Yesterday was 38 years since Burnham passed on to the land of the ancestors. Imagine that!! More than half of our population weren’t around when the man ran roughshod over the country and forever etched into our national consciousness the image of “DICTATOR”!! He’d wielded that power to grind us all into the dirt just to satisfy his insane compulsions to “remold” us in his image!! Guess his image was folks going around hungry, homeless and naked – which his “doublespeak” dubbed “feed, clothe and house the nation”!!
It was more that irony that Burnham passed just a few days after “Emancipation”. The irony being that by that time he’d taken Guyanese almost back to the days to the days of slavery – when life was nasty, brutish and short. The man even invoked slavery by riding around the city on his (high) horse decked out in jodhpurs, and wielding a riding crop something fierce to get folks out of the way!! He took particular pleasure in hauling hoity-toity civil servants to Hope Estate – “hope”….get it?? – and have then jump out of the way into canals – which they had to clean!! Yep…he had this fantasy of being an Overseer!!
By the time he’d gave up the ghost, he’s banned most imports that constituted the staples on which we’d been socialised to exist on. Bread and roti specifically which became verboten after he banned wheat!! “Buy local!!” he shouted – looked down on the masses passing by on the East Coast Road from his verandah at the Big Manja house at Belfield!! Yet when it became clear to him he was gonna go, his last request was for can of imported condensed milk for his to savour!! After all his pretensions on swirling cognac and nibbling on canapes, he had to lick some condensed milk!!
Yesterday, as his successors paid tribute to their “founder leader” they should reflect on the irony of that designation. That he was the “founder” of the PNC all on his lonesome – it was a one-man show!! Now we know there were a host of others who joined he and the bunch who’s departed from the PPP – like the bunch from the League of Coloured People. As Rodney pointed out, “Burnham encourages around himself individuals who are weak or corrupt because he then exercises vicious control over them.” We can now understand why the Sanctimonious Granger was one of his favorites!!
Burnham’s epitaph is also best summarized by Rodney, who advised that “Our language must express not only ridicule but anger and disgus” when it came to Burnham. And that’s why they ironically called him “King Midas – “anything he touches turns to shit!”
…ego
Did you wonder why is it that in all those pics of the faithful at Burnham’s mausoleum yesterday there were all those Purple Flowers?? Well, Burnham’s megalomania didn’t just have him ridiculously strutting around in a two-star General’s outfit – when he’d never even been a Boy Scout!! He also fancied himself as ROYALTY!! So his favorite color was “purple”, the colour of royalty!!
We return to Rodney who has some advice for the present generation on Burnham: “Dictators have a way of building statues in their own image. When a dictator is overthrown, the population seizes the chance to destroy or remove the various things which were meant to glorify him. But (also) the population must learn to despise the falsehoods which surround the man; they must refuse to accept that he has any halo of greatness around him.
They must remove any confusion in their own minds and see the dictator clearly for what he is
— a villain and a monster, the principal enemy of the people!”
…image
Finally Rodney informed us : “In Latin America, the dictators are known as “gorillas” — as distinct from the freedom fighters who are “guerrillas.”
We want it known that Guyana too has its “gorilla,” and that he is appropriately named “King Kong.”
That’s the real Burnham
