THIS month, Guyana joins with the family and political descendants of Dr Cheddi Jagan to observe his 100th birth anniversary. Like all political leaders, there are mixed feelings about this son of indentured labourers who rose to the pinnacle of leadership in Guyana and beyond. But few would dare dispute the fact that Dr Jagan remains one of the most celebrated political leaders of modern Guyana.

And we hasten to say that it is impossible to write our country’s political history without including his monumental contributions.
Dr Jagan was born in March 1918, which means he came of age in the period between the two world wars. This was a critical period in anti-colonial agitation here in Guyana, the rest of the British Caribbean and the wider colonial world. During this time, Dr Jagan attended the prestigious Queen’s College, an unlikely place for the children of the poor. He then left for studies in the USA—an atypical destination for most young students. Many of his peers went to the then mother country, England.

It was during his sojourn in the USA that the young Jagan developed his early political instincts and ideology. As was the case with many Black and Brown educated persons in the USA at that time, Dr Jagan was drawn to the progressive message of Marxism. This was a time when the Soviet Union was emerging as the example of what an alternative system to capitalism could look like. It was also a time in the wake of the Great Depression in the USA, when the Communist Party of that country was extremely popular. Indeed, the seeming decline of capitalism as manifested by the depression was good reason to embrace its alternative.

Dr Jagan also took note of the racial apartheid system in the USA in the form of legal segregation, which classified Black Americans as inferior citizens. The inter-war years were critical ones in the Civil Rights Movement that sought to overturn the laws that buttressed segregation. The young Jagan would have also noted the dynamic cultural resistance movement among Black Americans, which propelled the collective Black creative imagination to the centre of American cultural evolution.

Armed with this ideological exposure to Marxism and Black Nationalism, Dr Jagan returned to Guyana in 1943 with a doctorate in dentistry. He returned to a country and Region that were poised to launch the final blows against colonialism. The labour uprisings of the 1930s, dubbed the “1930s riots,” had shaken the colonial system in the Caribbean to its core. This was aided by the devastation of Britain during the war. The sun had begun to set on the powerful British empire and the young Cheddi Jagan made a conscious decision to become part of its alternative in his native land.

After some effort of familiarisation with the local political landscape, Dr Jagan and others, including his American-born wife who had followed him to his homeland, founded the Political Affairs Committee, a left-leaning group of progressive and mostly young people. It was on a PAC platform that Jagan would successfully contest a seat in the National Assembly at the 1947 election. This victory proved to be the perfect launching pad for what would become one of the most illustrious political careers in Guyana and the Anglophone Caribbean.

Jagan’s was the lone progressive voice in an institution that was dominated by conservative voices. But it was outside of the chamber that Jagan’s presence was more felt. The shooting of striking sugar workers at Plantation Enmore in 1948 and its aftermath upped his profile as a potential national leader. By the time Universal Adult Suffrage was won and the British had agreed to a constitution that granted Limited Self-Government to Guyana, Jagan and his comrades had transformed the PAC into the colony’s first mass-based political party, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP).

Joined by another young rising star, Forbes Burnham and other progressive activists such as the then Sydney King (Eusi Kwayana), Martin Carter, Ashton Chase, Janet Jagan and Boysie Ramkarran, Dr Jagan led the new party to victory at the defining 1953 election. At age 35, 10 years after returning to his country of birth, Cheddi Jagan had emerged as the new leader in a new dispensation in the soon-to-be independent country.

Dr Jagan’s career for the next 44 years would help define the new Guyana in ways that are both heroic and controversial, but always steadfast and compelling. Whatever he became, those early years captured here would remain definitive ones in his life’s work. Some have dubbed him a visionary, while others have called him the Father of the Nation. Still others have praised his fidelity to Marxism and the fate of the working-class. His reach was national, but that did not prevent him from articulating and embodying the hope and aspirations of Indian-Guyanese