THE day of Guyana’s Independence will always be associated with Forbes Burnham. He was the leader of the country when Guyana was granted legal sovereignty from the imperialist British Empire. But which part of the sixty-year-old journey is owed to Burnham?
This is a deeply controversial issue that will never go away. Burnham was the leader of the country at the time independence came, but what does Guyana owe Burnham? Maybe the jury will forever be out on that, but the facts will remain forever; some of those facts are from Burnham himself and they are indelible. Other facts converge to make Burnham someone who damaged the meaning of Independence.
Burnham’s first blot on the garment of Independence was the date itself – May 26. It was on that day that the British West Indies saw the deadliest racial conflict in the history of the region. In Mackenzie, the attacks on the Indian population were sadistic and remain in the politics of Guyana, its most tragic moment.
The entire population of Indians in Mackenzie was violently uprooted. Just over 3000 Indians fled Mackenzie leaving every single item of asset they accumulated in their years of existence. The looting and arson were horrible and dozens of women and girls were raped. It would appear that Burnham’s choice of May 26 was to insult the PPP and its leader Cheddi Jagan because it was a horrible act of insensitivity to choose May 26.
Why did he do it? There is no written explanation and I have seen no speculation whatsoever from any published document. I believe Burnham chose May 26 as retaliation for the Sun Chapman boat explosion in which 43 Africans lost their lives. There are two theories about the explosion. One is that it was deliberately done. The other is that the ferry was carrying dynamites to Mackenzie for anti-government conspiracies and was stored in the wrong place where engine heat caused the dynamites to explode.
Independence did not start on a good footing. It was granted at a time when two years before, society was reeling from internecine racial violence. Independence then meant hardly anything to those who saw Burnham as responsible for racial violence against Indians.
As Guyana settled down to develop the country after Independence, Burnham manifested an ocean of psychological incapacities to redeem himself. To a majority of the population, Burnham personified the meaninglessness of Independence because nothing was being done to make up for the inhuman mistakes Burnham made.
A mere two years after Independence, people’s right to choose a government of their choice was vitiated through rigged national elections. The mind of an Indian Guyanese had to be shaped against the meaning of Independence when they could not elect their handsome, charismatic, Gandhian leader, Dr Cheddi Jagan.
But Burnham was one of world politics’ complex humans. On the one hand, he made a majority of Guyanese feel that Independence brought misery, but on the other hand, he let it be known to Guyanese that they were not inferior to the White world, that Guyana had its own cultures, mores, and traditions and those should be enshrined in the national psyche.
He gave Hindus, two holidays and Muslims two also. He encouraged Guyanese to wear the national shirt-jack, and he encouraged Guyanese to think local and buy local. These were important symbols of sovereignty that, whether you like Burnham or not, the new nation after decades of imperial rule had to appreciate.
One of Burnham’s most glorious attempts to make Independence a sacred achievement for Guyanese was the creation of the multilateral school. I am not a fan of Burnham, will never be and my analysis leads me to assess him as a person obsessed with power and driven by the maximum leader syndrome. But the multilateral school was an excellent and expressive manifestation of decolonisation.
Burnham no doubt knew what it was like to be educated in the elite ambience of Queen’s College and The Bishop’s High School. In creating the multilateral school, he wanted to bring Queen’s College to the working class children of Guyanese. Burnham had deep visions about how to move Guyana away from the colonial culture it inherited and make Independence a living symbol in each Guyanese.
But there was a gargantuan “but.” But what happened in the first two decades after Independence was ironically bizarre. As Burnham gave Guyana the benefits of Independence, he took away those benefits by a show of intoxicating power that made people feel that Independence was simply changing the White colonial for a non-White colonial. That was the message of Walter Rodney. In assassinating Rodney, Burnham killed the dream of Independence. It was left to subsequent presidents to resuscitate the beauty of Independence.
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.