Dear Editor,
Politics, as History, is rarely treated to objective analysis. The exchange of letters and opinion, the editorials, the discussion on internet fora, have been particularly animated on the subject of the late President L F S Burnham. The exercise seems more about sculpting a final and commonly satisfying image of the “Comrade Leader,” than it is about the O R Tambo award.
But now two things are clear. The first is that, in Mr Burnham’s case, both the personality and the political history continue to elude definitive or a consensual portrayal. The second underscores a generality: it is that persons and institutions, especially those we imagine removed in space, time or interests from the contentions at play in any situation, are perhaps no more likely to arrive at an unbiased reading and judgement than we would. Perhaps then, it would be for us, in this generation, to make a preliminary pronouncement on the PNC and its leaders. And on the Rodney incident. Many of us have lived in space and in time close to the events and people.
Following publication of the letters and editorials a conclusion emerges. It is that, by all objective standards, Mr Burnham deserved the award on the merits and criteria customarily applied. He was not Pinochet or Indira Gandhi.
To strip history down to its essentials, he put in place a form of socialist policy that, in its broad outlines was supported by the politics and all major domestic politicians of the time. The irritations of its operational inefficiencies, like the Licence Office problems we have up to today, seem to have revealed the primitivity of the underlying national culture when it came to the delivery of services. The inevitably exaggerated charges of racial bias surge from local cultural aberrations. The struggle to remove and replace him, was in large part due to the generational changes inherent in and necessary to the politics of elitist leadership in most countries. And particularly as a mark of the post-colonial conditions we have witnessed in many places since the alien powers were replaced by their satraps. But it (abrupt generation change) has rarely worked, and a certain type of monumental leadership requires other methods. Also, in our case and from the economic standpoint, a proud and defiant non-alignment would have visited upon us the pressures and sanctions which, after the oil price shocks, led to budgetary problems that would highlight and exaggerate the anachronisms of the economic model we had inherited and sought to modify.
So Mr Burnham had three main orders of factors against him. There was the ideology and the economics that emerged from it. There was the philosophy of governance that replaced the colonial era of poor service delivery with a system based on paramountcy that also often failed in its delivery of greater efficiency. And then there was the implacable hostility that, at the popular level, pitted one ethnic group against the others. The fact that the cultural group (and not solely racial) that he and his party represented came to incarnate many aspects of the mores of the colonisers was another aspect that complicated matters.
It was partly as a commentary on the dysfunctions that arose from these factors, that the political opposition that came to congeal as the WPA, earned its arms. Essentially, it would represent an evolutionary product of the very social and cultural and ideological values that Mr Burnham’s generation had inherited, developed and nurtured. It was a response (the WPA) proper to the post-colonial politics of the Caribbean and was understood and identified with by many in the Caribbean on those grounds.
But one thing we need to constantly bear is mind is that despite the difficulties and stresses asssociated with the period, Mr Burnham and his party was loved and respected by many. He died, Hoyte came. The faithful had by 1992 renewed their affection. After all, the party represented more than the difficulties of its mistakes and its victimisations. It personified, if one may say so, the Creole (as a multi-racial being) in its usual self-identification as a progressive, resolute and culturally dynamic force. Intra-group quarrels would be forgotten.
Those insisting on a version of political history that wishes to see Rodeney and the WPA in eternal, Pan-Africanist, conflict against a retrograde and oppressive PNC are fighting the wrong battle. The contending forces are essentially united by shared ideas of the direction and implementation of some general concepts. Of racial equality, social egalitarianism, justice and a distribution of economic reward based on meritocracy, a ceaselessly dynamised Caribbean and new global order… ‒ political party, state agency, parliament ‒ and the engineering underlying their functions.
One of my grandmothers, born at the start of the 20th century, had witnessed the whole period of nationalist awakening. She had lived through the protests of the thirties and the hearings of the Royal Commission, the earlier creation of the trade union movement, the visits of pandits, sheiks, Marcus Garvey, the return of Dr Jagan and Mr Burnham after their studies, the PPP split, the riots of the sixties, etc. For her, as for many in both camps, the political leadership, poured into one human being, represented more than the foibles or strengths of that one man.
I had a conversation with her on the Rodney death a few years after the event. I had always considered “Mother,” politically semi-neutral. She was on some committee in her Church and the Methodist or Congregationa-list prism was the one through which she usually viewed events. She was of mixed race from Victoria village. Containing in herself all of the tensions and histories of her epoch and condition.
