Forbes Burnham, Walter Rodney and the hero in the crowd

JULY 6, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

Today, as I have been doing for several years now with my friend, David Hinds, I will attend a fund-raising brunch of the Forbes Burnham Institute at the Waterchris Restaurant. Interestingly, this event comes at a time when I was re-reading (yesterday) Archie Singham’s seminal book on post-colonial Caribbean leadership, “The Hero in the Crowd.” In my student days at UG, politics professors made Singham’s book compulsory reading. The text was first published in 1968, a long, long time ago but it remains one of the great books in understanding why Walter Rodney confronted Forbes Burnham. Please don’t buy the book if you think you want to understand that aspect of Guyanese history. The book doesn’t even mention Forbes Burnham or Walter Rodney. It is not about Guyana but Grenada, and the role of its first Prime Minister, Sir Eric Gairy, in the struggle for Independence. I am researching material for a forthcoming column on the reason why Guyana should import foreign judges and Singham’s book has material that I need to use for that column. It so happens that my re-look at Singham comes at the same time of the fund-raising event. The essential point Singham makes, which is useful in understanding why Rodney fought Burnham, is that the politicians who inherited the post-colonial state were culturally confused. They didn’t know which culture to embrace – indigenous society where they came from, or colonial leadership. Singham argued that since they were socialized into colonial values, they chose the latter. This led them to impose changes from above rather than seek alliances with indigenous society. Just as old as Singham’s work is an article on post-colonial leadership by Pakistani political theorist, Hamza Alavi (both Alavi and Singham are deceased) titled, “the Over-Developed State.” Alavi argued that post-colonial leaders inherited an excessively militarized state when the colonials left after Independence and the new leaders came to accept that the state must be like that. So they continued with such a state after Independence. Both Singham and Alavi argued that the authoritarian post-colonial state was inevitable. This Walter Rodney did not accept and sought to force post-colonial leaders to democratize. Prime Ministers Hugh Shearer and Forbes Burnham in Jamaica and Guyana respectively saw Rodney as being too radical. In the context of the over-developed post-colonial state, Rodney’s challenge to both Shearer and Burnham was logical, but Rodney may have failed to analyze the peculiarities and particularities of each post-colonial territory in the Third World and may not have sufficiently understood the historical differences between Guyana and the West Indian islands. It is ironic that of the territories in the British West Indies, the two countries which produced post-colonial Prime Ministers from the working class were the two Prime Ministers that faced violent revolutionary uprisings and were weakened by such revolts – Burnham in Guyana and Gairy in Grenada. But equally ironic was the fact that Gairy and Burnham were less democratic than their West Indian counterparts. It should be noted that though Burnham was not really from the working class, he was certainly from a class structure that was far less middle-class or semi-bourgeois than Bustamante and Norman Manley in Jamaica; Grantley Adams and Errol Barrow in Barbados; and Williams in Trinidad. Eric Williams in 1970 faced a revolt by the army and a guerrilla movement named National Union of Freedom Fighters (NUFF) but they were short-lived and did not threaten Williams’ rule even in a minor way. Prime Minister Robinson also faced a violent threat from the Muslimeen group in Trinidad but that did not weaken the government. On the contrary, in Grenada, the New Jewel Movement overthrew Gairy and in Guyana, Rodney’s Working People’s Alliance literally weakened Burnham’s grip on power and undermined Burnham’s psychological buoyancy. While it was true as Singham argued that the post-colonial Prime Minister ruled from above, Burnham in Guyana did not come in the classical mode of elitist middle class Caribbean leaders. Shearer banned Rodney from Jamaica but Shearer was far more capitalist than Burnham. Burnham was far more concerned with the social elevation of the working people than any of his West Indian counterparts. The question is; did Rodney lump Burnham with the rest of tyrannical post-colonial West Indian leaders that CLR James was so critical of and post colonial leaders in the Third World that Fanon was so contemptuous of? The answer seems to be yes. Some African-rights admirers of Burnham believe that Rodney was too implacably opposed to Burnham and this blinded Rodney from contextualizing Burnham’s politics in the immediate post-colonial period. Was this Rodney’s tragic mistake? Still, it leaves the question open; was Rodney justified in opposing and wanting to remove Burnham?