Hinds’ Sight : We don’t have to choose between Burnham people and Kwayana people anymore.

david hinds, guyana chronicle

SO I come back to Burnham today. When I wrote the column about him recently, I anticipated criticism from the anti-Burnham forces. After all, it’s well known that I grew up in anti-Burnham politics. That meant that you said nothing positive about Burnham. And anti-Rodney politics meant you said nothing positive about Rodney. And the same if you are anti-Jagan. But one of the things that I took seriously in my political upbringing is never to be a dogmatist. I learned that from two of my political influences – Walter Rodney and Eusi Kwayana.I did not grow up in a PNC home or for that matter a PNC village. When I was growing up Buxton was a politically plural place; the PNC and ASCRIA and later WPA shared the political support of the villagers. By the time I became aware of party politics, my aunt, who raised me and my siblings, had broken with the PNC. She had taken Kwayana’s side in his famous break with Burnham in 1971. Burnham, then, was not my political hero. For me, the political icon was Kwayana, whom I saw living humbly among the villagers and serving us as teacher, political representative and cultural examplar. So that became my political model. Burnham didn’t fit that model. My young, teenaged mind did not see Burnham as a superhero. Walter Rodney would return to Guyana and further draw my young mind in the direction of radical politics, a politics that was opposed to the statist politics of the Region of which Burnham was a chief representative. My anti-Burnham politics was now given a philosophical justification. The story of the WPA/Rodney-PNC/Burnham confrontation is known to the old-timers. Looking back, it was brutal. Activists were harassed and some, including Walter Rodney, were murdered. Many of us are lucky to be alive today. It is a period in our Guyanese and Caribbean political history that is still to be properly contextualised. It was a fight for the soul and direction of our independence. It became zero-sum. It reached its highest height in Grenada in the years 1979-1983. In October, 1983, the revolution died in a hail of bullets. Burnham supported the Grenadian revolution; some of the revolutionaries were trained in Guyana. But he crushed the revolutionaries in his own country. That’s the complex Burnham I alluded to in the last column. Burnham died two years after the Grenadian Revolution died. Almost instantly, the Burnhamites in Government walked away from Burnhamism. Thirty years later Burnham and Burnhamism are mere nostalgia. I am 30 years older. During those three decades I have participated in and studied and taught politics. In the process, I have learned that politics, like all profound humanendeavours, is a complex phenomenon. I have come to understand that my anti-Burnhamism was a motivation to reach for a better world, but also a political prison in which the world stood still. I will never forget the words of the villagers in West Berbice to Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine and me as we campaigned for the APNU in 2011—Brothers thanks for the APNU; We don’t have to choose between Burnham people and Kwayana people anymore. Burnham, like all of our political icons, was a product and a victim of something complex and contradictory in our Caribbean civilisation. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hating Burnham. I want to try to understand what it is about our society that gives rise to such contradictions. My love for Kwayana and Rodney should not be translated into hatred for Burnham.

Time moves on. We, Guyanese and Caribbean peoples move on. This past week I travelled to Grenada to participate in the launch of a book edited by my friend and colleague, Dr. Wendy Grenade. I have a chapter in the book on the role of the WPA in the Caribbean revolution of that time. I found myself on a TV programme pleading with Grenadians to view the Grenadian revolution in larger terms. At the launch, I asked for a national narrative that included Eric Gairy, Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard, not as demons, but as products of the Grenadian quest for freedom. If I could be presumptuous to ask Grenadians to reach for something above and beyond hatred, why not in my own country?

(Dr. David Hinds, a political activist and commentator, is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Caribbean and African Diaspora Studies at Arizona State University. More of his writings and commentaries can be found on his YouTube Channel Hinds’ Sight: Dr. David Hinds’ Guyana-Caribbean Politics and on his website www.guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com. Send comments to dhinds6106@aol.com