Veteran extraordinaire: Shirley Edwards and the People’s Progressive Party

Dear Editor,
On Tuesday, January 23, last comrade Shirley Edwards would have celebrated sixty-one (61) years as a member of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP).
Today the veterans of the early 1960s are not as prominent as in the years of “struggle for free and fair elections…”
As the PPP gears up for the May 2024 Delegates Congress, it is important that the current cadres, including several who have served Guyana with distinction at the leadership level, remember the tremendous contributions of stalwarts such as the late Philomena Sahaoye-Shury and EMG Wilson, both of whom shared experiences dating from the 1961 General Elections (West on Trial: Cheddi Jagan, pp. 188/205-207).
Comrade Edwards, who was employed as a schoolteacher up until becoming a member of the Party, was by all standards a frontline activist.
In the millennium the others who would have been affiliated with the country’s first working-class political party include Parbudyal Sattan, Harry Persaud Nokta, Clinton Collymore, and Gharpaul, as well as the widow of BH Benn (former Agriculture Minister 1961-64), Patricia Benn. Virtually all the other activists have passed to the Great Beyond.
But to genuinely appreciate the political alignment of grassroots activists of the PPP dating from the years characterised by the PPP “in Government but not in power…”, it would be instructive to note that there existed a selection process that sought to facilitate education as political knowledge based on the Accabre College Land of Canaan course in Party History, Socialist Paradigms, Mobilisation, and International Solidarity. These invariably consisted of two weeks with the option of a ten (10) week seminar/workshop training for preparation and assumption of leadership roles based on scientific socialism and Marxist dialectics.
In retrospect, activists such as Shirley Edwards can be compared to other radical or social revolutionaries in the Eastern Caribbean, notably Jamaica, where anti-communist paranoia was to have a devastating impact on the progressive forces during the era of the Manleys.
Cde Edwards survived the installation of the Burnham dictatorship and never wavered despite the slurs and vitriol directed at Black PPP members.
She remained consistent throughout the PNC’s 28 years, and with the Restoration of Democracy in October 1992, she served Guyana as a Member of Parliament.

Yours Sincerely,
Lawrence (Eddi)
Rodney