By Baytoram Ramharack
Cheddi Jagan (1918-1997) was a complex political character. Comprehending Cheddi, the man, his mission, and his legacy is virtually impossible without a profound understanding of the supportive role of Janet Jagan (1920-2009), his lifelong political partner. Cheddi and Janet Jagan were politically inseparable. Yet, despite Janet’s towering omnipresence and historical appendage to Cheddi’s political legacy, she remains relatively unknown today, largely overshadowed by the enduring charismatic appeals and sentimental memories of a husband turned grass-root politician. But Janet was more than an inconsequential appendage to the legacy of Cheddi Jagan. She has earned a permanent niche in Guyanese historiography. Yet, to date, very little independent or critical analytical narrative exists on Janet’s legacy and contribution to our political development. What, then, should Guyanese make of the venerable Chicago-born “Jewish grandmother” who became a naturalized Guyanese in 1966 and rose to the pinnacle of political power in what was considered an underpopulated South American backwater country?
Besides her role as an assistant at the family’s dental office located at 199 Charlotte Street, Lacytown, Georgetown, Janet, aided and supported by her husband, immersed herself in the nationalist struggle in Guyana, earning her the distinction of being the first American-born, and the only woman to serve as President of Guyana. She is somewhat reminiscent of Sonia Maino, the embattled Italian-born wife of Rajiv Gandhi, whose support among Indians created a pathway for her to become the longest-serving President of the opposition Indian National Congress. Janet’s insertion into Guyanese politics was facilitated by her marriage on August 5, 1943, to Cheddi Jagan, at the age of 23. She was a student at the Cook County Nursing School in Chicago when the young couple met. Janet recalled that she could not secure her family’s “good wishes” for the couple’s marriage. To her family, Cheddi was a foreigner – he was not an American, he was not white, and he most certainly was not Jewish – and the couple was already showing signs of embracing radical Marxist ideology, which Janet’s parents of Eastern European origin frowned upon.
By all indications, at the age of 12, Janet would have experienced the traditional ritualistic ceremony of bat mitzvah, the Jewish equivalent of Christian baptism, given the conservative nature of her parents. As a descendant of Jacob, father of the 12 Hebrew tribes, Janet could hardly have been oblivious to the irrefutable fact that her religion, ancestry, culture, and experience were far different from almost every person in Guyana. Her Jewish background automatically guaranteed religious entitlement as a member of “God’s chosen people.” Continued historical persecution of the Jewish people, from King Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian captivity to the Nazi Holocaust, has fueled a determined struggle that ultimately materialized into the creation of the modern state of Israel, the biblical promised land for Jews in the diaspora. There was no existing biblical covenant or exit strategy that allowed Janet to renounce Judaism, even if she wanted to, as she did with her American citizenship. Being Jewish was an important aspect of her self-affirmation and her cultural identity. In an interview conducted in 2001 with David Dabydeen, the 81-year-old matriarch stated that her government was “supportive of the Palestinian cause,” but she also “believe in the State of Israel’s right to exist.” She felt compelled to mention, too, that “Cheddi was one of the first, if not the first, Caribbean leader to visit Israel” before Guyana’s independence.
In British Guiana, Janet was confronted with issues of gender, race, class, and nationality in a society where exploitation was physically and culturally inseparable from European colonial rule. Her “whiteness,” coupled with her willingness to challenge European exploitation imposed by the colonial masters and the sugar plantocracy on behalf of the Guianese working class, endowed her with virtual immunity to work closely with men, a privilege not accorded to Indian and African women in British Guiana. In 1997, when Cheddi died, Janet was sworn in as Prime Minister and Vice President of Guyana, coming within a heartbeat of the apex of political power. Capitalizing on sympathy votes, following the death of Cheddi Jagan, and encouraged by poignant slogans like “Everything Will Be All Right” and “Unity and One Love”, Janet was elected President with 55% of the votes obtained in the 15 December 1997 national and regional elections. This was the height of her political career, as a camera crew, partially subsidized by the New York Times, followed her around and documented her historic electoral campaign.
