Brindley Benn was a man of strong political views. He was named in Sir James Robertson’s Report of the British Guiana Constitutional Commission 1954 as one of the six most prominent leaders of the People’s Progressive Party who “accepted unreservedly the ‘classical’ communist doctrines of Marx and Lenin, were enthusiastic supporters of the policies and practices of modern communist movements and were contemptuous of European social democratic parties…” He was cited in Sir Henry Wynn Parry’s Report of a Commission of Inquiry into Disturbances in British Guiana in February 1962 as saying “It is easier to stop tomorrow than to stop communism.”
Benn referred to himself, when he was only thirty, as a member of the party’s “ultra-leftist group consisting of Cheddi and Janet Jagan… Martin Carter, Rory Westmaas and Sydney King.” Even in his seventies, his ardour had not cooled. Explaining the evolution of his political thought, he confessed “I developed an attitude of rebellion because I couldn’t get on with certain members of the black middle class who were backing the colonial regime and that led me to join the PPP.”
As with so many young men, Benn’s worldview was influenced by the post-war zeitgeist of anti-colonialism, socialism and nationalism. On his decision to enter politics, he explained that, one evening while he was a teacher, he attended a street-corner meeting in Georgetown and heard Cheddi Jagan criticizing developments in the bauxite industry and in the colony. Jagan seemed able to answer the questions Benn had been asking himself about his retrenchment from Reynolds Mining and Metals Company − the American bauxite company at Kwakwani where he used to work. Benn was impressed and joined the People’s Progressive Party right away.
Benn plunged into politics and quit his job at the Indian Education Trust high school where he was a teacher after a disagreement with the headmaster Richard Ishmael. At the PPP’s second congress in March 1952, it was decided to establish a youth arm. Six months later this was done. It was called the Pioneer Youth League at first and Benn was elected secretary. It was renamed Progressive Youth Organisation in 1957.
The PPP won the largest number of seats in the Legislative Council in the general elections of April 1953 and nominated six ministers to the Executive Council (ie, cabinet). On October 9, however, a state of emergency was declared, the constitution was suspended, the ministers were expelled and the British army landed in Georgetown.
The PPP launched a campaign of civil resistance the next year and, under the Emergency Regulations, several party leaders were detained without trial or had restrictions placed on their movements. Benn, who had gone to New Amsterdam to do party work was stuck there from 1954 to 1956, ordered to report to the police daily and prevented from travelling to Georgetown.
The PPP suffered several neuralgic episodes in its early years, but Benn remained fiercely loyal to Cheddi and Janet Jagan during the two ‘Great Purges.’ In the first purge, the Jagans targeted what was called the “right deviationist” faction which included Forbes Burnham, Clinton Wong, Joseph Lachhmansingh, Jai Narine Singh and Robert Hanomansingh. They were formally expelled en bloc at the party’s congress of 1955.
Then came the turn of the “ultra-left” faction with whom Benn was once identified. Cheddi Jagan excoriated them as “bombastic Marxists” and for “attacking everybody at the same time.” The gang of four – Keith and Martin Carter, Sydney King and Richard Westmaas – understood Jagan’s addresss to be a public censure and left. Benn stayed. The reverses of his comrades, coincidentally, might have provided the opportunity for his own advancement. At the party’s congress of 1956, he was elected to membership of the Executive Committee and as Chairman of the People’s Progressive Party, the position previously held by Burnham.
Benn’s rise continued. After the state of emergency was lifted and a partially democratic constitution was restored, general elections were held in 1957. He was elected to the Legislative Council as the representative of the Essequibo Islands and the Interior constituency and appointed to the Executive Council as Minister of Community Development and Education.
It was in this unlikely portfolio, in August 1958, that Benn was selected to spearhead the government’s attack on the motion calling for British Guiana to join the West Indies Federation that had been tabled by PNC leader Forbes Burnham in the Legislative Council. The PPP had no intention of joining the Federation.
Benn burdened the motion with so many amendments − such as demanding a delay in the application until the Federation attained dominion status; deferring entry until Guiana attained internal self-government and postponing a decision until a plebiscite could be held on the issue − that, by the time the government side used its voting majority in the council, it had lost its meaning.
