Thursday will be the 28th death anniversary of Cheddi Jagan, who was born in 1918 and passed in 1997. As such, his life spanned some of the epochal events of the 20th century. Starting with the “Great War” that ended in 1917, it ended with the Far Eastern financial crisis of 1997, as a consequence of the capitalism’s latest phase – financialization.
Jagan would have appreciated those historical bookends as much as the intervening “pages” that saw his native Guyana roiled by global forces like so much flotsam and jetsam in the clash between the contending ideologies of capitalism and communism. The year before his birth – 1917 has witnessed two epochal events – giving birth to Cheddi, as it were, since they shaped his life. The first was the end of Indian Indentureship on March 12, by the British that exploited labour as a bridge between slavery and the so-called “free labour” dispensation that still enmeshes our bodies. In slavery, human beings were literally property – “chattel” with absolutely no rights. With indentured labourers, they had to provide labour for a fixed period under defined conditions enforced by a penal clause that in effect, “bound” them to the plantations.
The second event was the Bolshevik October Revolution that saw the monarchy of Russia violently overthrown and replaced by a Communist “dictatorship of the proletariat”. As the USSR, it presented itself as an alternative to the capitalist world system that had evolved from the mercantilist colonial Empires and of which Guyana, in the “West”, was a part.
Jagan’s parents were both indentured children brought by indentured single mothers to Guyana, and experienced first hand, the exploitative system on plantations in Berbice. His father was a “Driver” at Port Morant, which would have placed him in the middle strata on the plantation between ordinary workers and the Overseers. But, as he recounted in his book “The West on Trial”, he witnessed the wretched conditions of the former as compared with the luxury of the latter. As Jock Campbell, later Chairman of Bookers and owner of the neighbouring Plantation Albion noted, the stables of the estate mules were like palaces compared with the logies of the sugar workers.
Jagan’s parents were able to send him to a local private High School and then in 1935 to Queen’s College in Georgetown to complete his secondary schooling. There, he would encounter the racial and economic prejudices that typified the urban middle class whose children he interacted with. He left for College in the US in 1938 during the Great Depression, which had driven down wages in the sugar belt and precipitated riots across the Caribbean.
In the US, while qualifying to become a dentist, and augmenting the hard-earned money sent by his parents in Guyana, Jagan was influenced by the racism against African Americans and their lack of democratic freedoms. His political awareness was sharpened as he married a leftist student nurse, Janet Rosenberg and then returned to Guyana in 1943. Here, WWII had sharpened the contradictions of colonial rule, and the Moyne Commission’s Report of 1939 had already recommended opening up of the political space.
The radical Jagan organized a Political Action Committee (PAC) in 1946 and was elected to the Legislature in 1947,under an expanded but still restricted franchise. The same year, India and Pakistan won independence, spurring local efforts to achieve that status. After universal franchise was granted and elections held in 1953, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) won overwhelmingly, with Jagan as Leader and Forbes Burnham as Chairman. And the modern period of Guyana’s political history was launched with Cheddi as the father of the nation.
Unfortunately it was a history of betrayal by Forbes Burnham, as Britain and the US used the bogeyman of Jagan as a communist “fellow traveller” of Moscow, to oust the PPP from office and install Burnham in 1964. The PNC then rigged elections until 1992.
Jagan, to his credit, maintained a democratic alternative, and the PPP was returned to office in 1992, after the communist threat collapsed.
