Dear Editor,
I regret the lateness of this letter. Others were more ready than I. Mr Annan Boodram’s evidence (SN, December 31, 2009) that Walter Rodney had no legacy that could be itemised was based on my reply to him during a radio programme in New York. All I said, he recalls, was that “The WPA has done some things.”
This is one of the few accurate things in his letter. The radio programme to which he refers was one in which we took part by telephone by WBAI’s invitation to discuss a book by a sister of Gregory Smith (Assassination Cry) on her brother’s alleged non-involvement in Rodney’s assassination. The author also sought to implicate the WPA in Smith’s escape from Guyana and landing in Cayenne.
Boodram’s report on my answer, though not on Guyana’s politi-cal processes, is more or less correct. Regarding his question to me and my answer, I could not answer such a serious question in a soundbite or two. A proper answer, not so much for him but for the audience, would have meant leaving the mischievous book aside and expanding on another topic.
Not only would the audience have been disappointed, but I would have had to encroach on the time available to other panellists. It is the kind of answer the moderator could not fairly allow.
Well, that is all I could say without helping Mr Boodram to hijack the discussion from the planned analysis of a book and discuss instead whether or not the WPA had flopped after Rodney’s death on June 13, 1980. I did not know then that Mr Boodram saw Dr Rodney as an entertainer and that he merely wanted support for his thesis.
The mere need to study Dr Jagan and Dr Rodney, one born in 1918 and the other in 1942 in competition when they were not, and not opposed to each other, seems odd, and suggests some kind of wider insecurity.
Mr Boodram quotes from Mr Bisram in order to argue that Dr Jagan’s Marxism was not radical and not dogmatic, all to distinguish an astute Jagan from a naïve Rodney. We should not forget that although Dr Jagan was generally a pleasant, engaging personality, he was also a writing man. For example, in his National Patriotic Front proposals (1977) he wrote that it was necessary for the masses to be “imbued” with Marxism-Leninism. In distinguishing the PPP’s “socialism” from the PNC’s “image building reforms” Dr J wrote in another place that the PPP would insist not only on workers’ control but also on the closest political, economic and cultural links with the socialist world so as to ensure their solidarity against imperialist economic and military aggression against Guyana. He wrote that solidarity included supplies of military equipment as in the case of Cuba and the United Arab Republic. He also called for “scientific socialist (Marxist-Leninist) development of civil servants, teachers, army and police officers and the people generally.” He did not say they would have the right to choose.
To argue about Dr Jagan as “radical” or ”dogmatic” is really not the issue. We shall have to see what those words mean then and mean now. These qualities show themselves in various ways. There are ways in which I find Mr Boodram over wise. For him to suggest that I am puzzled about Dr Walter Rodney’s legacy makes me get to how he sees the world.
Then, safely quoting this time a wider section of people, Mr Boodram argued that while ideologues saw Dr Jagan as a champion of the working class, “his grassroots supporters, rightly or wrongly, saw him as Bapu, the father figure a la Mahatma Gandhi…”
Mr Boodram may not know half the story. Large sections saw Dr Jagan not only as Bapu and also as a reincarnation of a stellar eastern deity, but they did also “rightly or wrongly” see him as a champion of the working class, as Mr Burnham’s followers earlier also saw him. His “grassroots supporters” did not need a specific ideology to revere Dr Jagan, who was able to have an equally strong appeal both to the international left and the “grassroots supporters” even when the ethnic contradictions had been revealed. In an age of champions, Dr Jagan was not their only champion but their leading and most articulate champion after 1947.
Mr Boodram applauds the present Mr Dev who wrote with much truth that the past leaders Burnham and Jagan “must be judged within their contexts.” For Boodram, however, Dr Rodney being a mere transient and beguiling transient or shadow, is not entitled to being judged in context. Perhaps he had no context?
In 1957 an election year, Dr Jagan declared at a public meeting at Mahaicony that if the Hallet Boundaries Commission did not draw up the electoral constituencies in a fair manner, he and his party would take up arms. A major ethnic group felt disturbed and threatened. In 1957, the same election year, Mr Burnham declared at a public meeting in Georgetown that if the PPP won the election, the Guyanese people could regain their freedom only by a bloody rebellion. A major ethnic group felt disturbed and threatened.
Let me add in fairness, that though I myself did not call for violence, I called for retaliation in 1964 and the Archbishop of the West Indies denounced “the damnable doctrine of retaliation.”
A quarter of a century after election year 1957, not “fighting for a seat” or contesting an election, a young man, Dr Walter Rodney, put forward a choice present in any freedom struggle, and has earned from an authority like Mr Boodram what amounts to a dismissive curse. In July, 1980, Walter Rodney declared at a public meeting in Georgetown: “The PNC must go and by any means necessary.”
