Dear Editor,
In this age of historical revisionism and political opportunism in Guyana, David Granger adds fuel to the fire with his statement “There’s no father of Independence, there’s no mother of the nation, father of the nation and I think we need to unlearn some of those myths. If there’s any paternity, that paternity has to be attributed to the working people of the Caribbean.” Father or mother of nation is viewed within the context of those who played the most powerful role in achieving independence. It is political expediency to cast the working class everyman as the father of the nation. Even worse, Mr Granger is not satisfied with the working class Guyanese but makes the absurd statement that all working class Caribbean people are the fathers and mothers of Guyana. Mr Granger fails to realize or deliberately rejects the fact that there are heroes and leaders in every civilization and they must be counted. He himself has panegyrized Forbes Burnham as a historian, yet now as a politician he wants to distort history. What Mr Granger is really practising with this statement is avoidance. He faithfully avoids doing a proper comparative analysis of those contenders for fathers or mothers of our nation. When our nation’s thrust for independence is analyzed, there are two heavyweights contending for paternity: Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham.
Mr Granger’s speech examined three discernible trends which shaped the struggle for independence: the trade unions, the political empowerment of the masses and the struggle against the plantocracy within the parliamentary system.
Utilizing his own benchmarks for defining the issue of paternity, Cheddi Jagan’s ascendancy over Burnham in these areas is obvious. Cheddi Jagan had a far deeper, closer, more intimate and direct connection to trade unionism in Guyana than Forbes Burnham ever held. The political empowerment of the masses in Guyana started on a mass-movement scale with Cheddi Jagan’s formation of the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) in 1947. The PAC attempted to convert the working class appeal of trade unionism into working class politics, thereby expanding the dialogue from just workers’ rights to workers’ political rights. Self-determination and self-government were central themes of the PAC long before Burnham appeared on the political scene. The PAC led to Cheddi Jagan’s pivotal role in the formation of the nation’s first mass political party, the PPP. Forbes Burnham joined the PPP. Forbes Burnham has never created such a mass political movement on his own. The PNC was created from splintering the PPP and siphoning off some of its resources.
Cheddi Jagan’s efforts in battling the plantocracy through the parliamentary system were significant and pre-empt Burnham’s contributions in this regard. In the 1947 election while Forbes Burnham was away at university in England, Cheddi Jagan won the Central Demerara constituency and was the only PAC member in the Legislative Council. In the period from 1953 when British Guiana held its first election under universal adult suffrage to 1964 when the PPP lost power, the PPP won every single election under Cheddi Jagan in those years, defeating Forbes Burnham and the PNC. That decade happened to be the most critical decade in the pursuit of independence, and the dominance of Jagan’s party in the Legislature led to its leading role in the call for Guyana’s independence. Certainly, Forbes Burnham echoed those calls for independence but as a weak opposition he lacked the legislative and parliamentary clout to demand independence or to execute an agenda for independence during that period on the level of Cheddi Jagan who was Premier for most of that period. The only reason Guyana did not achieve independence in 1962 along with Trinidad and Jamaica was the PPP’s Marxist ideology and the British and American refusal to grant independence to a Marxist party. Forbes Burnham never won a plurality or majority of the votes in a free and fair election in Guyana’s history. His political appeal never wandered much beyond the African constituency and by the mid-1970s with the appearance of Walter Rodney even that constituency was divided in its support.
Forbes Burnham did struggle for independence for Guyana and he stands just below Cheddi Jagan as father of the nation. His legitimacy as father of the nation’s independence is surpassed only by Cheddi Jagan who not only commanded greater electoral support than Burnham even when he was out of power, but who also played a more potent and pivotal hand than Burnham in those critical movements that underpinned the march to independence. By Mr Granger’s own measure, Forbes Burnham’s entitlement to fatherhood of the nation falls below Jagan’s. Mr Granger is too brilliant for me to consider this ridiculous statement as anything but historical revisionism, ontological avoidance and intellectual concealment. Even when opportunities are presented for the PNC/APNU’s intellectuals and leadership to do the right thing and rise above the scourge of race and ethnic fear, they collapse like the PPP’s current leadership into it by concealing facts, avoiding necessary analysis or just twisting history. A party that desperately needs crossover ethnic votes from other ethnicities to ever form a government cannot play loose and fast with historical facts and expect political salvation from those who will see danger in its historical rectification. I cannot trust a dazzling mind that knows our history inside out and engages in this kind of historical concealment and misguidance.
Yours faithfully,
M Maxwell