The eminent West Indian Nobel laureate Sir Arthur Lewis did not hide his disappointment in delivering his address at his installation as Chancellor of the University of Guyana in January 1967. Sir Arthur said bluntly: “From the moment I returned to the West Indies in 1959, as principal of the College [University College of the West Indies] in Jamaica, it became clear to me that there should be four campuses – in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana and, at least an evening campus, in Barbados. I succeeded with Trinidad and Barbados but was not allowed to have my way in this obstinate country.”
It was in this obstinate country that Cedric Vernon Nunes was to be given the historic but problematic mandate to establish a national university with meagre means. That he did so during his brief 40-month tenure as Minister of Education and Community Development in the 1961-1964 People’s Progressive Party administration was no mean feat. But the paths followed by the three UWI campuses in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad on the one hand, and UG on the other, could not have been more different.
From the start, plans for the University of Guyana were plagued with problems, some of which are still evident up to the present day. When the People’s Progressive Party approached the general elections of August 1961, there was no inkling of its intention to establish a national university. Its manifesto referred only broadly to continuing its collaboration with the UCWI to establish an extra-mural institute to conduct courses leading to an arts degree.
To everyone’s astonishment, only a couple of weeks after he was sworn in as Minister of Education and Community Development in September 1961, Vernon Nunes convened a working party to examine the feasibility of establishing a university. He submitted a memorandum for the establishment of the proposed University of British Guiana to which the council of ministers agreed in December 1961.
The optimistic idea was that the university should start classes by the next academic year ? September-October 1962 ? utilising the buildings of Queen’s College and the police force barracks in Eve Leary, a short distance away. The early date, hasty preparations and ad hoc arrangements might have been dictated by political, rather than academic, motives. Both the Legislative Assembly and the Senate had approved a motion, proposed by the premier Dr Cheddi Jagan in November 1961, requesting the Secretary of State for the Colonies to fix a date during 1962 when British Guiana would become an independent state. Quite likely, the schedule for the establishment of the university was intended to coincide with the timetable for the independence celebrations.
The administration had clearly decided to go the whole hog by having its own national university and signalled its intention to withdraw its financial support for UCWI. To no avail, Dr Eric Williams, then UCWI’s Pro-Chancellor and Mr Cameron Tudor, Barbados’s Minister of Education, both paid flying visits in attempts to persuade the administration to review its decision to establish a separate university. Either as a deliberate diversion or a delaying tactic to foster the illusion that a final decision had not been taken, Vernon Nunes asked Dr Williams to convene a special meeting of the council to consider a paper for restructuring UCWI along lines that addressed Guyana’s concerns.
Bewilderingly, Mr Nunes sent the same paper to the Senate at the start of its deliberation on the University of Guyana Bill. The two contradictory documents created some amount of confusion, if not consternation. In the final analysis, the bill was passed and assented to in April, and the University of Guyana was declared open in October, 1963. At such short notice, sufficient serious detailed preparations for the accommodation, curricula, financing, library, laboratories, staffing and other long-term needs of the institution could not have been done owing, at least in part, to political turmoil in the country in 1962. As a result, much of the groundwork had to be done hurriedly between January and October 1963 to meet the pre-determined deadline.
Apart from the establishment of the university, Vernon Nunes’s tenure was marked by incremental changes in primary school enrolment and the maintenance of school feeding programmes established by UNICEF in earlier years. One significant change, however, was the decision in September 1962 to redesignate primary schools with upper divisions, and which catered for pupils between the ages of 5-6 years and 14-16 years, as all-age schools; those with pupils to the age of 12 years retained the designation primary schools.
Vernon Nunes came onto the political stage during troublous times in this country. General strikes called by the British Guiana Trades Union Council in 1962 and 1963 degenerated into rioting and unrest, largely in Georgetown. During that period, Nunes left the Public Buildings on June 12, 1963 to walk a short distance to his office across High Street but, before he could reach, he was stoned and clobbered severely by an angry crowd.
The following year, the Guyana Agricultural Workers’ Union called a strike in the sugar industry which also degenerated into serious civil violence. In June 1964, acting under emergency regulations, the police arrested 32 members of the PPP and 3 members of the PNC, detaining them without trial at Sibley Hall, next to Her Majesty’s Penal Settlement at Mazaruni. Vernon Nunes was to be detained there as well, but he fell ill and had to be removed.
Cedric Vernon Aloysius Nunes was born on November 6, 1921 in Mahaicony in the Demerara-Mahaica Region, the son of Charles V Nunes, a checker on the sea defences in the Public Works Department. He attended Potter’s Private School at Mahaicony, the Mahaica Methodist and Mahaica Scots Schools, All Saints Anglican and New Amsterdam Boys Roman Catholic Schools, and the Berbice High School in New Amsterdam, Berbice. He was trained as a teacher at the Government Training College for Teachers from which he gained the Trained Teachers Certificate Class 1 and at the University of Birmingham from which he gained the Diploma in Education.
He taught at Carmel RC School and was once winner of the Primary Schools Teachers Scholarship. He also served as visiting tutor at the Government Training College for Teachers and headteacher of the Vergenoegen Government and Anna Regina Government primary schools, and was a member of the Executive Council of the British Guiana Teachers’ Association. His political career began as a nominated member of the senate of the then bi-cameral Legislative Assembly. This was followed by his appointment as Minister of Education and Community Development in the Council of Ministers in September 1961.
Nunes was elected chairman of the People’s Progressive Party in 1965 but migrated to the United Kingdom shortly afterwards. In his honour, the administration had renamed the Anna Regina Government School in the Pomeroon-Supenaam Region, where he had once been headteacher, the C V Nunes School. Along with his political colleagues Brindley Benn and Philomena Sahoye-Shury who had also been detained during the 1964-1965 state of emergency, Vernon Nunes received the national award of the Cacique’s Crown of Honour in May 1993 after the PPP returned to office.
He was married with two children.
