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Remembering Cheddi Jagan
Mar 10, 2010 Editorial
It is hard to believe that it has been thirteen years since Dr Cheddi Jagan passed on. Maybe it’s because he is so much in the news. During the last year there has been an extensive debate in the press over his role in the history of the country. On one side are the “revisionists” – those that believe that the good doctor has gotten a free pass by those who have relied mainly on his own account of that history – “The West on Trial”. On the other, there are not only the partisans of the great man, but those who profess that while “revisionism” is all well and good (and inevitable), the changes do not all have to be negative.
But the debate itself, and its intensity, simply confirm the impact of the simple “country boy” who came out of Port Mourant, Berbice, and without any dispute changed the trajectory of Guyana’s history. Born just a year after the abolition of indentureship, Jagan was the child of first-generation immigrants brought here from India to labour for King Sugar. However, the meteoric rise of his father to the top of the pecking order among the locals as the “head driver” had to have given him an early inkling of the possibilities of change within the social order.
That order had collapsed with the markets for sugar as the Great Depression had spread from the US to the other developed economies – including Britain and hence Guyana as one of her colonies. Already subsistence-level wages plummeted by twenty-five percent on the plantations by the mid-thirties but yet Cheddi’s father managed to pay for his son to attend Queen’s College all the way in Georgetown.
Not many have written about this phase of Dr. Jagan’s life, but the dramatic change in the social environments had to have been traumatic to the impressionable teenager. Interestingly enough, Dr Jagan has elaborated on only one aspect of the probable multiple dislocations to which he had to have been subjected. From the privileged position he would have enjoyed in his home village to being forced to perform menial chores for a rich Indian family at which he boarded in Georgetown, alerted him powerfully to dangers of sentimentalising ethnic ties. Class mattered to him most directly even though he was to think of it in those terms much later. The humiliation lingered long.
What has also not been clearly delineated has been the details of his turn to Marxism-Leninism as an explanatory tool for social phenomena as well as an implicit strategy for change.
It would appear that while in the US from 1935-43, while becoming increasingly politically aware, he was at the most imbued with the aspirations of the democratic ideals of the Atlantic Charter as articulated by Roosevelt and Churchill. Gandhi, he said, was his hero. If that is in truth the fact, then his choice of ideology was a conscious one he made when he confronted the state of his country – still a colony of Britain – on his return.
The problems of the then British Guiana had been greatly exacerbated by the war raging in Europe. While Jagan had been studying in the US, the contradictions in sugar had erupted into violence not only in Guiana (the Leonora shootings of 1939) but also across the Caribbean. The usual ploy of the British to such eruptions – the Royal Commission of Enquiry (Moyne, in this instance, which was sitting in Guiana when the Leonora outburst exploded) – had recommended that the Crown Colony device of rule ought to be modified to include more local elements as well as expanding the franchise.
But even if the report had been made public (it was not because of the war) the concrete dire situation would not have been altered.
There are those, with perfect 20/20 hindsight, who fault Dr Jagan for his choice of world view in the forties. We should reflect that over sixty years down the road, we still have not found an alternative that adequately answers the questions posed by colonialism (now “neo”), capitalism, racism, ethnic aspirations, gender biases etc, that confronted him then and still hold us in bondage today.
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