Dear Editor,
I know Rev Gideon Cecil and based on his letter in Stabroek News, August 10, titled ‘Burnham achieved nothing’ I can clearly state that he writes from a vacuum in respect of our recent history. He has taken no time to investigate this, and cannot begin to understand it; for this I blame the PNC and our historians, that is, if the Reverend was interested anyway in understanding, much less appreciating the world of Burnham. I cannot conclude this paragraph without acknowledging that the ‘hate Burnham cult’ activated by the PPP has gone a far way in misleading many of those who believed that they were the avatars of cosmic truth.
I benefited from the atmosphere of creating a Guyanese consciousness that Burnham advocated; I was never a member of a political cadre, benefiting from overseas courses, etc, like many who now stab Burnham’s party and its constituency in the back. In fact I was one of the first five to be redeployed at GRB because I didn’t vote in the 1978 Referendum.
Forbes Burnham inherited a former British colony, our Guyana. His was the task to decolonize a social system stratified along strict class and Church power that ensured the continuation of ethnic privileges.
Socialism was the popular anti-colonial ‘Grail’ of the day, and Burnham needed a system to work with in order to reshape the local British colonials with their Victorian class pretensions, and liberate the social and psychological fetters that enveloped the vulnerable masses that looked to his government for a new dawn. Let me illustrate the task of decolonization from simple social levels: The “Nigger yard” that Martin Carter wrote about was not a metaphor; they existed all over Georgetown, and where the GuyOil station now is at Regent and Wellington Streets there was the famous ‘Federation Yard,’ to identify one. These yards constituted some fifteen to twenty-five families, with a middle of the yard standpipe where you learned to fight. There was one toilet and a bathroom at the rear of the yard; one seldom evolved out of the yard to higher education. In fact in the banks none of the beautiful and handsome Indian and African Guyanese brothers and sisters we take for granted today were invited in as employees. I could remember applying to JP Santos for a bond trucker labourer’s job, and was told to get a letter from my district priest before I could be employed; this was in the early seventies. On the landscape there were no South, North, Festival City housing schemes; no National Dance School or Cultural Centre; no Burrowes School of Art; no Carifesta; no Caricom; no NIS or Timehri Airport, highways, bridges and public works that stand the test of time – these were the things the Burnham era did. Burnham took the high ground and supported the anti-apartheid struggle. The GDF will one day tell their story; we became brothers in arms with Cuba in that moral struggle. It was bad geopolitics that bankrupted us with the hydro project; it does anger me that those with the data in their hands are not writing.
Burnham’s Guyana declined because, as the title of the late Tyrone Ferguson’s book expressed it the alternatives were, To Survive Sensibly (in reference to the passive obedience to the Western status quo of the day) or to Court Heroic Death (in respect of the political choices Burnham made). Those choices also opened our eyes to the oppressive, immature political Caesars who evolved to our distaste. Burnham nevertheless culturally and politically expanded our perceptions, but the cost also impoverished us.
Gideon with typical flare, made reference to Haitian poverty, indicating his ignorance of the phenomenal hard-won historical achievements of the Haitian people. He revealed his obliviousness to any of the political processes of isolation and the pressures exerted by the French and others to render that nation an example of the slogan, ‘as poor as Haiti,’ as if it was self imposed.
Yours faithfully,
Barrington Braithwaite
