Dear Editor,
In your editorial last Sunday you referred to the posthumous award by President J G Zuma of South Africa of the Order of the Companions of O R Tambo (Gold) to the late President L F S Burnham “for his integral part in the sport boycotts against South Africa during the apartheid regime and support for the liberation movement and freedom fighters in South Africa.”
In an article in Kaieteur News in 2010 Halim Majeed reminded us of some of the many actions taken by L F S Burnham that would have motivated the award. Examples:
a) In 1960 L F S Burnham, while attending the constitutional talks in Great Britain, was arrested while protesting with his colleagues against the barbarous apartheid policies in South Africa.
b) As President he secured parliamentary approval to commit funds from Guyana’s treasury to aid the African freedom fighters. Later he instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to issue diplomatic passports to key leaders from Southern Africa to facilitate their mobilisation of international support.
c) As President he facilitated the re-fuelling and re-supply in Guyana of Cuban aircraft on their way to Angola to support Cuban and Angolan forces in their fight against the apartheid regime. That was something no other Caribbean nation would do.
d) Most pertinently the PNC government hosted a visit by Oliver Tambo to Guyana during which he was “treated with the protocol, courtesies and dignity normally afforded a Head of State.”
Your editorial also referred to the rather confused status of the award, the presentation of which was to have occurred on 27th April. Let me bring some clarity to that status. L F S Burnham’s relatives have been informed that the presidency of South Africa has “decided to defer the posthumous awarding of the Order … indefinitely.”
The Burnham family did not seek this award on L F S Burnham’s behalf. We were pleasantly surprised and thought it very fitting when it was announced.
We were, as you can imagine, much less pleased to hear of the deferment which remains unexplained as yet. We have seen claims in the blogosphere that the deferment is linked to unproven allegations about Walter Rodney’s death and other issues.
But none of these are at all germane to the basis on which the award was granted. So it seems, to us, unlikely that the South African presidency would risk the level of diplomatic opprobrium that the deferment has engendered on such tenuous considerations and we will await their explanation in due course.
Maybe the ruckus over the award will prompt the more informed debate about L F S Burnham’s legacy that you called for in Sunday’s editorial. Let no one in that debate, however, question L F S Burnham’s championing of and practical support for the abolition of apartheid and the wider pan-African movement. He was a politician who steadfastly held firm to his beliefs and convictions, a politician who understood what it was and what it took to fight “the long fight.”
In closing, and with more local political considerations in mind, let us remember that to be for one thing does not mean that one is against some other thing that the observer may regard as opposite. That LFSB was a pan-Africanist does not mean that he stood against the progress of other ethnicities. He truly believed that we in Guyana should be One People in One Nation with One Destiny. And so, one hopes, do we all.
Yours faithfully,
David Pollard
