Bridgetown, Barbados — I’ve long marvelled, and still do, at the remarkable perspicacity, in some matters, of Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, the first paramount leader of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana, now dead 24 years to date (August 6).

With a mischievous glint in his eyes and that familiar chuckle “heh, heh, heh, heh”, he at times remarked that whatever Rickey Singh did so also would do Hubert Williams, and wherever Hubert Williams went there also would go Rickey Singh…because they are like each other’s shadow.

He called his humour ‘tantalise’…or teasing… very familiar to Guyanese as a form of making fun of others, which other cultures would refer to as ‘ragging’ and by various other names.

And because he felt we were two of the same and virtually inseparable, he took some strange delight in personally ‘rechristening’ us Hubert Singh and Rickey Williams, and would at times, in the presence of his political colleagues, address us as such.

There were occasions where at cocktail parties he would switch the surnames of our wives, referring to Rickey’s Afro-Guyanese wife Dolly as Mrs. Williams, and to my wife Eugenie, of part Indo-Guyanese stock, as Mrs. Singh.

We all took it rather light-heartedly, but knowing the man, we were always on guard against any serpentine spring with bared fangs.

It must have pleased him no end, and our actions seemed to match his expectations, when first one and then the other de-linked from the staff of Guyana Graphic Ltd., publishers of the country’s leading daily and Sunday newspapers, and a regional paper called “Berbice Times” for the eastern-most county.

In the face of growing Burnham control, and legislation in 1971 which provided legal cover to political manipulation of the privately-owned media enterprises, and Burnham’s strongly influential personal relationships with the top echelon of the Graphic’s editorial department, Williams resigned to become an independent operative in Guyana for the London-based Reuters News Agency.

It was of considerable import, too, to that decision, the tragic death in a road accident of then General Manager D. A. “Bob” Grandsoult, the strong hand that had steered the company, and about which event Williams had remarked to the Reuters head office that “the Graphic is dead”.

In the case of Singh, his going was the direct result of pressure exerted by Burnham on the then British owners of the newspaper, which had first moved out of its founding Booker sugar ownership into the hands of the Mirror Group of Cecil Harmsworth King, and then became a property within the spreading empire of Roy Thomson, a wealthy and very influential Canadian, subsequently deemed the king of Fleet Street, and recipient of a British peerage.

Among the several experiments in the connivance of Burnham and big business to silence Singh was the extraordinary banishment of this foremost Guyanese political reporter to England to cover cases in a magistrate’s court for a provincial newspaper within the Thomson chain.

Extraordinary in the sense that this was a reversal of standard colonial practice where political and other sorts of irritants (prisoners, also) used to be sent packing off to the colonies to get them out of the way; but in Singh’s case (a virtual unknown outside of his own jurisdiction), he was sent up to the Mother Country from a recently colonial possession – to get him out of the way.

When he eventually decided that being away from his family and wasting his talent covering innocuous court cases was totally unacceptable, to the utter dismay of the Thomson authorities in London, he high-tailed it back to Guyana.

No one but Williams had been advised of his intended return, and it was Williams who met him at the airport, chauffeured him home, and when the door was opened, was there to witness the shock and great joy of his family.

Not too long thereafter both Singh and Williams were to relocate in neighbouring Caribbean countries. One in Trinidad and Tobago, the other in Barbados. In 1979, both the Singh and the Williams families were resident in Barbados.

Burnham must have chuckled “heh, heh, heh, heh” that his thesis about the two was alive and well…whatever one did, that likely would the other do.

I was to discover subsequently that some of his thinking had been shared with J.M.G.M. “Tom” Adams, the then Prime Minister of Barbados, when in attempting at his office to sort out an issue over which we had differing perceptions, he revealed that Forbes had warned him about me and Rickey… that we were very difficult people to cope with.

It is now a part of historical record that the relationship between Rickey and Mr. Adams reached their lowest point during the Grenada invasion by American troops in 1983, that Rickey’s residency permit was revoked and that he was invited out of Barbados, a decision enforced despite the intervention of the gentleman politician, now Sir Henry Forde, who then held responsibility for immigration matters in the Adams cabinet.

What may not be in the general record is that Rickey found a means of frustrating the Adams intent by exploiting the island’s image as a tourism destination, although it was a formula that carried a significant financial cost.

He did initially exit on a one-way ticket, but returned shortly thereafter on an extended visit as a tourist, with a ticket showing a date of departure; and when that time came, he would depart and return to do it all over again.

It must be the case that the immigration authorities knew what was happening, but winked at his tactics, for if they had so wished, they could have frustrated them.

It was my view at the time that Mr. Adams himself, having made his initial public strike against Rickey, did not wish to incite an international human rights/freedom of expression issue and further sully the island’s reputation, so he saw through what Rickey was doing, but decided to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’.

Following Mr. Adams’ sudden death in March 1985, Rickey enjoyed much better relations with one-year successor as Prime Minister, Harold Bernard St. John, later to become Sir Harold.

However, it was not until the return to office of Prime Minister Errol Walton Barrow, at elections in 1986, that the Administration regularised Rickey’s position by granting the Singh family residency status, though even before that, Rickey had turned down an offer by the Canadians of refugee status in Canada. “I am not a refugee,” he had responded. “I have a country to which I can return at any time.”

Now to cap this discourse as to the quaint expectations of Mr. Burnham…that whatever happens with one, so will it with the other:

In 1996, very suddenly, Rickey, a dynamo at all times and an exceptionally high-volume producer, suffered a serious heart attack. He was rushed to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Bridgetown, 10 minutes drive away from his residence, where the surgeons’ skill saved his life through a triple-bypass procedure.

Careful food selection and preparation, specific medication resolutely taken as prescribed, and rigorous exercise have served to ensure a return to full functionality; and Rickey’s journalistic output has remained prodigious.

But somewhere out there – in the netherworld, or where-ever – the sound “heh, heh, heh, heh” might have been heard, for Mr. Burnham those years long past had been wont to suggest that whatever affected the one would by some means and in time apply equally to the other.

And so it was that 12 years past 1996, on the 14th of July 2008, there I was, presumably ‘as fit as a fiddle’ with very comforting readings during all phases of my periodic medical check-ups, but suddenly stricken by a heart attack: a big one, the course of recovery from which would take me thousands of miles away from Barbados.

In an attempt to erode the applicability of Mr. Burnham’s thesis, one has to snatch at crumbs of comfort, little bits of differences: things like

(1) Rickey was rushed immediately for medical attention, while I was at home alone for two-and-a-half days, ignorant of the fact and trying to self-treat for suspected food poisoning.

(2) Local surgeons at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital saved Rickey’s life: I was air-ambulanced to Boston’s Caritas St. Elizabeth’s Medical Centre where specialists dealt aggressively with the attack, but avoided surgery.

So, now, we are both survivors: And as our lives course through the excess years granted beyond three-score-and-ten, it is only human to wonder: What else might Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham have seen that we two are yet to experience? ….“Heh, heh, heh, heh”.