Although his regionalism was questionable, Benn’s nationalism was not. During his tenure of the education portfolio he organised the National History and Culture Week. He believed, in his own words, that “British Guiana can make a unique contribution to history only if we weld ourselves into one people, one nation and pursue one destiny.” The slogan stuck and One People, One Nation, One Destiny lived on to be adopted as independent Guyana’s national motto.
More turbulence in the PPP hierarchy secured Benn’s position when, in May 1959, two PPP members of the Legislative Council – Edward Beharry and Fred Bowman – quit the party. Cheddi Jagan, the Premier, dismissed Beharry and appointed Benn as Minister of Natural Resources. After the general elections in August 1961, Benn was appointed Minister of Natural Resources that was restyled Minister of Agriculture, Forests and Lands.
Benn’s tenure coincided with a surge in rural and agricultural development. This was based largely on a comprehensive water control system conceptualised by the engineer F H Hutchison in the early 1950s and which was being implemented since 1954 by the British government.
Sir William Halcrow & Partners, Consulting Engineers to the British Guiana Government’s Drainage & Irrigation Depart-ment, designed and began the construction of the country’s four major drainage and irrigation schemes − Boersarie, Corentyne (including Black Bush Polder), Mahaica-Mahaicony-Abary and Tapacuma − which by the early 1960s were beginning to come on stream. The Guyana School of Agriculture which had been conceptualised by Dr Alvro Chapparo of the Food and Agricultural Organisation in 1962, was also opened in 1963.
While government attentiveness ensured that rural development and the agriculture sector moved apace, urban development and the private and public sectors lagged. It need hardly be mentioned that the PPP saw the civil service as its natural enemy. For several years, civil servants had agitated for improvements in their working conditions without success in the face of the sharply rising cost of living. A commission was appointed under C W Guillebaud which proposed salary increases in September 1961 but the administration refused to implement the commission’s recommendations.
Benn, acting in the absence of the Premier Cheddi Jagan, refused to meet the British Guiana Civil Service Association in December to discuss its requests. But the fat was already in the fire and, from that time, a strike by civil servants and other government employees was all but inevitable. When the administration introduced a budget that imposed a compulsory savings scheme among other measures, a general strike was called during which there was destruction and disorder in Georgetown in February 1962. There was more violence and arson in 1963, associated particularly with an 80-day strike. The unions were able to prolong the strike because they took money from various US organisations into which funds had been funnelled by the CIA.
Benn’s first big challenge to his position in the PPP came from the party’s Senior Vice-Chairman. Balram Singh Rai made a bid for the chairmanship at the congress of 1962. Benn, both for his fidelity and the necessity to project a multi-ethnic image, was the Jagans’ favourite. Rai was defeated, claimed that the elections were manipulated, refused to recant and was expelled from the party. Rai recalled the cynical counsel of the Attorney General Fenton Ramsahoye who told him cryptically “Comrade, why worry. The party works in devious ways.”
Benn, though, saw no deviousness and thought that he was genuinely popular. He said: “My party credentials were better than his. I was in the party longer than him. I was chairman of the party. I was a minister before he became a minister. I was detained and restricted in New Amsterdam.”
After Cheddi Jagan astonished the nation by agreeing to the ‘Sandys compromise’ in October 1963, Benn was sent on a mission to seek the intervention of President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana in an effort to forge an alliance between the People’s Progressive Party and the People’s National Congress. As a result, Alex Quaison-Sackey, a Ghanaian official, paid a visit in January 1964. It was unsuccessful. But the knives were already out.
A campaign called the ‘Hurricane of Protest’ featuring huge rallies and ‘Freedom’ marches aimed at stirring up opposition to the elections planned under the system of proportional representation was launched in January 1964. The pro-PPP Guiana Agricultural Workers’ Union was mobilised to strike in the sugar industry to support the ‘Hurricane’ in February. The strike ignited arson and murders which degenerated into communal and criminal violence of the worst sort by March.
Benn and 31 other members of the PPP were arrested early in the morning after the Hadfield Street massacre in which the home of a prominent senior civil servant Arthur Abraham was ‘channa-bombed’ on June 12, 1964. They were detained without trial at Sibley Hall at Her Majesty’s Penal Settlement at Mazaruni, under the Emergency Regulations. Thus, it was as a political detainee that Benn’s seven-year ministerial career came to a close.
