I DIDN’T get to meet and greet many friends and comrades before leaving Guyana during the last week before Christmas 2021, but I did see my elder and friend Shirley Edwards, a veteran PPP Central Committee member and parliamentarian, whose life story is long and lively, but still largely unknown and therefore worthy of sharing on a very special day in her life.
Sixty years ago today (January 23, 1962), a youthful Shirley joined the PPP, aged 22.
At the time, the party was just 12-years-old, still led by Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, leading the anti-colonial fight as a united political front embracing and representing the two main races and all other mixes in between against Britain’s continuing exploitation of people and resources in another land far away.
Shirley soon lived through the bitter but brave experience of standing up in defence of the PPP administration during the 1963-64 disturbances, alongside other stalwarts like EMG Wilson and Cyril Belgrave, fighting to keep the ferries running and the docks operating to overcome the 80-day strike that preceded the externally engineered split that resulted in the creation of the People’s National Congress (PNC) and the weakening of the local anti-colonial mass movement.
She witnessed the PNC’s assumption of power in 1964, the subsequent political fires in Georgetown, the disturbances and difficulties of the 28 years of virtual one-party rule that followed, through to the restoration of democracy in 1992, riding the waves with the PPP/Civic in and out of power over the next three decades.
Shirley often demonstrated her strength of conviction whenever she and family members, resident in Lodge, would be accused of ‘treachery’ or ‘betrayal of her race’ for supporting the PPP, each time valiantly defending her and her family’s individual rights – like her accusers — to support parties of their choice.
After 58 years of service and still attending meetings at Freedom House up to two years ago, Shirley proceeded gracefully into retirement and even today at home looking out at the world from her reclining chair in her Princes Street balcony, Shirley will tell you “Nothing” in the past six decades has caused her to regret joining — and remaining forever — with the party of her choice.
She was never deterred for all of her 60 years in the PPP by anything thrown at her — neither banishment to the interior as a Georgetown teacher, nor arrests or detention, violent attacks or verbal abuse.
After a long life of sacrifice and service to the PPP and for Guyana, Shirley’s left a legacy in the legislature waiting to be perused by historians, while resting in retirement, proud of her personal contribution — and even more, that her sons and daughters all followed in her footsteps as loyal members of and activists for the party in which they grew up and also proudly remained with, to this day.
Her heirs and successors have also earned plaques of appreciation from their party for decades of loyal service.
Before and since my six years of service to and in Guyana (1993-1999), I’d never visit Guyana without spending some time with Shirley on her balcony, each time adding rich chapters to the volumes of knowledge accumulated from our exchanges over four decades of friendship and political kinship.
Her sons and daughters are also all and each clear evidence of the truth of the saying that ‘The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree’ — each with their own lengthy chapters to add to the family’s long and extraordinary history, growing up in a society already disunited or torn apart, separated or divided, by the politics of race, religion and culture.
A staunch Catholic in the leadership of a communist party wasn’t (and still isn’t) something easily understandable to anyone reluctant to even think it’s ever possible, but Shirley lived that experience for all of her 60 years in the PPP, alongside majority comrades who’re Hindu and Muslim, or Atheist – not once feeling or made to feel uncomfortable.
The peaceful coexistence of members of multifarious religions in a party adherent to Marxis- Leninism is another subject future historians will certainly examine as part of the unique political landscape of Guyanese and Caribbean politics from the 1938 revolutions, through the post-war Federation days, to the age of CARIFTA and CARICOM.
For all of that, Shirley has always been my favourite Lion Queen in the Jungle of Guyana’s politics.
Many other stalwarts will have similar stories to share, but Shirley’s is one (of the many) only waiting to be known and shared alongside the many others who also silently endured pain and agony in pursuit of freedom from colonialism and staunch defence of democracy.
Shirley has lived to share the tales of six decades purposefully roaming that vast political jungle, forever confident that her sacrifices would one day be rewarded by seeing her country finally getting on track for a path of development that will ensure her grandchildren and future generations of Guyanese share the good health and wealth she worked hard, fought for and dreamed of for six long decades.
She wasn’t alone: EMG Wilson, Ashton Chase (still alive at 95), Cyril Belgrave, Brindley and Patricia Benn (and their son Robeson), Clinton Collymore, Philomena ‘Fireball’ Sahoye-Shury, Doris Awah (and more contemporary figures like Sam and Yvonne Hinds…) all come to mind, all of whom remained proud PPP and/or civic stalwarts despite all the racial slurs and pathetic ethnic epithets or other unfair selected partisan political criticisms thrown their way for choosing to associate with the PPP.
But the identification with the PPP by Afro Guyanese stalwarts of the struggles for freedom and against colonialism was no less honourable than the Tuskegee Airmen who flew their war planes low down and sky high to fight and win for the USA, not because of their colour, but because they were Americans.
Indeed, those were the thoughts running through my mind on the morning of my last day before leaving Georgetown on December 23, when I was also wheeled to my self-promised ‘must see’ visit to the 1823 Monument along the Georgetown Sea Wall memorialising the Demerara Slave Rebellion of August 17 that year, unveiled on August 5, 2013, by then President Donald Ramotar.
Shirley’s parliamentary contributions are recorded in the National Assembly’s Hansard, but her personal contributions are still the subject of oral history recorded in the hard drives of the memory board of surviving colleagues, fellow comrades-at-arms and Demerara Catholics, friends and relatives, who know her story.
One of the failures of most Caribbean political parties has been to document the contributions of ordinary members who went to extraordinary lengths to keep them alive and active, especially the women who’ve been the driving forces in every election without due recognition or acknowledgement, their habitual, dependable contributions too often taken for granted.
Not so Shirley, who has plaques observing her decades of service to the PPP; but there are countless others like her — men and women in both major parties — whose selfless contributions are yet to be recorded for acknowledgement and appreciation, if only for history’s sake.
Here’s hoping Shirley’s 60th anniversary will mark the beginning of a greater appreciation for the need to tell the untold stories of the Lion Queens and Kings who’ve survived all the roaming in the jungle to eventually roar triumphantly in their greying years, living to see the yielded fruits of their patient prowling in pursuit of political harmony and happiness for all.