THIS week was Burnham’s death anniversary and I did not have the thought of doing a column on Burnham. But then something happened. Last Thursday, Leonard Craig and I were having phulourie with sorrel juice at Spicy Dish restaurant on Albert Street.
Craig made an utterance that caused a piece of the phulourie to drop out of my mouth. Nonchalantly, he said that since free and fair election returned to Guyana in 1992, in every subsequent free poll, Georgetown saw a low turnout, including 1992 itself, except 2015 when the PNC subsumed itself under a different name with new players from outside the PNC.
I asked Craig if he could show me the statistics. He said yes; he researched it from GECOM’s database. What Craig and I did not even come close to touching was why this was so. I went home and the Craig revelation bothered me. If I am a competent analyst, then I have to put an explanatory meaning to Craig’s statistics.
Here is my theory for consistently low Georgetown turnouts among African Guyanese which have caused permanent electoral damage to the PNC. A caveat is in order. This is complex political theorizing that cannot hold into a newspaper column of 800 words, so what you are reading here are brief notes.
In a nutshell, African Guyanese became detached from the PNC from the middle of the 1970s because of extremely deep chagrin they had over Burnham’s transformed personality and character. This explains the consistent low turnout in 1992 and after. Why was the turnout high in 2015? You have to put this down to the genius of Rupert Roopnaraine.
Roopnaraine always had a Freudian attachment to Burnham and the PNC, but he knew after the middle of the 1970s Burnham was politically dead and the reason for that was the extensive damage Burnham did to the psyche of African Guyanese. What Roopnaraine did (and Robert Corbin was so damaged psychologically so he gravitated to Roopnaraine’s invention) was to form a new political entity to entice African Guyanese to vote for the PNC, though it will not be the PNC if you follow.
When African Guyanese went in large numbers in 2015 and voted for APNU+AFC, in their minds they were voting for something new, not the PNC. And it worked. In 2016, APNU was literally degutted, AFC was shafted and the WPA was humiliated. So, in 2020, African Guyanese saw the rebirth of the PNC and they stayed away as they did before. In 2025, African Guyanese signalled to the PNC that the withdrawal was permanent. In 2030, Guyana will no longer see the existence of the PNC.
Now for the theory itself as to why African Guyanese ditched the PNC in the 1970s. African Guyanese saw Forbes Burnham as a demigod. He was bright, articulate and a likeable personality. African Guyanese wanted Guyana to be in the hands of Africans and not the East Indians under Cheddi Jagan and the PPP. For them, Burnham could deliver Guyana to them. And he did. By 1966, when Independence came, Burnham was the god that could do no wrong.
But African Guyanese buried in the vortex of adulation for Burnham never knew who he essentially was. Burnham hid his lust for power under the electrifying banner of the anti-colonial, anti- PPP passion. It was when power was attained that Burnham began to display what Franz Fanon and CLR James knew and predicted.
The anti-colonial saviour had become an emperor. He chose the colour of the Roman emperors, purple. He addressed his subjects from balconies like the Roman emperors. He rode on horseback like the Latin American oligarch. What happened then was profound mental confusion among African Guyanese. Burnham riding on horseback, sharing out cigarettes, and at Hope Estate riding on public servants clearing trenches were moments that destroyed the psyche of the African Guyanese.
That psychic trauma was not easily repairable, but the advent of Rodney did some soothing. African Guyanese felt that the real African hero was Rodney, not Burnham. The real political party to save them will come one day and they saw Rodney as that party. For them, the PNC was dead.
Rodney had to die because Burnham was so conscious of what Rodney had done to him that it was out of anger that he took revenge on Rodney. But one more episode lacerated the psyche of African Guyanese – the assassination of Rodney. That was the culmination of African Guyanese break with the PNC.
The genius of Roopnaraine came into play. He was Indian but understood how Africans felt about the PNC more than any PNC leader between 1980 and 2015. The story of Burnham and African Guyanese came to an end on September 1, 2025.
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.