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The Tambo Award is normally conferred on distinguished South Africans and foreign personalities for their varied contributions in helping to end the long, dehumanizing governance system of Apartheid in that country, which has long distinguished itself as a towering ally of the poor and oppressed worldwide.
For those who may wonder about this sudden postponement of the posthumous award to Burnham, they just have to recall the ruthless assassination of the internationally renowned Guyana-born historian, pan-Africanist and political activist, Dr Walter Rodney in Georgetown on the night of June 13, 1980, and the puzzle should quickly clear up.
The award is named after the internationally-revered leader of the African National Congress (ANC), which has been governing South Africa since the collapse of the apartheid system.
Among previous recipients of the award over the years from the Caribbean region were Jamaica’s late Prime Minister, Michael Manley; Guyana’s late President, Dr Cheddi Jagan; and the former long-serving Commonwealth Secretary-General, Sir Shridath Ramphal.
The announced award for Burnham was scheduled to have been ceremonially received by his eldest daughter, Roxanne Van West Charles, last month (on April 27) to coincide with the annual ‘Freedom Day’ national honours ceremony in Pretoria.
Quiet deferment
But the surprising and yet unannounced decision to indefinitely defer the conferment of the award to Burnham has followed militant opposition from various quarters, in and out of the Caribbean, as well as in the USA and also among South Africans.
Critics have been openly writing and commenting on whether the late Guyanese President was in effect being honoured for the assassination of Walter Rodney?
Clearly not!
But the current South African administration of President Zuma cannot be unaware, or unmindful, of the serious political implications in conferring the Tambo Award on the late Guyanese Head of State, a concern that could well have influenced both former Presidents Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thambo Mbeki, against doing so during their respective administrations.
Anti-dictatorship campaign
It was against Burnham’s documented dictatorial regime that Walter Rodney was passionately spearheading national campaigns in his homeland when he was killed in his car by an assassin’s bomb in the Guyana capital.
The heinous political crime was linked to a secretly recruited member of the local army (the Guyana Defence Force), Sergeant Gregory Smith, who was speedily facilitated to flee Guyana by the Burnham regime to find refuge in nearby French Guiana, where he died some years later.
Smith — who was traced to French Guiana by this columnist, as a regional correspondent for the then Caribbean News Agency (CANA) — was to first plead innocent before claiming that the tragedy “was an accident…” He declined to offer details.
Was it “accident” that had then President Burnham openly “gloating”, as recalled last month by the Jamaican historian and Pan-Africanist, Dr Rupert Lewis, author of “Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought”?
In joining the outcries against the announcement of the Tambo Award to Burnham, Dr Lewis noted in a statement (published earlier in the Observer):
“Anyone who witnessed Forbes Burnham on television gloating about the killing of Walter Rodney by a bomb nearly 30 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 the Caribbean political leaders of the time, he eliminated individuals in the political opposition within Guyana. Rodney was the best known of these political activists, and the most prominent Pan-Africanist in the 1970s…”
Another well-known Jamaican scholar and Pan-Africanist, Dr Horace Campbell, had earlier noted that Rodney was “unstinting and unrelenting in his opposition to all forms of oppression” that included the Burnhamist dictatorship in Guyana…”
Therefore, he felt that “granting this posthumous award to Burnham will demean the memory of Oliver Tambo. If there are still progressive forces within the African National Congress they should rescind this award…”
Well, the award was not conferred, and NO official explanation was offered to coincide with the ‘Freedom Day’ honours ceremony in Pretoria on April 27, for which Burnham’s eldest daughter had earlier been invited.
George Lamming’s agony
The internationally famous Caribbean novelist and social commentator, George Lamming, for one, would be quite pleased over the deferment—hopefully, cancellation– of the award to Burnham.
I recall Lamming’s memorable eulogy for Rodney’s funeral at the Brickdam Cathedral in Georgetown:
“Some times,” he intoned, “it may take a death and a special kind of dying to quicken the truth that is not urgently alive in our own consciousness…
“Today, we meet in a dangerous land, and at the most dangerous of times. The danger may be that supreme authority, the supervising conscience of the nation, has ceased to be answerable to any moral law; has ceased to recognize or respect any minimum requirement of ordinary human decency…
“Walter Rodney’s death, like the manner of his dying, has quickened the truth and provoked within and beyond Guyana a rage and grief which official authority could never have anticipated…”
That was three decades ago. Perhaps President Zumba and his advisers were too preoccupied with other matters of national importance to reflect why previous ANC administrations in Pretoria never considered Burnham for a posthumous Tambo Award.
Now, however, that the South African government has quietly postponed extending this honour to Burnham, it should perhaps also give some consideration to offering an appropriate apology to his family for the inconvenience suffered as a consequence of the embarrassing change made in Pretoria for the originally scheduled April 27 event.
