The Complicated Legacy of Forbes Burnham
Perhaps no singular personality has shaped the post-colonial politics in Guyana in the way that Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham did. Given that today is Burnham’s 100th birthday, I will explore Burnham’s complicated legacy.
To his admirers, Burnham was a visionary leader who led Guyana to independence. He was also a Pan-Africanist who supported the various anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Burnham was indeed a very brilliant and visionary leader, yet his legacy is one which has largely been tainted in the eyes of some because of his authoritarian tendencies. When the government of South Africa decided to award Burnham with the Oliver Tambo award, there was an immediate outcry over the assassination of Walter Rodney. It is widely held that Burnham’s government was responsible for Walter Rodney’s assassination. This was a view which was reinforced by the findings of the Commission of Inquiry into Rodney’s killing.
Rodney ran into problems with Burnham’s government when Rodney tried to return to Guyana to teach. He was barred from teaching at the university and was forced to teach overseas in order to earn a living. Rodney was also a member of the Working People’s Alliance, which was very critical of Burnham’s government at the time.
Eusi Kwayana also emerged as one of the most vocal critics of Burnham’s government at the time. Eusi Kwayana had previously supported Burnham’s PNC political party, but he broke with the party over corruption within the party. Kwayana’s organization, the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), found that the government began to frustrate its efforts. This included deporting two American Pan-Africanists — Mamadou Lumumba and Shango Umoja — because of their ties to ASCRIA. Burnham also got the government of Tanzania to ban all non-governmental organizations from the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania. Here we see one of the great contradictions of Burnham. On the international level he supported Pan-Africanism, but on the local level his government opposed the efforts of Pan-Africanists such as Kwayana and Rodney.
There are other aspects of Burnham which are difficult to reconcile. Burnham was a socialist, yet one of the criticisms of Burnham which was raised by the Working People’s Alliance at the time was that the economic policies which Burnham engaged in were policies which placed Guyana in further debt to the IMF, while also implementing policies which lowered the standard of living for the working class.
It is also interesting to note that even though Burnham was a socialist, the CIA intervened in Guyana in the 1960s to help position Burnham in power to keep the Marxist-Leninist Cheddi Jagan out of power. In the article mentioned above, Clive Thomas suggests that the CIA continued to support Burnham in power. It is difficult to say. Once Burnham came into power in Guyana, his relationship with the United States was a tense one. He also aligned himself with socialist nations such as Cuba and North Korea. This surely was not something which made the CIA comfortable. Of course, there are those who have expressed the view that the CIA was working to destabilize Burnham’s government as well. It is difficult to say, but what we do know is that the United States and Britain preferred to have Burnham in power than Jagan.
The points that I raised above in this article explain why Burnham’s legacy remains such a complicated one. It’s certainly one which the African Guyanese population continues to wrestle with. As a Pan-Africanist, I myself have been confronted with the challenge of reconciling the Pan-Africanists who come out of the Burnham tradition and those of us who came out of the Rodney/Kwayana tradition.
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Dwayne is the author of The Political and Intellectual Legacy of Walter Rodney