Benn was still in detention when general elections were held in December 1964. By the time of his release in 1965, the People’s National Congress-United Force coalition had been installed in government. Benn was uncomfortable with the unaccustomed role in the opposition and started to criticise his party’s lack of militancy.
He regarded the PNC-UF as a pro-Washington administration and saw the PPP as adopting a pro-Moscow stance. He himself moved away and established his own pro-Beijing Working People’s Vanguard Party (Marxist-Leninist) in 1968. Whatever notions Benn nourished of personal popularity in the PPP soon evaporated. Apart from his personal friends Thelma Reece and Victor Downer, not many working people accompanied him as he quit the PPP. The WPVP operated on a shoestring and never competed in elections. It printed a mimeographed newsletter, each issue carrying a different title − Beacon, Challenge, Champion, Combat, Crisis, Militant, Solidarity etc − to avoid compliance with the legal obligations for publication under the Newspapers Act.
As evidence emerged that the results of the December 1968 and of the July 1973 elections had been manipulated by the PNC administration, several opposition groups sprang into existence. Benn allied his WPVP with the Indian Political Revolutionary Associates led by Moses Bhagwan; the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa led by Eusi Kwayana, formerly Sydney King; and the Ratoon Group that included a few academics, to form the Working People’s Alliance in 1974.
Benn became one of Jagan’s fiercest critics. In newspaper articles he reviled PPP leaders as “crude political opportunists and unfit to lead what is left of the PPP.” As part of an ‘alliance,’ the WPVP became disruptive, opposing policies adopted by the other constituents to continue to pursue a working relation with the PPP in order to build an anti-PNC front. After the PPP at its 25th anniversary conference in 1975 adopted a policy of “critical support” of the PNC administration, Benn became openly censorious of Jagan and what he called the PPP “sell-out.”
As a result of these attacks, Benn was forced out of the WPA which he had helped to establish. Thereupon, in a bewildering ideological volte-face, he joined up with the ultra-right wing Liberator Party led by Ganraj Kumar and the People’s Democratic Movement led by Llewellyn John, to form the Vanguard for Liberation and Democracy. The WPVP simply withered away.
Benn’s name, astoundingly, appeared on the PPP/C List of Candidates for the 1992 general elections.
After the party’s victory and at the age of seventy years, he was appointed Guyana’s High Commissioner to Ottawa from 1993 to 1998. On his return home, he was appointed Chairman of the Public Service Commission and served also as a member of the Guyana Defence Force Commission’s Board, Police Service Commission, Teaching Service Commission, Guyana Lotteries Commission and Guyana Revenue Authority Appeals Board.
Brindley Benn had an interesting life. Born in Kitty, Georgetown, the second child of a working class couple − Samuel and Rosa Benn − he attended St James-the-Less (now F E Pollard) Primary School in Kitty, the Queenstown Roman Catholic School and the Central High School, but did not matriculate. After finishing school, Benn worked at the Reynolds Mining and Metals Company, Kwakwani, as a clerk. He was retrenched and returned to Georgetown in the post-war recession.
He began teaching at a high school in Broad Street and operated his own short-lived Georgetown Secondary School − located in Evans Street, Charlestown − for about three years. He taught at the Indian Education Trust, now Richard Ishmael Secondary School, then located on Carmichael Street, Cummingsburg.
An Anglican, he had been a chorister at St James-the-Less Church, and later choirmaster at the St Sidwell’s Church.
In his later years, he worshipped at St Paul’s Church, Plaisance where he was a member of its Men’s Guild. Along with Cedric Nunes and Philomena Sahoye-Shury who had also been detained with him during the state of emergency in 1964-1965, Benn received the national award of the Cacique’s Crown of Honour “For his outstanding service in the field of politics, especially in the struggle for the Independence of Guyana and the restoration of democracy in Guyana” in May 1993.
Brindley Benn married Patricia, herself a former chairperson of the PPP’s Women’s Progressive Organisation, who survives him with six of their seven children.