I asked her what she thought of Burnham after the fact that people said that Burnham had killed Rodney. “We can all criticise him. But… Rodney insulted him” ‒ or some such comment.
Followed by some lines on all that the man or party had done for the people and the country. I realised then that there was, in her reading of events, this matter of respecting your elders, an inalienable value in the Afro-Guyanese sphere in which she was brought up, and the matter of managing your conflict so as to not overstep the limits. Rodney, no matter how right he had been would never lead the country after a free vote. The hard core of Burnham faithful plus the Jagan followers would always outnumber the new movement. Burnham, like Jagan, had emerged from historical time and space and both became something iconic. Still, in the seventies, higher in the pantheon than the Rodneys or Roopnaraines, usually seen as leaders in waiting. Who would, in the world as seen by those around me, serve an apprenticeship and then perhaps inherit the mantle. Burnham had the advantage of having created the party and movement in terrible conditions. He therefore had earned our undying gratitude and respect.
But beyond Mother’s generation, the PNC was in constant renewal. Allegiance formed in the preceding generations would be handed down to the young. Some of my family and many of my grow matches were active. Eugene Gilbert, Garvey Harry, Donald Ainsworth, Fred McWilfred.
The party was in a “whosoever will may come” period of its development. Its door would have been open, to a Rodney. Had he so wished. Had he so chosen. Battling a Titan such as Burnham is and had been was to underestimate the circumstances in a way that Che Guevara obviously did.
Burnham is larger than the incidents of the sixties and seventies. Whatever the status of the victims in a world where the smallest of us is of equal worth. Burnham had become, with Cuffy and Critchlow, one of the necessary heroes with which every people in similar circumstances identified, and to whom they attach qualities that they see as defining their essence and giving life to their values. Some assume this iconic stature while still alive. Chavez or Khomeini or Mandela, like Abraham Lincoln or George Washington or Churchill, each personify a value to which their countrymen remain attached. One of these is fortitude in times of trial. And if Burnham, on the other hand, and in the dyadic relation of elder statesman/younger aspirant, would be accused of anything in the sad history, then, according to the Creole-Guyanese value system, it would be of not exercising the patience and forbearance expected of the older wise.
In our reading then, and putting the worst colour on things, the fact seems to be that both sides over-acted. It becomes understandable then that the hostilities were abandoned upon Rodney’s demise and after the excesses became evident and the provocations on one side or the other, were halted. It was inevitable, one knows, that a rapprochement of the two sides would follow.
Rodneyites have therefore not continued Rodney’s example in many ways. For what is essential and unifying in our country is the set of values based on justice and, immediately, social harmony. The PNC and WPA share these values. Those WPA “activists” still living mentally in the seventies and in hostility to the Burnham of that time, ought to consider that some attitudes are foreign to our culture and hostile to the concord and that unstoppable impulse to social harmony that is an important part of our patrimony. It is a valuable thing because, while present markedly in many Caribbean cultures, particular histories have shaken it loose in others.
The case of the two Jamaican professors currently vilifying Burnham in the name of Rodneyite Pan-Africanism is unfortunate. But perhaps, without caricaturising Jamaican culture, their attitude has to be understood both in light of the special affection Jamaicans have for Rodney and the way conflict is handled in the society in which that affection occurs. In 1979 about 750 Jamaicans were killed in partisan political violence. Evidence is that both parties, JLP and PNP were caught in a round of aggression or defence (one with American support it was said). The target was the Manleyite socialist government. Manley, like Burnham, would defend himself. In Jamaica political allegiance and violence is trans-generational. They cannot expect the same of all of us here.
In Trinidad, also in the seventies, there was an army mutiny. The government reacted and defended itself. The mutineers were detained, then, generally forgiven and rehabilitated.
In judging the WPA members who were preparing insurgency, one is certain that the cultural trait that tends to re-integration of the rebels and political equilibrium, has and will continue to dominate. This tendency to forgive and forget is a good Guyanese trait, then, and it ought to ignore those who do not share it. For in a final analysis both Burnham and Rodney were heroic, admirable figures.
Burnham, after the violence of the sixties, did not begin to witch hunt opposition fighters. It was a case of stopping all pursuit in the interest of national harmony. A grand moment in our history.
Burnham, after Rodney’s passing, seems to have abandoned all pursuit and persecution of the other activists. He was, in his way, faithful to the tradition of his forebears. It is the way we are to live if one day we emerge to harmony. The few beating the racist drums and igniting hate are operating from a different system of values. But we will overcome.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
