Stuck in the Burnham era

“Guyana: Politics, Economics, Society. Beyond the Burnham Era” is, despite its title, a book about the Burnham era in Guyana. The British edition is, somewhat confusingly, titled “The Co-operative Republic of Guyana: Politics, Economics and Society”. As far as I can tell, it's the same book.

Guyana is a former British colony on the South American mainland. Culturally, it's part of the Caribbean. The main ethnic groups are the Afro-Guyanese (descendants of Black slaves) and the Indo-Guyanese (descendants of immigrants from India). During the Cold War, Guyanese politics revolved around attempts by the Western powers to undermine the Marxist and pro-Soviet People's Progressive Party (PPP) of Indo-Guyanese activist Cheddi Jagan. The PPP was the largest single party in the country. Jagan briefly served as prime minister. One of the Western “assets” in the struggle against Jagan was Forbes Burnham, the leader of a predominantly Afro-Guyanese breakaway from the PPP, the People's National Congress (PNC). Ironically, Burnham later “moved to the left” and turned Guyana into an authoritarian socialist state, known officially as the Co-operative Republic (but apparently without much cooperatives)!

Burnham's regime nationalized 80% of the economy, supported the struggle against apartheid in southern Africa (Cuban fighter planes on their way to Angola were allowed to refuel in Guyana) and had good relations with Black nationalists in the United States. An unfortunate result of the latter policy was that Burnham's government allowed American reverend Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple to settle in Guyana. Jones was White but his cult was apparently part of the Afro-nationalist milieu. Due to Guyana's precarious geopolitical position as a socialist state on the US backyard, Burnham preferred non-alignment to full pro-Sovietism. Initially, he had better relations with China (during the US-Chinese thaw á la Kissinger) than with the Soviet Union, and the idea of “co-operative socialism” sounds similar to Tito's “self-management” schemes in Yugoslavia. Relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union were cautiously developed over time.

Internally, Burnham's regime proved repressive. The elections were rigged, opposition meetings frequently broken up, anti-government activists murdered (most notorious is the 1980 killing of Walter Rodney, a left-wing radical critical of Burnham's rule) and labor unions with the wrong political affiliations dumped from negotiations. The strongest opposition party was still Jagan's PPP. Burnham based his power on the state bureaucracy and the military, while his political party, the PNC, was actually a rather weak organization. It consisted mostly of candidate members, since full members were expected to contribute a large portion of their incomes to the party (or perhaps the Burnham machine at large).

Burnham seems to have used the pro-Soviet PPP as a foil in order to cast himself in the role of “lesser evil”. His delicate balancing act between East and West seems to have worked. The PNC managed to stay in power even after Burnham's unexpected death in 1985, but in 1992, Burnham's perennial nemesis Cheddi Jagan finally became president after a democratic election. By then, the Soviet bloc had already collapsed and the world had changed fundamentally. But that, as they say, is another story.

“Guyana: Politics, Economics and Society” is badly written, and often sounds more like a sociology treatise or detailed report on every little sub-committee of the Guyanese state apparatus or PNC ditto. You have to sift through this book really carefully to find the information that might be useful. For that reason, I only give it two stars. And yes, the title (or titles) are confusing…