In Rodney’s case, the statement was made after the country had gone through four years of deeply divisive ethnic violence in the sixties. Yet he was addressing a large crowd of all races living in and near the city. In the cases of Jagan and Mr Burnham in 1957 after the 1955 split, they spoke before there was any experience of African-Indian communal violence. There is no need for Mr Boodram or Mr Dev to “revise” history on Jagan’s account. The sheer size of Jagan’s role in the political life of Guyana after the Second World War is massive enough.
To cleverly represent Walter Rodney as being wedded to violence is a problem of quoting words and ignoring them at the same time. Most people reading Rodney, and Malcolm X before him, choose to quote and at the same time forget a key word “necessary” which has the force of a conditional. We can learn a lot about “legacy” and “context,” if we wish by these incidents.
Mr Boodram should be told, in case he does not know, that the reasons he gave for the popularity of Rodney’s meetings are strikingly like those excuses given by the PNC leaders, including Mr Burnham at one period – “novelty” and especially “curiosity” and an entertainment factor. Perhaps that is the one point on which they agree. But he also adopts through Mr Dev, CLR James’s conclusion on Rodney’s “naïvete.” I have not heard Rodney’s critics on the manner of José Martí’s death.
Although he is at pains not to reveal his own political culture, except in broad national and patriotic terms, Mr Boodram indirectly tells a lot about his preference. He can find not a single positive quality to speak of in the departed Rodney, a non ruler. Everything he says of Rodney has a touch of disdain and he does not hide it. Here he goes, at the same time revealing what he expects of a political leader or path-breaker. His gut political culture leaks out when he states in his letter his tests of a true leader:
“Furthermore, Rodney did not build any political entity that endured with viability; did not lay down any policy/programme that was visionary or impactful; did not establish a cadre of leaders that forged ahead with any degree of political success. His appeal was transient and personality-centred rather than premised on the potency.”
Mr Boodram in effect criticises Rodney in the lines just quoted for not being a maximum leader, for not performing all the named tasks of a maximum leaders. Boodram wanted him to justify himself by controlling, doing everything. Yet when disappointed he calls WPA “a one man show.” Some of the most creative, resolute and critical minds in the WPA were women’s. He really means a one man show with nothing to show, because this one man did not do what Kim Il Sung and perhaps Jagan (whom, he does not call a one man show) are credited with doing. Mr Boodram throws all the negatives at Walter Rodney even though some are in conflict with others.
What is the significance of this attempt to turn Walter Rodney into someone in all respects unworthy? It has to be self serving. Mr Boodram sees Dr Jagan in the PPP as a good man drowning in a sea of unworthy habits and dictatorial processes. I myself challenged the right of the PPP to impose democratic centralism on the nation. Boodram in his December 31 letter paints a sorry picture of how it worked and works inside the party. The legacy he describes is not an uplifting one. Only members of that party can confirm or deny it at first hand.
I fully agree that Dr Jagan was not seemingly lured by high living and extravagant glitter in the early part of his reign. Yet after the much celebrated “return to democracy” he allowed himself to be hosted and feted on a guided tour by Asian investors in Guyana, accepting these conflicts of interest as no doubt due to one who had endured decades of exile from office.
But forced exile from office does not justify conflicts of interest on the part of government leaders. One researcher has made a link between Jagan’s Asian tour and the way in which certain forest laws and codes were administered in relation to certain foreign investors. I as a WPA MP in a rigged parliament under Mr Hoyte raised the issue of the late Mr Burnham’s assets, and was roundly abused. Later his widow released a statement. However, the question of Dr Jagan’s estate has been ignored as though he was never head of state and government, even by writers who affirm his honesty. We have all seen the Mahatma’s possessions in a small photograph. I hope this concealment of rulers’ assets is not going to be a Guyanese tradition. It is unhealthy.
The PPP has not yet commented on the fact that I had to do the work of the DPP after the 1997 elections and file a private prosecution against the suspect Mohamed Salim or ‘Beast,’ a PPP representative after SN reported that the police had found him with a large set off lethal firearms and ammunition in his house. Mr Boodram does not reveal to the present generation that at the time of the arguments between him and Jaguar in New York, Dr Jagan and others had experienced four years of ethnic conflict in the sixties. Jagan knew therefore as perhaps the Jaguars did not that he was in no position to lead an armed struggle, if it made sense then, unless he was inviting an ethnic confrontation. It was based on experience and not as Mr Boodram has suggested, on foresight.
The fact is that the only political figure who could call on the nation to remove the PNC by any means and not excite fears of racial violence among the people was Walter Rodney. And they had known him in the flesh for only five years. The people did not turn to anyone and ask for a listing of Rodney’s legacy. And such a call is not entertainment – not with the Riot Squad and the House of Israel on the street.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
