Hold Your Applause: Irfaan Ali “Gestures” Toward Reparations in Guyana
On Wednesday, September 20, President Irfaan Ali of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana appeared as a guest on Good Morning Britain (GMB). Ali’s exchange with English television host Richard Madeley launched viral headlines after the latter threw nothing short of a tantrum in his line of questions to the Guyanese premier. Madeley questioned the legitimacy of Caribbean reparations and rubbished the debt owed by “someone who maybe had [a slaveholding] ancestor seven or eight generations ago.”
Ali earned applause for his poise in response to the indignant Madeley. Ali declared this historical degradation the “greatest indignity to the human being, and that is the slave trade,” before adding, “not only did you benefit during the slave trade, and your country develop, but look at what it cost the developing world.”
The bout crescendoed when Madeley, betraying his colonial arrogance, turned his attention to the British Royal Family:
One of the points that you’ll be making today is about our royal family, and you feel it’s not just about the finances involved for you in terms of reparations about slavery, it’s about gestures. And you think the British royal family should make gestures, don’t you? What do you mean? Hand over a palace?
Madeley’s caricature of Ali nonetheless echoed the clamour by CARICOM leaders for gestures — apologies and symbolic reckonings — with the history of slavery and its legacy in the Caribbean. Ali’s exchange with Madeley coincided with the opening of the 78th United Nations General Assembly in New York. Historically, the UN summit serves as a principal staging ground for the populist masquerades of Caribbean leaders and politicians.
Here, at a safe distance from their own citizens, regional statesmen adorn themselves in seemingly militant language of reparations, climate justice, and solidarity with Cuba and Haiti against U.S. sanctions and intervention. In fact, a finer ear reveals that CARICOM statesmen previously committed to invade Haiti with Kenyans and other African military forces as a veil for U.S. Empire. Moreover, they actually rolled back commitments to preventing ecological disaster in the Caribbean.
In his appearance on GMB, Ali invoked the recent apology of the Gladstone Family for their slaveholding heritage in Guyana as a model for the “gestures” he would like to receive from Buckingham Palace and Downing Street. In this fiery exchange with Madeley, though, he failed to mention the crowd of Guyanese protesters that surrounded the Gladstone apology in Georgetown, exposing the apology as an empty gesture that fails to transform the lives of the Guyanese working people in any material fashion.
Again, it is at international forums such as the UN and COP Climate Summit where these masquerades prove most effective. The protests and dissent of Caribbean commoners are kept far from view. Moreover, members of the political class dispatched to these forums are largely educated at the region’s prestige secondary schools where they are taught the language and comportment to engage in rhetorical melees with foreign ministers and media correspondents.
This sound postcolonial education is less valuable in Caribbean leaders’ exchanges with ordinary people and the working classes. In order to remedy this gap, leaders like Ali resort to masquerades in which they engage in gestures of their own. When it is most successful, Caribbean leaders surround themselves with popular musicians and lyrics or chatter about climate inequities to provide cover for their own economic programmes of multinational development, corporate tax holidays, and dispossession of communal land holdings.
When this masquerade fails, as it did when Jamaica opposition leader Mark Golding shamelessly tried to enrich his remarks with Jamaican Creole — a language for which he and many local elites conspicuously lack proficiency — it reveals the distance that is always present between ordinary people and those tapped to represent them in the international arena. That these gestures remain a masquerade, rather than an actual commitment to the self-emancipation of ordinary people in the Caribbean, requires that we distinguish the reparations mas from its more authentic expression.
Some elites and politicians are more adept than others at wielding popular language and culture to captivate the masses. This charisma is misleading. Despite their “gestures,” this class falls laughably short in their efforts to cultivate the popular will of working people toward self-directed power. After a half century of independence, the promised future of dignity and autonomy remains incomplete. But the masquerade continues. This exclusive class of educated statesmen can entertain (or even inspire feelings of pride and dignity) but cannot discard their ambitions to preside over police states that contain the masses of Caribbean people with indiscriminate violence.
So, why did Ali’s call stop at gestures in this case for Caribbean reparations for slavery? The short answer is that gestures — especially those concerning the history of the Caribbean before 1834 — are most valuable to him and his compatriots in the Caribbean political class.
Gestures help to improve the diplomatic standing of Caribbean nation-states in the privileged arena of international politics. They promise a seat at the table (or a perch outside the window) of powerful entities such as the UN Security Council. Moreover, the unequivocal defense of reparations for slavery by a descendant of indentured servitude may be viewed strategically by Ali and his Indo-Guyanese dominated People’s Progressive Party (PPP) as it makes outreach to Afro-Guyanese voters.
Ali projects a “One Guyana” policy but stiff arms the opposition party — the overwhelmingly Afro-Guyanese PNCR — while making direct appeals to Afro-Guyanese people. This is crafty in one respect. He may finally find terms for a partial recognition with opposition leader Aubrey Norton. On another, it reveals a tendency in Ali’s personality to aspire to be a maximum leadership personality.
Ali holds an opportunity, and he may still take it, to advocate reparations for the descendants of Indo-Guyanese indentured servants who are today barefoot, homeless, unemployed, toilers not unlike their Afro-Guyanese counterparts. We might ask why Ali did not address indenture in his remarks, despite tracing his ancestry to this tragic epoch himself. The short answer is that Ali — along with his counterparts in CARICOM — views reparations for slavery as a negotiation tactic, a “gesture” to facilitate the transfer of wealth to state actors and private sector businesspeople in the region.
To invoke indenture would require Ali to confront the enduring inequalities in Guyanese society in which ordinary people are condemned to persistent poverty while their designated representatives enrich themselves in the racially divided arena of party politics. For Ali to advocate reparations for indenture, he would have to acknowledge the distance between propertied professionals like himself and the poverty faced by the Indo-Guyanese masses. One cannot sustain the politics of racial insecurity in that manner.
What slavery and indentured did to Guyana and the Caribbean, from the point of view of Ali and his associates, is it underdeveloped Caribbean capitalism, their personal pursuit of wealth. It impeded peripheral Caribbean capitalists ability to establish themselves on equal footing with European industrialists, financiers, and armies.
But ordinary people in the Caribbean demand more than gestures and the occasional masquerades of elite representatives. We at Clash! share the desire for genuine reparations for the crimes of slavery and indenture in the Caribbean. Our agenda is not national or regional capitalist development but direct political and economic power for those of all ethnic groups who have been left behind.
If Ali chooses to join us, he may activate the Guyanese people in a national movement for reparations, convening workplace and neighborhood councils to discuss their material needs and desires for a comprehensive reparations program. It is valuable that an Indo-Guyanese, there have been others, have publicly defended the African descendants of the enslaved. Let us say, until it can be confirmed otherwise, that Ali’s intentions are good. But, Clash! does not believe that the Caribbean political class, in their capitalist aspirations, truly represents an oppressed class of people. There can be no “One Guyana” or “One Caribbean” united around peripheral capitalist schemers. That is what Ali and his colleagues advance in their masquerade.
Rather, convening workplace and neighborhood councils so the homeless, hungry, and burdened can discuss their material needs and desires can be transformative. This can contribute to popular control of a comprehensive reparations program. If reparations remain an issue to be debated and gestured at by Caribbean leaders in their exchanges with European governments and television anchors alone, it will remain nothing more than an empty and divisive masquerade in which the ruling classes spar with the lowest forms of intellect like Richard Madeley and his ilk.
If Ali fancies himself a real challenge, he will debate the terms of reparations with the ordinary people of Guyana from neighborhood to neighborhood, village to village, and workplace to workplace. Until then, we will hold our applause.
