I lived in white man’s country. The non-white record is awful

JULY 19, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

I am a non-white citizen of the Third World, born and raised in a non-white country. No one in this entire world can sell me any nonsense of how bad the white world is and what the white world has done and is doing against the non-white peoples of the world. If I am in any forum, anywhere in the world among the most learned anti-white scholars, I would reject that as nonsense and the persons peddling it as idiots. I don’t care if those scholars are the greatest brains civilization produced. From the time I was born I have been hearing how the white man told us to close our eyes and pray, when we open our eyes, the white man had our land and we had their bibles. Is that a fact? The answer is yes? Is it a fact that the white man exploited the resources of the colonial world? The answer is yes? It is a fact that the Western conqueror tampered with our culture and our psychology. The non-white world had produced scholars as great as Europe and they have showed us the ravages of colonialism. Edward Said, CLR. James, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon among others. I grew up, became a grown up adult, and I am still hearing how bad the white man was and how permanent has been the damage of the white man on the colonial mind. Well, there is a simple way out. If the white man has so ravaged the psychology of the non-white races, then why do we still want to live as damaged goods? Why don’t we all commit suicide because we would never achieve dignity, innovative ideas and free minds? What the hater of the white man doesn’t tell us is what we have done to ourselves long after the white man left. And that our lack of development, inventions, attractive ideas, modern thinking, may be due to genetic factors rather than the permanent destruction of our national cultures by western plunder. What the anti-white preachers don’t show us in the Third World is the damage we have inflicted upon each other long after the white man took our resources and left. What have we done with our countries since he left? Have we reclaimed our dignity? Have we treated our own non-white folks with more respect or is it the opposite –that we are crueler than the white man has ever been? I remember the words of Joshua Nkomo. After the success of the Zimbabwean revolution and he fell out with Robert Mugabe, he wrote that he was never more persecuted in his life than under his own people. You look around the world today and you will find that the richest woman in the world is not the daughter of a ruler in any white country. But she is the daughter of former guerrilla and current president of Angola, José Dos Santos. We blame the white man for every major depravity we commit in the Third World yet the white world is far more civilized than us. We put young men in jail in Guyana for mere possession of a smoking utensil, something that is unimaginable in any white country, including New Zealand and Australia. The white colonial destroyed our national cultures and our institutions and what have we done to reclaim them long after the white man left? In this country, one of the poorest in the world, a president spent sixty million American dollars on a Marriott Hotel to cater for foreigners who will never come, while the country’s only university falls to pieces. By what asinine logic can we in the Third World blame Western penetration for the mess we are? The white man’s country was just as primitive as we are now in the Third World but the white man, out of nationalist love, fashioned a modern nation. In white man land, the leaders are in a hurry to build bigger universities, larger trains, cleaner hospitals, while we in the Third World, long after the white man left, are nowhere near those goals. Here in Guyana, we have mere months before we celebrate fifty years of Independence. What is there to celebrate? Certainly not the achievements of human rights. In which white country could a child be expelled peremptorily from primary school for the mere possession of a cell phone? This morbidity takes place quite often in Guyana. In Guyana fifty years after Independence, you sue the police for brutality, you sue your employer for wrongful dismissal, you sue the state for violation of your rights and the case comes up fifteen years later – long after you are dead and gone.