Latest update May 23rd, 2024 11:41 AM
Nov 11, 2012 Letters
Dear Editor,
I have followed the debate by both my friend Freddie Kissoon and M. Maxwell [or should I say the M. Maxwell group?] in the Sun Oct. 24 and Monday 29 Kaieteur News. I have had a young citizen question me about the pre and post Independence leaders; the Burnham and Jagans.
How are they to be remembered, was his simple question. Letter writers cannot be merely content with the age-long propaganda definitions and personal political dislikes, we are dealing with Guyanese History and some level of research and corresponding fact-finding must be involved in their letters.
Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan are not political twins. They evolved from diverse origins, their objectives and motivations were culturally and politically different. The post WW2 world shaped their perceptions.
Nazism failed to create the thousand year Third Reich but it had created the Third world with its justified anti colonial banners, and many of the new leaders had served in that conflict. Contrary to the nostalgic illusion, British Guyana was a colony, yes; a functional colony, but not a prosperous industrialized nation. Unemployment, low wages, lack of proper healthy housing, a virtual caste system with the subtle mental fetters that sustain the proverbial ‘Colonial’ were the characteristics of pre-Independence Guyana.
Jagan was the product of the Indentured mainly Hindu populated Sugar estate environment; he never found favour with the business/professional Indian classes that occupied the East Indian Association.
On the other hand, Burnham was a Guyana Scholar, a product of the ongoing conflict between Plantocracy and emancipated slave and emerging Afro middle class who was also at war with itself. To cut it within the confines of this letter, these men were complicated; products of their time, each with his own sense of purpose and conflicting ideals of liberation.
“I come from the Nigger yard of yesterday.” Martin Carter’s poem, references like ‘Bound yard coolie’ and ‘Loogie coolie’ are all aspects of the real British Guiana. These were the problems of human misery facing the local pre Independence political leadership. A large percentage of the Afro Guyanese population of Georgetown was housed in ‘Nigger Yards;’ relatives of mine grew up in one of those yards in Drysdale Street Charlestown. Festival City, North, South Ruimveldt, Stevedore Scheme Meadowbrook, Roxanne Burnham gardens and eventually Sophia all were schemes developed post Independence to empty the ‘Nigger Yards of yesterday’.
Burnham’s war was primarily with a pretentious black middle class whose confusion with self led a member of a prominent family to accuse Burnham on the implementation of the Common-Entrance scheme that “You want to have the children of my servant sit in the same seat as my children.” Burnham replied that “we all came off the Plantation some 130 years before.” This is not to say that the animal farm syndrome did not take effect, as it has gone full blown under the PPP today.
I am a product of policies the PNC initiated, Tom Feelings, the noted American illustrator, was brought to this country in 1974 to do workshops. He inspired a generation of local artists, and Burnham’s ban on foreign comic strips that had colonizing messages opened doors for local story tellers and artists. The then PNC Government launched professional dance in this country when Madam Lavinia Williams was brought to work with the infant National dance company.
Thousands of Guyanese youth received skill training in the Youth Corps and the National Service. The PNC should publish a list of those who they had sent to western Universities on tax payers’ dollars who never returned to serve, to the point that when I was to go to Scotland to be qualified in animation production and film making, I sat outside and overheard the heart-rending and depressing phone conversation that concluded that if I was sent I wouldn’t come back.
To say that “There’s nothing great about the PNC’s role in Guyana’s history” (M. Maxwell Sunday Oct. 28 2012) is either a result of ignorance, orchestrated dishonesty, or a mind twisted by hate. I am sure that M. Maxwell is a PPP construct or the residue of one of the many enemies that had to be made in the process of decolonizing Guyana. M. Maxwell claims:
“ The PNC was formed out of one man’s sick quest for power at all costs, built entirely on racial antagonism and political strife and played willing lackey to a foreign ideology and outside puppeteers. The PNC is the only main Party in Guyana’s history formed entirely and completely as a race party.”
Jai Narine Singh Sr. states that the PPP blamed the power moves of the Jagans after the 1953 win for the following suspension of the constitution and the dissolution of the legislature.
He outlined a secret meeting in late 1954 with both Burnham and Jagan present [it was decided by many that Burnham would have handled things differently] “and it was decided that it would be strategically astute for Jagan to give way to Burnham as the leader of the party. Jagan actually agreed with this, but it must be noted that, his wife Janet was absent from the meeting.”The concerns of the colonial administration were the question of ‘Communism’. J. N. Singh Sr. continues “A few weeks later [in November (1954) the executive met again and this time Janet was present and Jagan announced that he would not be accepting the earlier decision. At that stage, we all realized that there was no way we could prevent the impasse from getting out into the open.”
The dictatorial mandate of the Jagans divided the PPP. The PPP was at that time funded by the KGB. The penniless PNC turned to the west as an alternative to the Stalinist Jagans in a paranoid anti- Communist world and received Western funding. Recognizing the majority Indian vote, the PPP activated in 1961 the ethnic civil war, not the PNC. The fact is, that from emancipation to Indenturship, to Independence, there were always ethnic news papers, pressure groups, ethnic religious centers etc.
The Colonial ethnic divide and rule economic constraints of British Guiana, its caste system, imposed a predisposal to outer pressures from influential social groups on the political parties of the day. We are still fighting those battles today, we’re much more informed and are resisting the efforts to impose ethnic strife.
We also understand that all the above stemmed from inadequate economic prosperity, and opportunities. Like Freddie I do not think M. Maxwell is a person but rather an interest group, the mystery is, in whose interest?
APNU and the AFC are monitored by we who recognize that change must be made away from the old social and political custom of practices; an understanding of the past is necessary and if the Maxwell group wants to make an enlightened contribution, write based on thorough research.
Let’s help the next generation understand.
Barrington Braithwaite
Every country demanding more and more taxes, not Guyana.
May 23, 2024
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