Wild horses cannot hold me back from Benjamin Gibson’s funeral today

AUGUST 25, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

You can probably tell how some of your childhood friends will turn out, but others may induce heart alarm when you see how they have evolved. I am not surprised that the biggest name in the First Assembly of God is Pastor Raphael Massiah. Raphael and I were boyhood friends on Durban Street, Wortmanville and we lived directly opposite each other. Raphael’s mother had particular objections to me playing with him and being in her yard. Looking back now at those days in the sixties, I could understand how Raphael’s mother was thinking. Raphael’s parents were very decent, middle class people who would have been sensitive to very lower class kids, with dirty appearance hanging around their children and being in their yard. Those were hundreds of moons ago, but I can distinctly remember me and Raphael playing in the yard, and his mother coming out and ordering Raphael inside. I’m sure if I can remember, Raphael can. I am not surprised Raphael is a pastor. He was different from the other ten-year-olds on Durban Street. He was quiet and very polished. Kean Gibson’s evolution has indeed surprised me. We entered UG at the same time, in the same Faculty. She was doing English. I was a History major. Kean Gibson in those days was a huge name in the sport of lawn tennis. At that time, tennis had its own quarters named Non Pareil Tennis Club opposite the Government Technical Institute on Woolford Avenue. It is still there, but with a different name. This was where the Portuguese section of the population hung out. More correctly, middle class Portuguese. The administrator of the club was a loud-mouthed Portuguese fellow named Joe Babito. My father worked there as a groundsman at the time when Kean reigned. I wonder if Kean remembers him. I doubt whether they had another Black woman in lawn tennis in that club. At UG, Kean socialized with a group of snobbish Indian middle glass girls. I remember one of them, Andrea Seepersaud, was particularly elitist in her attitude. If I had to predict how Kean Gibson would have turned out, I would say she would have married a light complexioned middle class or Portuguese man. Today, Kean is a serious African-rights activist who has made formidable sociological adumbration on the nature of PPP’s racism. I was at UG the same time as Kean Gibson, never met her or talked to her, but around the same time I got to know her wonderful father, Benjamin. Gibson was much older than me, but the kind of personality he had, you took the liberty of being informal with him. People close to him called him “Gibbie.” I called him that. There are some human beings that when you look at them you can see the genetic inability to be formal, bureaucratic, arrogant, standoffish. Gibbie was one of those persons. You know when you were in his company you could be informal. Such was the man. I listened attentively last Friday at the church service when Nigel Hughes recalled his mother’s experience in defiance of the authoritarian edicts of President Burnham. Nigel had done the same at the eulogy of his father. We read so much about the people who defied Burnham in the seventies, but the bravery of Nigel’s parents, Christobel and Clarence Hughes, has never been recorded. We know of their courage through the funeral eulogies of their son. It is the same with Benjamin Gibson. What Nigel Hughes is today with his human rights praxis, Gibbie was in the seventies. So many large names we can easily remember in the seventies in the fight against authoritarian rule; if asked to name five or ten, perhaps Gibbie wouldn’t make your list. But he was there lending his legal services without charge to the cause of democracy and human rights. I came to know and like him well. He definitely had a meaningful influence on me during my UG student days. I lost touch with him when I left to study abroad as the seventies drew to a close. After I returned to Guyana, I became a columnist with the Catholic Standard and the Stabroek News. One day I was jogging on the seawall and this guy with his leg strapped up called out to me, congratulating me for one of my columns. It was Gibbie. I was delighted to see one of the human rights lawyers who had made a big impression on me years back. Strangely, I never introduced my mom to Gibbie, but when I was away, I was informed he was her lawyer in a landlord-tenant dispute. Goodbye Gibbie! Rest in peace!