Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham was born on 20th February 1923, helped form the PPP in 1950, left the PPP in 1955 and formed the People’s National Congress (PNC) in 1958, became prime minister / prime minister in 1964, became president in 1980 and died on 6 August 1985.
Two weeks ago I was invited by the chairman of the National People’s Congress (PNCR), Ms Volda Lawrence, to make a presentation to the leadership of the Region 4 party on the contemporary relevance of Burnham. I tried to focus my presentation on my experiences in the PNC and constitutional reform to acquire that difficult level of national unity without which Guyana will not thrive properly.
Last week this column concluded that national unity would be impossible without some significant consensual understanding of government and the positive national narrative that might flow from it. It occurred to me then, though not strictly necessary, one of the great difficulties with developing such a narrative would be to find a consensus on Forbes Burnham’s place within such a story. In some quarters Burnham is considered a hero but for others he is the archetypical racist and undemocratic opportunist. Why not move my presentation, avoid the decades of propaganda and focus on Burnham, seize the opportunity to begin a narrative with the following brief, if somewhat hackneyed, historical background?
In my presentation, I argued that the society that inherited the PNC exhibited all the features of underdevelopment inherent in its colonial status. The production of three basic products dominated its economy: sugar, bauxite and rice, the first two focused on the international market while the latter was a basic staple of population and a significant export. The country relied on external sources for most of what it needed to survive. There was little back / forth integration in the productive sector (and to this day, after centuries of sugar production, Guyana still struggles to produce the required quality of refined sugar for its needs productive). It is not capable of fishing or fruit in any significant size although it is well endowed with fishing and agricultural land resources which are perennially exploited by others. With the exception of rice, the main productive activities were controlled by foreign companies that had a profound influence on the economic, social and political life of the country. Indeed, the nickname British Guiana as ‘Bookers Guiana’ suggested this reality.
British Guiana was generally in an overall state of underdevelopment with poor infrastructure, a shortage of productive capital, inadequate economic and social services and a level of income per capita (1950-56 average G $ 350 a year) which put the majority of the population into a standard of living barely above subsistence level. Between World War II and independence, unemployment averaged about 25 percent of the total labor force. The internal beneficiaries of this underdevelopment were mainly the European colonial elite and their creole colleagues.
By 1950, when the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) was being formed, on the international scene communism and capitalism – the West and the East – were in a dinghy battle for world domination, with the former desperately seeking to ‘include’ the internationalization objective of communism. Moreover, colonialism was unveiling: India gained its independence in 1947, Ghana in 1957, Tanzania in 1961, Guyana in 1966, and so forth. In this firmament various liberation theories began to flourish: communism / socialism was popular along with negritude, non-alignment, black power, ujamaa socialism, cooperative socialism, and the like. One suspects that some, such as non-alignment, ujamaa and cooperative socialism, were developed to avoid having to take jobs that could be interpreted as ‘communist.’
Unfortunately for Guyana, in the very early 1950s his nationalist political leadership, more specifically Cheddi Jagan and the PPP, was labeled communist and thus Guyana became part of the international struggle. Usually when major local characters cannot agree on the constitutional nature of the state it results in prolonged violent conflicts until some acceptable or unavoidable resolution is found. That said, in Guyana the internal row was driven by international capital with the help of their local business allies, the trade unions, the churches, the United Police (UF), elements of civil society and later quite opportunistically by the PNC. There were widespread political / ethnic upheavals against the PPP that left, in the aggressive and anti-aggression, about 170 people dead, millions of dollars in lost property and significant ethnic internal migration. The colonial administration had unsuccessfully invaded the electoral system to drive the PPP from government since about 1957. However, success in 1964 when it imposed proportional representation (PR) became unusual and ‘one-sided’.
It was local and directly related to the ethnic situation in Guyana, about 1950 MG Smith, looking at what he considered ‘multiple societies’ suggested that there would be a battle for power between Indians and Africans once independence would be possible. This was mainly because ethnic and cultural characteristics had become symbols of political allegiance driving the ethnicity apart. These types of theories then took years, if not decades, to filter down to practitioners but officials in London understood the implications of Smith’s contention. Smith may also have come upon John Stuart Mill, who almost 100 years before was quite dismissive of the possibility of establishing representative governments in such countries. ‘Free institutions are next to impossible in a country of a different nationality. … (There) the unified public opinion necessary for the work of representative government cannot exist. ‘Furthermore, in 1954, the British Guiana Constitutional Commission noted in the Robertson Report, considering the hard evidence on the ground,’ We do not share the confidence altogether … that a comprehensive loyalty to British Guiana can be instilled in people of such diverse origin. ”
Sir Arthur Lewis was studying partisan politics in West Africa around the same time and is considered the father of joint governance arrangements to deal with the inevitable ethnic / political conflicts that arise in countries such as Guyana. Indeed, the British government was skeptical of Guyana’s possibilities of ever being a normal democratic state and thus offered Guyanese leadership joint governance similar to, and what they were currently offering in Cyprus. in 1998 that finally brought an end to the political. and armed struggle between the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland. This was rejected by Cheddi Jagan who may have considered the proposal as another attempt to remove him and it is possible that this way of keeping track of the PPP would have been considered in the British mind. However, even if Jagan were correct, in the context of Guyana it would have been the more sensible solution to the ethnic problem; possibly killing two birds with one stone as it were.
Unsurprisingly, the PNC / UF coalition won the public relations elections in 1964 and with the PPP out of the way but clearly not really grasping the nature of his position, Forbes Burnham addressed him to the nation after the 1964 elections unbiased. He spoke of an ‘apparent’ ethnic split that his party would eliminate by exposing PPP’s dishonesty, fraud, opportunism and racism (Future Notes, SN: 10/02/2021)! Burnham was something of a socialist who regarded D’Aguiar’s capitalist orientation as a humbug and knew quite well that the West would not risk the PPP coming to government so he took the opportunity to get rid of the UF by manipulating the elections of 1968. In 1970, Guyana became a Co-operative Republic with the promise – still waiting to be fulfilled – of ‘making the little man a real man’!