Dear Editor,
I started to blog, or rather, follow up on Harry Hergash’s letter in the February 29 edition of SN entitled, ‘We have to address the negative impact of Burnham, not just the positive if we are to be honest to history’, but the response began to involve lengthy quotes from the writing of my former political science lecturer. Hence this letter.
Today (March 1) is the funeral of Kenneth Persaud in New York. He was eighty-four, and one of the few remaining stalwarts who actively participated in pre-independence politics in Guyana. Kenneth Persaud, better known to the world as KP, was active in the formation of both the PPP and WPA.
Like Walter Rodney, KP had a thorough knowledge of society analyzed purely from an objective and Marxist perspective. He was not a lecturer. Lecturers deliver. KP was a teacher. He made sure his students understood a concept before he proceeded to expound another. I enjoyed doing his course that first year he taught Politics 100. I guess so also did Khemraj Ramjattan. We both got As.
Matthew Arnold said, “Truth sits on the lips of dying men…” In what must have been KP’s last serious political analysis, entitled, ‘Follow-up on Gokarran’s thesis: Jagdeo was Burnham’s incarnate’, (published in the Guyana Journal), he expressed a sadness and disappointment with both the PPP and PNC which explained why he had much earlier become one of the founding executives of the WPA, and was so active and vibrant in that organization.
KP became even more disenchanted with the Jagdeo regime. Stating, “I was specially arrested by his (Sukhdeo’s) statement that these men (Burnham and Jagdeo), both past Presidents, ‘endowed with a narcissism and super ego, lapsed into a Machiavellian dictatorship after their first term in office’. This broad, underlying insight presented in the mixed imagery taken from psychology and political science is lovely, flamboyant and powerful.”
KP continues, “ Now, if it is true that both men were more or less identical dictators, we have to agree that the economic, social and political environment had been arrested at the demise of one and the reappearing of the other, a quarter of a century later. This indeed was the case, nonsensical as it appears. This apparent jumbie story is true. But seriously, we have to ask the question: Had history stopped? Was there no positive development or change in the economic, social and political life of the people?”
In tracing the origin of this static history, KP states, “I knew Burnham pretty well, personally…When Burnham returned from his studies to Guyana I had just finished high school. He, with Dr. Jagan, and Sydney King, (now Eusi Kwayana), used to visit my father, seen as an important person in our village, to help them in the formulation of a new entity, a political party. I picked up a close friendship with Forbes who was most friendly and approachable, even amiable. I did not spot any proclivities to tyranny. And, as to the concept ‘dictatorship’, that could not have been in our consciousness at the time!…As time passed, Burnham, and some other professionals, moved 360 degrees…”
“The other party, Jagan’s (PPP), developed its own unique rhetoric which, likewise, has been in vogue through time. And what has happened to the ‘masses’? Did they develop a narrative for themselves? No. They, by and large, at this formative stage of our nation, realized that they were made merely riff raff: the political, economic and social fields have not
developed for them. Economically speaking, their lot has remained soldered into poverty, their social and political life has stagnated. (Older persons, who compare a 1990 stump speech with one heard in 1957 say they have heard nothing new, absolutely nothing new.) It works well for the system which replicates itself. But, for the people, true agents of politics, time has been standing still.”
Harry Hergash wrote, “Within the past few years and especially since the May 2015 national elections, historical revisionism aimed at distorting post-independence Guyanese history has become prevalent.” KP said it, too. “Hindsight is a wonderful purveyor of ‘facts’; it licenses itself to fictionalized stories, it is married to convenient flights of fancy. Latter-day historians, armed with a million-dollar ‘research’ grant from former slave masters can, and do, turn the true facts upside down to prove nothing but nebulous hypotheses! Another species of historians, like a stray dog in Albouystown, pick up bits and pieces of stinking flesh and weave masterly theories for degreed institutions foreign to them. We have to be on the lookout for these charlatans!”
KP laments, “If I were in Guyana at the last elections (2011) I would not have been true to myself to vote for a party. Political parties, even the newer ones like APNU, are created over damaged, retrogressive goods; their founding elements rest on the same narratives created earlier”.
So, it is not really since May 2015 historical revisionism has been going on. It was happening before. But it is sad, very sad that it is still going on. I wonder, with all his insight, would KP have voted at the 2015 elections? He did say, “But, for the people, true agents of politics, time has been standing still”.
But for him, there was a faint light of hope. He wrote, “Gandhi’s teaching has brought success: on his slim shoulders the mighty ‘revolutionaries’, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, have stood and shaken the complacency of the 20th century to glory. And we can, with the prudent use of Gandhi, be successful too.”
True, history always absolves they who are honest and true to it; the dishonest usually end up in the garbage heap of history. People die but their words of truth live on like alpha and omega. Honest academics leave footprints on the sands of time while those of others are washed away by the tides of empiricism. Hence, this response to Harry Hergash is also a partial tribute to Kenneth Persaud.
Yours faithfully,
Gokarran Sukhdeo
