Life is about stories. What story do we harbour about ourselves? How do we see ourselves?
The individual lives out a self-telling story. And a society builds and also lives out a story about itself.
Stories endure, knitting humanity across time and space, linking generation after generation.
Mankind’s enduring quest is to build a good story about ourselves.
Social media is all about this idea of mapping our story.
If America became the world leader in the 20th century, it did it with the “American story”, epitomized in the famous American Dream of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’. Through TV pop culture and brilliant diplomatic political leadership and even some global social engineering, the century of industrial progress became the American story.
Just so, Guyana has a story. And this story is dynamic, alive, ongoing.
How do we see ourselves as a nation? What kind of story are we building today?
Today’s world realizes that building a story is a design process, a deliberate effort to hone a good image. No longer do we believe that life just happens. We design life. We build. We dream and make the dream real. Design thinking, image making and social shaping have all now become big business.
We are coming back to see story telling as the enduring strength of humanity.
When we look at our nation, after nearly half a century of political Independence, what kind of story have we built, and even now, are building?
As we see Caricom failing, as we see our capital city falling apart, as we witness a quasi-democratic government refuse to allow local community governance, as we behold our national State media being so warped and deformed, our self-story doesn’t look good. We have to face that fact, and transform our posture so we make a difference for the next generation of Guyanese.
An important aspect of re-shaping our story is to re-write our history, so warped under the weight of a crippling ethnic political schism. For example, the story of Forbes Burnham, which encompasses a period covering nearing three decades of our history, needs a total re-visit.
We have come to be ashamed of who we are as a people because we believe some blatant lies and terrible myths about Burnham and his rule.
Even as Barbados celebrates Errol Barrow and Trinidad and Tobago upholds Eric Williams and Jamaica loves Michael Manley, we continue to demean three decades of our experiment with developing our nation.
Much of the Burnham story floating around as our popular history is simply not true.
In fact, Burnham was never a worldly billionaire harbouring a secret Swiss bank account. His children all live overseas, and his eldest daughter Roxane lives a very humble life in Canada with her husband Richard Van-West Charles.
Both Richard and Roxane are the simplest of folks, humble, friendly and not by any means rich.
Though both worked closely with Burnham, with Richard being not only Minister of Health, but also his personal doctor, one would expect any illicit wealth would have passed to the Burnham kids. Instead, after the President’s passing in 1985, all Burnham’s descendants migrated. That is a really sad situation.
We need to re-examine the myth about Forbes Burnham.
His real story is fascinating, and few of us know that story. This is a leader who shaped our nation, who led us through the most crucial time of our nationhood.
For example, he has strong Barbadian ties. Burnham’s grandfather was born to slaves on a plantation in Barbados. After emancipation, with the slaves free, the two sons descended from those slaves kept the name of their slave owners – Burnham. One son migrated to Puerto Rico, and the other, to Guyana.
In Guyana, James Ethelbert Burnham married a woman from the Sampson family at Lana on the Demerara River.
James became a Head Master at the Kitty Methodist School, now J E Burnham Primary School, and served the Methodist church as a lay preacher, something his son, Forbes Burnham, also did in later years.
This tidbit about the origin of Burnham, about the man and who he was, what made him, what motivated him, illuminates, for example, his absolute commitment to a close relationship among the West Indian family.
Forbes Burnham was to marry a lady from Trinidad and Tobago, Roxane’s mom. This lady was of the French and Spanish ancestry of St Vincent, whose family had migrated to Trinidad. Such history seems lost to our 21st century Guyana.
This man, Forbes Burnham, with such a diverse heritage of Caribbean history in his blood, tried to shape and mould our nation to play a role on the global stage. In the context of the Cold War, with Cuban-style communism threatening to swamp the new land, he battled to keep Guyana free and independent.
We need to know his total story. Why did Burnham do the things he did? Who was he? What happened to his legacy? Why did all his kids migrate after his passing?
Since 1992 we have come to celebrate Dr Cheddi Jagan. We uphold him as a Guyanese hero. It’s time to shed our baggage and see this country for who we are – our struggles and pains, our dreams and triumphs. And Burnham holds an important place in that mosaic.
If we could shape the next generation around a Guyanese story that inspires and motivates them to believe in moulding their destiny, we would go a long way in building a solid future for our nation.
Forbes Burnham and Eric Williams and Michael Manley and Errol Barrow all studied at elite schools in England. And in England they dreamed of building a new story for the peoples of the West Indies.
They came back and won political independence in their respective territories. They forged a great friendship among themselves.
And today, we have lost the story they started. To move forward with a healthy spring in our step, with confidence and zeal in the West Indian dream of Guyana as the breadbasket of the Caribbean, we must start seeing ourselves, our history, our future, our story, with new eyes, looking and feeling the heartbeat of those who shaped us into the people we are today.
