Dear Editor,
Did Forbes Burnham order the execution of Walter Rodney? This was one of the defining questions of a certain epoch and as such the answer, for each of us, has moral implications that determine where we stand politically and then the course of action imposed by the response.
It is a question that we expect to be clarified in the report of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) into Rodney’s death, hence the great interest that the COI has created. It is a question into which a huge emotional investment has been made by survivors of the tragedy linked to the victim by ties of family or political sympathy. A question that opponents of Forbes Burnham and all that he is made to represent wish to see settled in his disfavour with a guilty verdict they wish for engraved as his epitaph.
Occasionally the trauma of the event is relived in the controversies that break out in the press. One remembers the exchange between Frederick Kissoon and Minette Bacchus, for example, in which the contenders all but accused each other of emotionalism and lack of objectivity in their appraisal of the facts surrounding the death.
Frederick Kissoon, in a letter carried in SN on July 1, asks of me whether, like a friend I quoted in my own letter of June 28, I hold the view that the death of Rodney was independent of the will and knowledge of Mr Burnham and that the event caused the then President grief and anger (‘The biggest loser after the COI completes its work will be the Rodney family’). As he himself says in his letter, whether the death was commandeered from on high is unlikely to find a definitive answer through the COI. He also says that people tend to read into countenance and word the image they consciously or unconsciously desire, and that eyewitness accounts of other people’s reactions are not reliable. A truth that needs to be taken into account.
Of course I have asked myself the question. The person who told me this story was at the time a young man and close enough to the Burnham family to remember the PNC leader’s unease at the rising influence of the WPA and its work with soldiers and members of the armed forces (with the exception of the People’s Militia, I think).
I myself, also young but hardly impressionable, met Mr Burnham once or twice a couple of years after the incident at public events and on a visit he made to the Essequibo Coast. I had not been in Guyana in the years preceding it and missed the turmoil of the time. But it was in earlier meetings, in calmer times at his office or during his walkabouts that one was able to discern who the President was. I concluded that Mr Burnham, like Dr Jagan, was a creation of his people and caught in a role that said as much about us as it did about his personality. Many wanted or needed a ‘Kabaka’ and so we tolerated the arbitrariness that led to some excess. The self-celebration and regal pretensions that Burnham later assumed was but a projection of the way the class and race from which he was issued saw itself. And in this sense, the underlying ethos was not about race at all. The Afro-Creole middle class had in the large considered race irrelevant. Hoyte personified this in a marked way. The group was not in the least anti-Indian. The protestations of some in that community was an outward projection of its own mentalities.
Another discussion I had: An aunt of mine in London recalls the “race problem” of her time. In Guyana as in Trinidad, for a lot of coloured girls, the question was being “red enough” to get a good job on Main St. This was the preoccupation. Not Indians.
The question of racial dominance of the politics, hardly raised in reference to the PNM’s 28 years in Trinidad, takes a new dimension now when we consider that the call for power sharing is often presented in terms of race. It was not Burnham’s mission to ensure racial dominance by any group. The psychology of the group he led did not require it.
Walter Rodney, I said in my letter, was an example of a leader arising outside of the process of nomination by the influential politicians. Mr Burnham, at the start of the PNC, was chosen by the coalition of forces that entered the big tent that the PNC started out being. Rodney, whose way was prepared by Kwayana and influential others was similarly ‘anointed’ in his own way. The forces behind him were already and essentially non or multi-racial. It represented an evolution that needs to be taken into account when we consider the character of the WPA and now the AFC.
Now. Do I believe Burnham did it?
I, like others, have no more information than that which is publicly available. I am warned to beware of false or questionable accusations. Until persuasive evidence emerges I would prefer to suspend judgement. But I add that nothing I have heard or observed persuades me that he, personally, was involved.
Freddie needs to remember that the same way that those who see Burnham as innocent operate from predisposition and preconception, those who see him as guilty often operate from similar prejudgements. Many, personally hurt, will believe the worst. I personally am among those who lost five years at university because of the National Service imposition that I refused to fulfil. I put personal grievance aside.
Mr Burnham as collectivity and system, was, like Dr Jagan, an excresence of a social group at a certain point of its development. We should all learn and grow.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
