The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel by Rahul Bhattacharya

Author:Rahul Bhattacharya [Bhattacharya, Rahul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

CONSIDER too Akingbade, who goes by this single epithet, Yoruba for ‘brave one who wears the crown’. As we walk down the line on East Coast Demerara, not many miles from the home of the Singhs, old friends call out to him as Charles. ‘Can I help it if certain ignorant specimens insist on calling me by my slave name?’

Mr Singh I had chanced on, but Akingbade I sought out. I tell him so. I had read his letters to the editor. Mr Singh called him a propagandist.

He is a heavyset, slow, tentative man, grey facial hair, in worndown mocassins, crushed black denim and a bright green dashiki. His hair is in a fro, his spectacles are thick and black, the styles of his hero, Walter Rodney, the great intellectual and activist assassinated during the reign of the dictator. But Akingbade has long departed from Rodney’s non-racial agitation. He aligns himself with the party thought responsible for the death of his one-time hero. It is the ultimate indictment of Guyana.

There is much that is inspiring in Akingbade’s African pride, the reclaiming of the name, the garment, his interest in old African cultures – the medicinal remedies, the soirées, the drumming sessions. But it has come in this instance with a blindness.

He cannot refer to Five for Freedom as criminals. They are exactly what the name says, freedom fighters. To him the crime spree was not a crime spree but an ‘armed African resistance’, a just response to police and state repression. The murders, abductions, arson, sexual violations against an ethnic community – it is not revolting, it is revolution. ‘A necessary and inevitable corrective.’

He points out that African petty criminals are executed or jailed but the drug barons, architects of the narco economy, are allowed to roam free. ‘Twenty-five metric tonnes of cocaine pass through the country every year. They have not made a seizure greater than ten kilos. They are apprehending the mules, the cargos are sailing through. The pickpocket is caught. The dons are safe, building their empires on blood money.

‘Resistance,’ he says, making his thick hands into fists. ‘Resistance by any means.’

He considers me not adversarially, but cautiously. He cannot be candid with me as the Indians are (who not only assume I’m on their side but that I have come specifically to bear witness to their persecution). So when talk turns to the black academic who put out the extraordinary thesis that an aim of supplanted Hinduism on these shores was the extermination of the black race, he does not argue in its favour. Yet he cannot bring himself to condemn it. Instead his admonishment is reserved for the ethnic relations commission which had the publication banned. ‘It is systemic. It is systemic.’

Anything could be inverted, corrupted.

I thought of something I had seen in one of the Five for Freedom handbills. The escapees, it said, would ‘fight for the African-Guyanese nation just as the sea bandits Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake and Henry Morgan had fought for England and been honoured by the queen’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.