I GOT a reaction from a person who is in his 80s and who was quite an influential state official during the reign of President Forbes Burnham. I welcome the opportunity on any occasion to write on Mr Burnham and other historical figures in contemporary Guyana because I approach history differently from my comrades in social activism and my colleagues in academia.

If you look around Guyana today, there are not many, maybe none at all of political activists and public intellectuals whose original training was in the discipline of history. I started out as a student at UG majoring in history. As a trained historian, you will never see facts, events, people, and places the way other humans not trained in history see them.

A historian is a ferret. He/she just wants everything to come out into the open so they will become part of history. The historian will never miss an opportunity to put something into history because he/she believes everything should go into the unlimited storage room we call history.

I will give you just one example. I don’t need to give more because this one example is potent evidence of how the historian and non-historian operate.

Tonight (Monday) on the Freddie Kissoon Show, Ravi Dev will be the guest who will offer a thorough examination of the Vincent Alexander theory of a defective genetic condition that African Guyanese have to live with.

In rejecting Alexander’s theory, Ravi pointed to an African Guyanese who rose to national power through the patronage of President Burnham and he remarked that this person told him that his erudition and intellectual qualities came about because he had non-African genes in him. I pressed Dev to name the person. I first asked if he was alive.

Dev said no, so I asked Dev to name him. Dev declined only to say he would only give a clue – the person was known as one of the best to come out of Buxton. Immediately I shouted out the name, Haslyn Parris. Dev acknowledged it was Parris.

Now Dev is a lawyer. I am a historian. Immediately when Dev chose not to name him my historian’s instinct kicked in.

I have had that situation that I had with Dev with dozens of other people who had no training in history. It is for this reason I did a negative assessment of the autobiography of Clement Rohee. Rohee is rich with political history, but his autobiography is poor on the recording of history.

This has been a long digression from the subject of Forbes Burnham and what the caller wanted from me about what I wrote about Burnham yesterday (Sunday).

He told me there was a glaring contradiction in yesterday’s piece. He reminded me that I referred to Burnham as having a lust for power and was a megalomaniac, yet I praised Burnham for wanting to remove the plural nature of Guyanese society.

Until he spoke to me, I would not have known that my portrait of Burnham in yesterday’s column was contradictory. In the remaining paragraphs, I will attempt to explain why it is not. It doesn’t mean I would have convinced him (I told him I will write about him, but he declined to be named).

I am convinced that Burnham possessed visionary power, was not racist, was not pro-capitalist and had serious inclinations to empower working-class people. But you cannot formulate a template for the transformation of society that when complete, would bear no resemblance to colonial Guyana and immediate post-independent Guyana and the template was drawn up with your ideas only.

That was where Burnham went dangerously and tragically wrong. Burnham’s blueprint was a plausible and impressive one, but it was when the blueprint was implemented you saw where it would go astray. This was because the template had rough edges that Burnham insisted weren’t rough because to admit that was to confess that he wasn’t a genius after all.

This was Burnham’s undoing. He could not leave space for alterations from others. The alterations had to be rejected because he, Burnham drafted the re-designing of Guyana, and no one must touch it – just implement it but don’t change anything.
I will end with one gigantic example of where Burnham’s megalomania undid his visionary power and given his lust for power, it had to happen.

Burnham called a General Council meeting of his party on the negative impact of the flour ban. There was total and resounding consensus in the auditorium of Congress Place that the ban was damaging the party and the government. At the end of the debate, Burnham with oozing nonchalance told the audience; “I hear ya’ll but leave the ban, it is good for Guyana.”

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.