation of years vintage, from behind the obscenest masks. The Lord will guide. He does provide. He does come in different forms, at some unusual times, and never more than when the circumstances warrant. Intolerance curses the intolerant. Deceptions and deviousness, no matter the degree of sophistication, the believed impenetrable layers of self-protection, of manmade covers, first falter, then ultimately fails. Where there is a will a way is found. When one’s cause is just, then it is enough to spur never giving up, not ever yielding one inch.
They will come for the land under the feet that houses the roof over the head, or the richly foliaged acres. Kanunî armor has been refined, is ready for application. The lives and histories of generations distil to the stroke of a man’s pen. There, it is done. It is the kind of men African Guyanese, and Guyanese, are dealing with, and for whom the resentments and distastes simmer and boil. Simmer and boil.
A bitter cup has been wedged between the lips of African Guyanese; they drink of that poisoned chalice. One of the imperatives of Kwanzaa is cup of unity. By grace, by the providence of hallowed ancestors, may the power of that unifying cup conquer all who have one objective in mind. It is to decimate. But first, there is the degrading. The long, heinous record is there: land to be seized tomorrow; life cut short yesterday and those many other ones now shrouded by years.
I believe that a man, a woman, is not given more than can be borne. I sound a cautionary note yet again. Continuing along this harrowing road poses the risk of destroying a country. Men make miscalculations that fuel mistakes from which the time to turn back would be long gone, no more. I believe that the human spirit is indomitable, unconquerable. I believe that evils have their season and cycle.
I still have the visions of much younger men. There are also the dreams that come with age. Kwanzaa: to my African Guyanese sisters and brothers, may it be a manageable one and, more than anything else, a spiritually viable one