Green and Clarke should deal with Burnham’s entire performance

Mar 03, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,
I refer to Oscar Clarke’s letter in your edition of February 28 relying on Naipaul’s statement in his book: “The Middle Passage” in support of his contention that Burnham was a good orator.
The General Secretary of the PNCR was replying to Rajendra Rampersaud who, in an earlier letter, had complained about the tendency of many people to adjudge Burnham as a genius in many things, (when in fact there were people who surpassed him in the same things), without reference to Burnham’s ruination of Guyana, which detracted from all of Burnham’s good qualities, much of which, like his alleged oratory, looked like posturing in hindsight.

Kaieteur News in an editorial had referred to Burnham’s gift of wit in Parliament without acknowledging that Boysie Ramkarran was the most celebrated wit in the legislative history of Guyana and acknowledged to be so. There is no dispute about this.
Some in the PNCR cannot allow this to stand, of course. First, Mayor Hamilton Green, now G.S. Clarke joined the fray to keep alive Burnham’s now tarnished reputation as an orator. This is a diversion from the main point of Rampersaud’s letter.
Mayor Green and G.S. Clarke cannot be allowed to selectively choose their own ground for debate.

Rampersaud was talking about the whole of Burnham, not a part of him. He said that Burnham’s alleged oratory must be juxtaposed to his rigging of elections. He was saying that Burnham’s oratory (which he doubted) was far outweighed by his rigging of elections. Rampersaud was in good company.
This is what Eusi Kwayana, who is in a better position than most to judge, said to Naipaul about Burnham when he visited Guyana again in 1991: “He was well admired by the Guyanese when he got back from England in 1950, on account of his supposed scholarship, and oratory – which I found empty.” Naipaul himself found Burnham to be empty way back in 1961 when he first visited then British Guiana. He had heard Burnham in 1953 at Oxford and again at a public meeting in 1961. He interviewed him.

This is his conclusion: “In 1953 he spoke, however uncertainly, like a man with a case. In 1961 I felt he had none.”
Naipaul’s assessment of Burnham’s oratory in 1961 was based on a public meeting he attended at which Burnham spoke. While he praised his oratory, this is what he concluded: “Unfortunately Mr. Burnham had little to say.” This earlier assessment by Naipaul confirms that of Kwayana’s, expressed 30 years after in 1991, that he found Burnham’s oratory “empty”. Maybe Mayor Green can now chide Kwayana as he sought to do to Rampersaud.

But as I said above, Rampersaud was talking about the whole Burnham, while Mayor Green and G.S. Clarke sought to extract a part, his oratory, and comment on that only. If G.S. Clarke relies on Naipaul for one part of Burnham, he ought to rely on this other part by the Nobel Laureate who said in his article ‘A Handful of Dust: Return to Guiana in 1991’: “Every important industry — bauxite, rice — was taken over by the PNC-controlled government; and the government gave jobs, or created jobs, for its supporters. So the Communist-style tyranny of the state was also a racial tyranny; and the corruptions, petty and big, had a further racial twist.

Everything became rotten in this state; everything began to lose money. More and more money was printed; in the racist state, the Guyana currency, once on a par with the currency of a place like Trinidad, became almost worthless. Imports were regulated, many items banned. Guyanese of all races began to pine for certain simple and cheap foods they had grown up on — New Brunswick sardines, Canadian flour, Canadian smoked herrings and salted fish.
At a time of plenty in neighbouring Trinidad (because of the oil boom of the 1970s), Guyana was experiencing want. Guyanese began to leave, legally and illegally, Indians at first, and then others; they went to Trinidad and Canada and the United States. More than a third of the Guyanese population now lives abroad.”
Albert Marchand

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