THE last article in my series on the Mulattto/Creole middle class (MCC) in historical perspective in Guyana was on Wednesday, May 31, 2023.

In that piece, titled “Race and class suicide in Guyana,” I described the marital breakdown between Forbes Burnham and the MMC but many points were left out because of space.

I will add some brief notes on the breakdown between Burnham and the MCC then move on to the relentless courage of the MCC to stay in power to preserve their class hegemony, through the invention of Walter Rodney and the WPA and the AFC. I hope space permits such a discussion. If not there will be a follow-up.

The MCC saw itself as a pivotal base on which Burnham’s power rested but that was an illusion. The MCC felt that it was its crucial role together with the Portuguese commercial class and their party, the United Force and through a collaborating relation with the UK and the US that made Burnham’s accession to power possible.

It was an illusion because Burnham’s party, the PNC, and the party’s extensive hold over rural and urban Africans plus enormous support from the trade unions that made the PNC’s access to power possible.

From the start of the relationship trouble was brewing because the PNC was suspicious of the MCC and the MCC made sure that it was represented in power and indeed it was. The MCC demanded favourable state positions and got it.

It was Burnham’s devastation of the United Force, the PNC’s intensive penetration of the entire public sector, extensive nationalization and the fall-out between Burnham and the cultural icon of the MCC, Martin Carter that brought about the schism. Carter became the rallying point for the MCC.

It is interesting to note that though Mrs. Janet Jagan had admired Carter, the PPP never got close to Carter even though Carter became vocally anti-Burnham.

This was because Carter himself stayed away from socialising with the PPP because he was psychologically limited by his racial psyche. Carter and his friends, particularly the Westmaas family, were the essential embodiment of the character of the MCC.

Enough has not been written about Carter’s politics and class position. And Guyana’s historiography has been too kind to him. Both Carter and Walter Rodney need iconoclastic treatment from Guyana’s historians. See my column of Tuesday, June 13, titled, “An iconoclastic essay on Rodney’s death anniversary.”

In that article, I took a look at Rodney’s embedment in the company of the MCC, the identical position that Carter embraced. Anyway, back to Burnham and his treatment of the MCC personnel in his government.

By 1974 with the saturation of dark-skinned African Guyanese in the nationalized sector, the MCC no longer wanted to work with Burnham because they felt that Burnham defected from the politics of the 1940s and 1950s.

The MCC felt that Guyana now had a black dictatorship. There is an interesting reflection in Yesu Persaud’s autobiography in which he described how PNC apparatchiks were placed at the management levels in each nationalised entity. Persaud described how these apparatchiks were interfering with the professional public sector.

It was these kinds of transformations that were worrying to the MC because they saw before their very eyes their diminution of power. Burnham had Freudian irritations about the MCC. He knew they were elitist, that they think in superior terms and felt that they were an entitled lot. Burnham deliberately set about to undermine the MCC.

First he degutted the United Force, secondly, he retained a school of MCC members in the state, but without real authority. The most prominent of these names were the Dolphin sisters, the Pilgrim brothers, Arthur J. Seymour, among others.

Thirdly, he subtly sidelined the MCC personalities that were in the leadership of the United Force and that came over to him after the United Force and its leader Peter D’Aguiar were ousted from government after the rigged 1968 general elections.

By the time Burnham invented the External Trade Bureau (ETB) through which all trade between Guyana and the world had to pass and created the doctrine of paramountcy of the party, the MCC had become the sworn enemy of Burnham and his government.

Only two members of the MCC decided that the PNC was Guyana’s permanent government and this reality should be faced. So they sought a survivalist relationship with Burnham.
One was the company, Singers Sewing Machine that was administered by the Wishirt family and Bunny Fernandes, the patriarch of John Fernandes Ltd. Space has run out. In the next installment, I will get right into the MCC’s invention of the WPA and AFC.