Although she was forced to resign from the Presidency in 1999, partly due to ill health, she remained an active member of the Executive Committee of the People’s Progressive Party until she died in 2009. In a country where over 95 percent of the population is either Indian, African, Amerindian, or mixed, Janet was moved, she believed, by the national outpouring of admiration, love, and support. “People do not see white when they look at me,” she confessed to Dabydeen. In a speech delivered at Wayne University (now Wayne State University), her Alma Mater, Janet explained that her political passion was influenced by two factors, namely “the prejudice and discrimination” she experienced “as a Jew” and the “radicalism” which she felt “were decisive in molding [her] character into a person who despised discrimination and injustice.” Her Jewish background and her radical Marxism set her apart from her schoolmates in Chicago.
Janet, the rebel, who was born in the south side of Chicago to family members who traced their origin to Romania and Hungary, was a proud member of the Young Communist League, the youth wing of the Communist Party of the United States. David de Caires, the founder of Stabroek News, observed that Janet “kept the party together” and stood out as a “brilliant organizer” even when the PPP was at its lowest ebb during the 28 years the party was excluded from political power and the country was held firmly in the grips of the dictatorial policies of a Machiavellian Forbes Burnham. Martin Carter, who shared a close friendship with Janet, given her love of western literature, theatre, and arts, concurred that she was “a good organizer.” It was Forbes Burnham, who once commented that his nemesis, Cheddi Jagan, was “a very charming person, but a most incompetent administrator.” Janet obviously filled the void Burnham recognized as a potential organizational flaw of the People’s Progressive Party. More importantly, she helped convert the mass-based multiracial party the Jagans birthed in 1950 into a formidable electoral machine, notable for winning elections.
Brindley Benn, by far the foremost African in the party (aside from Ashton Chase, and, later, Sydney King), also recognized the indispensable organizational skills Janet brought to the PPP. However, Benn felt that her exceptional organizational ability and the structure of the PPP allowed the imposing matriarch to transform herself into a powerful party oligarch. Benn (and his wife Patricia), who broke from the PPP in search of a Maoist brand of Marxism (only to return in 1992), bluntly told Janet in 1965 that “You see the Party is your personal property. You have no sense of comradeship. You keep whom you want and destroy them later. You have one face for Guyana and another for foreign socialist countries.”
Janet remained as inflexible in her pro-Soviet and Marxist ideological posture, as Cheddi. After all, Cheddi generously acknowledged that from time to time, Janet provided him with his early reading materials on Marxism-Leninism – indisputably, she was a formative influence in his Marxist creed, as Cheddi admitted to VS Naipaul in a revealing interview in 1991. Seven years earlier, in October 1984, Cheddi made a similar confession to Professor Frank Birbalsingh that it was Janet who provided the seminal impetus to his life-long political orientation: “I was able, through her, to get Marxist-Leninist literature – Lenin’s booklets and Das Kapital. The radical politics in which I was involved in the US began to gain clarity from these books, clarity from a working-class perspective.” Marxism, for Cheddi, as it probably was for Janet, provided a “total understanding” of the world. Janet never swayed from her ideological orientation, even after the demise of the Cold War. It is quite possible that it was Janet who delivered Cheddi firmly into the Soviet camp.
Janet’s role in defending the PPP and its actions is universally acknowledged. The small political study group Cheddi and Janet founded, along with Ashton Chase, and H.J.M. Hubbard in late 1946, the Political Affairs Committee (PAC), was armed with a “propaganda” organ from its inception. Between November 1946 and December 1949, the PAC Bulletin was published fortnightly, comprising 43 issues circulated throughout British Guiana. All were personally screened by Janet Jagan, whose editorial skills and ideological certainty contoured the numerous publications and narrative of the PPP over a period of nearly 60 years. There was no doubt that the Bulletin, from its very first issue, espoused the superiority of “scientific socialism”, Marxism or communism, as its guiding principle. Cheddi was the principal contributor, never missing the opportunity to endorse the Soviet Union and its satellites as the only legitimate economic model for radical transformation and entry into the socialist utopian world. The party’s ideological organ, Thunder, reveals that the Jagans never deviated from the divine orthodoxy of Soviet communism. Yet, as is transparent in her writings for PPP publications over five decades, Janet was not inclined to theoretical or intellectual rigor – at least not at the level that could match that of Walter Rodney, whose scholarship syncretized Marxist theory with his insightful analysis of colonial societies and the impact of global imperialism. Her inclination was more practical and organizational, the nuts and bolts of PPP politics and ideology.
