Let opinions flourish

Heeding the UN’s call for this year to be observed as the “International Year for People of African Descent”, in Jan 2011, the then PPPC government launched what promised to be a year-long series of events. From the reaction of some domestic African groups to the Government’s programme, however, it signalled it was going to be a year-long war of sniping and attrition. These groups, which surprisingly included the erstwhile “multiracial” opposition Peoples National Congress”, accused the Government of excluding them from the planning process. The painstakingly detailed riposte of the Minister of Culture – under whose bailiwick the commemoration falls — was of no avail. The groups boycotted the successful launch, which was, ironically, dominated by very credible African-Guyanese persons.
Now, in and of itself, there was not much untoward in that reaction. Even though the Minister was able to identify a host of individuals and groups from the African community that were integrally involved in the planning process, if the complaining organisations felt they were sidelined, it was their right – and indeed their duty — to highlight their opinions. What we found troubling was the approach they took to those African organisations and individuals that did participate and confirmed that the planning process was broad-based. They were branded as somehow less authentically “African,” and in the end, betraying “the side”. Seven years later, with the “slipper on the other foot”, these groups are now sidelined.
This proclivity to force individuals into a “group think” mentality, which is also behind the Chronicle’s firings, is one of the major obstacles towards the development of a democratic culture in our country. And it must be resisted. The essence of democracy is that the individual must be permitted, nay encouraged, in placing his/her opinion in the public realm for the consideration of others. And those “others” in the public realm must give such opinions the respect that it deserves: there is, after all, the inalienable presumption of equality. The premise that some “know better” than others, and by which premise they arrogate the right to belittle and excoriate opposing views, is the sure sign of an anti-democratic mindset.
But the danger goes deeper. In his classic “On Liberty”, John Stuart Mills wrote: “Society can, and does, execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs to be protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by means other than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.”
It is purely a matter of contingency that we are born into the social group in which we have found ourselves. This is not to deny that the social conditions determined by that contingency have to a great extent shaped our identity, and indeed much of our circumstance. In fact, the declaration of the “International Year for People of African Descent” was in acknowledgement of that truth. But the declaration in based on the belief that such circumstances are not immutable; they can be transcended, and individuals must be left free to navigate their own way.
In the end, we are all part of one humanity. Those that practise the “social tyranny” of labels, insults and ostracism to bludgeon into conformity those that refuse to define their identity only by opposition to others in the society are ghettoising their group. In the multiracial, multicultural, multireligious community that was created by imperial happenstance, we cannot continue in perpetuity not to reach across our now self-imposed barriers.