Last Monday was the 100th birth anniversary of Forbes Burnham, and not surprisingly, it occasioned widespread retrospective analyses. Burnham and Jagan are Rorschach tests for Guyanese, and if nothing else, confirm our national schizophrenia. While narratives in the present should bring us together rather than further divide us, when these two individuals are invoked, that becomes quite a challenge. As such, it behooves us to allow the facts to speak for themselves.
Back in 1979, the year before he was assassinated by Burnham (now confirmed by an official CoI), Dr Walter Rodney published a pamphlet – “Peoples Power; No Dictator”. He declared Burnham a “dictator”, and explained what he meant, “A dictator is defined as one who wields absolute power…There is nothing big or small which lies outside of his personal intervention.” Rodney compared the Burnhamite dictatorship to Hitler’s totalitarian Nazi Germany, while noting that even though because of scale, Burnham’s strutting around in a general’s uniform was closer to “comedy and farce”, his “megalomaniacal” actions had the same disastrous effect on the populace.
In 1988, in a paper “On the Dictatorship”, I developed the totalitarian claim by using Carl Friedrich’s “seven-point syndrome” abstracted from the experiences of Stalinist Russia, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. These were a single mass party led by ‘the dictator’; an official ideology; a system of terroristic control; control of mass communication, state coercive institutions, the economy and social organizations.
The personality of the leader is a most crucial variable in the determination of the precise form of the regime. Burnham’s overriding characteristic was his ambition, and this shaped his life from childhood, as he adopted Machiavelli as his guide. Winning the Guyana Scholarship in 1942 from Queen’s stirred immense pride among African Guyanese fighting to climb the race-based social ladder, where the Whites and Coloureds were above and Indians below. He was recruited from England by the Jagan-led PAC after he completed his legal studies as one who could rally the African section for the soon-to-be-formed nationalist P.P.P. He became Chairman of the party under the leadership of Jagan, whose position he craved and fought for from the beginning. The party was an agglomeration of ethnic representatives who insisted they represented the “working class”.
The ambiguities and contradictions inherent in this approach were myriad, but were masked by the electoral mobilization in the first general elections under universal franchise in 1953. They were, however, exposed as soon as victory was won and the “spoils” were to be distributed and exemplified by Burnham’s persistent pursuit to be the leader from 1953; his splitting the PPP in 1955, and his formation of the P.N.C. in 1958. Strategically, he exploited Jagan and other “extreme” leftists’ stance in the era’s geopolitical realities, and rallied the “beleaguered” African and Creole sections.
The dominance of Jagan as leader of the PPP and the entry of Indians into positions formerly dominated by Creoles and Africans raised concerns about the implications of their “minority” status. Their discomfiture was exacerbated by the indignity of being possibly dominated by a group whose culture they had been taught was “heathen” and “inferior”. “The horror! The horror!!” The national ethos defined Guyana as a “White-bias Creole nation” with Creoles and Africans as guardians of its ethos, and inheritors of the nation on the departure of the British. Consequently, after an initial scepticism by the Coloureds pre-1955, Burnham did not have much difficulty in legitimising his drive for power by articulating the fears of the Creole and African sections when he launched the P.N.C. and provided a vehicle to address those fears. Interestingly, Rodney identified Burnham’s “racist attitude to Indians” from the account of the latter’s sister in her pamphlet, “Beware my brother Forbes”, while his wife Patricia claimed “Burnham and his regime promoted inherently racist policies”. One of Burnham’s reasons for assassinating Rodney was the latter exposing his racism during the Arnold Rampersaud trial, and generally attracting broad Indian support.
Burnham’s fusion with the United Democratic Party (U.D.P.) – the political offshoot of the League of Coloured People – and Black nationalist Eusi Kwayana in 1958 to create the P.N.C. was a natural development. It combined his support among the lower-class Africans with the strategic support of the urban-based Creole and African middle class. This has since remained the raison d’etre of the PNC, even as today it struggles as the representative of a minority bloc to broaden its support in a now nation of minority blocs.