Unlike Cheddi, Janet hardly wore her Marxist ideology on her sleeves. Undoubtedly, they were devout and loyal followers of the Soviets, who, according to information released from MI5 files, took their marching orders directly from their revered Marxist guru, Billy Strachan (1921-1998), Secretary of the Caribbean Labour Congress (London Branch) and the most influential leader in the West Indian section of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Released MI5 files confirmed that the British intercepted all communications between the Jagans and suspected Marxist operatives outside British Guiana.
Aside from her ideological obsession with Marxism, and her pro-Soviet loyalty, Janet shared the dream of “international proletarianism,” a radical dismantling, and restructuring of the global capitalist economic order along Marxist principles. The revolution would be led by the Soviet Marxists, of course, through diktats issued by the descendants of Russian Bolsheviks. Moses Bhagwan knows about this all too well. As he recalled, “Janet in particular and the leaders of the party were pro-Russian… The real reason for my expulsion from the party was because I appeared to be anti-Russian. The Russians would not tolerate anyone within the leadership with whom they were not comfortable…”
Ideologically, the members of the PPP did not represent an integrated and harmonious political organization. Rather, it was, as Clem Seecharan observed, “an agglomeration of discordant political strands, on a continuum from communist to capitalist …lacking the authority or the resolve to rein in divergent tendencies, all seeking to outdo each other in hating the British imperialists. On one hand, the right wing of the PPP, led by Burnham and including Ashton Chase, Dr. J.P. Lachmansingh, Clinton Wong and Jainarine Singh, was virtually irreconcilable with Cheddi Jagan’s communist core of the party that included Janet Jagan, Sydney King [Eusi Kwayana], Martin Carter, Rory Westmaas and Brindley Benn.”
In fact, in 1953, of the following members of the PPP’s first executive committee, only Cheddi and Janet Jagan, Sydney King and Ramkarran could be considered Marxists: Cheddi Jagan (Leader); L.F.S. Burnham (Chairman); H. Aubrey Fraser (First Vice-Chairman); Clinton Wong (Second Vice-Chairman); Janet Jagan (General Secretary); Sydney King (Assistant General Secretary); Ramkarran (Treasurer); and the executive members: Ashton Chase, Rudy Luck, Frank Van Sertima; Ivor Cendrecourt, Mary Thompson, Hubert Critchlow, E. Kennard, Theo Lee, Ulric Fingal, Jainarine Singh, Dr. J.P. Lachmansingh, Cecil Cambridge, Fred Bowman, Pandit S. Misir and Sheila La Taste (the wife of L.F.S. Burnham). Janet remained the most influential PPP operative, tenaciously in control of the rudder, steering the PPP ship along its Marxist journey, and effectively eliminating anyone who dared to challenge the core values and objectives of the PPP.
The PPP’s women’s organization, the Women’s Progressive Organisation (WPO), of which Janet was its founder and President, was established in May 1953. The WPO sought immediate affiliation with the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a feminist organization that initially established close links with Moscow. That same month, Janet Jagan attended the Third World Congress of Women in Copenhagen, organized by the WIDF. As an elected member of its Presidium, she appealed to her comrades to align themselves with “the great Socialist countries which have been moving forward with great rapidity and success.” In July 1953, a few months after being elected to the Government, Janet Jagan attended the Women’s International Congress in Copenhagen, held under the auspices of the WIDF. At the time, her numerous portfolios included being the General Secretary of the PPP, the editor of its organ, Thunder, a legislator, and Deputy Speaker of the House of Assembly. After the conclusion of the congress, Janet visited Romania, then she paid a visit to London on July 8, 1953. Much of her time in London was spent cementing a lifelong friendship with West Indian communists of the Caribbean Labour Congress (London Branch), led by Billy Strachan, and members of the CPGB.
To be continued…
Dr. Baytoram Ramharack teaches politics and history at Nassau Community College (New York). He has a forthcoming publication which is titled A Powerful Indian Voice, Alice Bhagwandai Singh: Reflections on her work in Guyana.
