THE recent decision by the South Africa government to confer on Guyana’s late President, Forbes Burnham, its highest national honour designated for outstanding foreign citizens–the Oliver Tambo Award (gold)– has drawn  strong criticism from two well known Jamaican scholars and Pan-Africanists, Dr. Rupert Lewis and Dr Horace Campbell.

Both have expressed shock and sadness while wondering aloud whether President Jacob Zuma’s administration had, in effect, posthumously awarded the former Guyana Head of State for the June 13, 1980 assassination of the internationally renowned Guyanese historian and Pan-Africanist crusader for freedom and justice.
While professors Lewis and Campbell were agonising over this surprising “recognition” by President Zuma’s administration, Burnham’s eldest daughter, Roxanne Van West Charles, was heading a family delegation to South Africa to receive the Oliver Tambo award, on behalf of her father, at a ceremonial event scheduled for yesterday.
Dr Rodney, noted for his widely treasured scholarly examination of “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, was killed in his car from a bomb explosion, subsequently uncovered as the work of an officer of the Guyana Defence Force (one Gregory Smith), who was secretly working as an agent of the then Burnham regime.
Smith died years later in nearby French Guiana, to which he had fled from Guyana following Rodney’s assassination. Despite a long waged campaign for an independent inquiry, with international support, into the circumstances of Rodney’s death, no such action was ever taken.
Horace Campbell, author of “Reclaiming Zimbabwe (The Exhaustion of  the Patriarchal Model of Liberation”), and Rupert Lewis, whose seminal work, “Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought”, would have had no problem in separately expressing, within days of each other, their grievous disappointment over South Africa’s  “Oliver Tambo Award’ to Burnham.

Stand of two historians
In a column last week for 1804 Caribvoices (Pan-Caribbean Voices for Integration and Social Justice) Online, Campbell noted that Oliver Tambo “was unstinting and unrelenting in his opposition to all forms of oppression.” Consequently, he firmly declared:
“It is my view that the granting of this posthumous award will demean the memory of Oliver Tambo. If there are still progressive forces within the African National Congress (ANC) they should rescind this award, so that  the scheduled April 27 ceremony will instead be one that honors the memories of Walter Rodney…”
Such a development was virtually impossible to expect. But in his own response that came as this column was being written, Rupert Lewis was quite emphatic:
“Anyone who witnessed Forbes Burnham on television, gloating about the killing of Walter Rodney by a bomb nearly thirty years ago, would be shocked to learn that South Africa is to posthumously reward him with the Oliver Tambo award…
“It is not that Burnham did not contribute to the anti-apartheid cause, but, unlike other Caribbean political leaders of the time, he had eliminated individuals in the political opposition within Guyana. Rodney was the best known of these opposition activists, and the most prominent Pan-Africanist in the 1970s…”
The historian Lewis further recalled that while  at the University of Dar es Salaam (in Tanzania) from 1966 (the year of Guyana’s independence) until  the early 1970s, Rodney was actively engaged in debates and educational programmes of several of the Southern African liberation movements, including the ANC of South Africa.
Therefore, in Lewis’ reasoning, the posthumous Oliver Tambo award “can only help to cover up Burnham’s assassination of Walter Rodney…”
It is quite relevant to record also the viewpoint of a senior researcher for the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), Tula Dlamini, who has been following reactions to the Tambo award to Burnham (who died on August 6, 1985).
As part of his own contribution on 1804Carib Voices in relation to the controversy sparked by South Africa’s decision to confer the Tambo award on Burnham,  Dlamini said that “regardless of the merits or demerits of the positions taken against the award, it is within reason to support those who are calling for a serious debate on this issue…
“For example,” he contends, “the  South Africa government must explain what rationale is there for the  honour to be given to Burnham, when it has never been given to Julius Nyerere (Tanzania’s first President who died in October 1999).”

WPA’s silence
In this column last Sunday on the surprising award to Burnham, I noted that it had been similarly conferred much earlier to Jamaica’s Michael Manley (2004) and Guyana’s President Cheddi Jagan (2005) for their respective contributions to the dismantling of the vicious apartheid system in South Africa. The President of South Africa then was Thabo Mbeki.
It was also pointed out that while Burnham could not be objectively viewed as having been involved—like Jagan—in the struggles for Guyana’s political independence, he, like Manley, was quite active, at various levels, in regional/international efforts to end the apartheid system in South Africa.
The objections now being raised by well known respected scholars and Pan-Africanists to Burnham as a recipient of the ‘Tambo Award’, in the context of the 1980 assassination of Walter Rodney during the height of political oppression and killings under the PNC’s dictatorial regime, must, therefore also be troubling for at least the frontline leadership of the WPA.
At the time of writing, however, the WPA remained publicly silent on this very controversial political issue of interest nationally and internationally.
While it is recognised as an integral segment of today’s main parliamentary opposition — A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) (which is largely viewed as ‘the old PNC in new political clothing’), the WPA may yet find it relevant to make a public intervention. We shall see.