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Yesu Persaud, Forbes Burnham and me

Dec 09, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There are times when blackouts come at Turkeyen, where I live, in the evenings when you are on the computer. You don’t feel sleepy, so there are only two options. You can turn on your battery-operated CD player and listen to music. Or use your battery-charged lamp and read a book.
Aubrey Baptiste from one of Guyana’s longest surviving small businesses, “Matt’s Record Bar,” recently sent me, from Florida, the latest cover of the great Burt Bacharach love songs done by an artist named, Steve Tyrell. The album features two fabulous covers by the inimitable lady of soul, Patti Austin. After listening to the songs in the dark, I turned on the lamp and went to my library to see what I should read again. I chose to reread an intriguing section of Yesu Persaud’s autobiography, “Reaching for the Stars.”
Yesu celebrated his 90th birthday recently. The second part of his autobiography should be out next year. The country’s young generation (outgoing US ambassador says half of Guyana’s population is under 26) will have a portrait of what Guyana was like before they were born, on reading Yesu’s autobiography.
Yesu is one of the persons who I admire intensely in my life. If I ever had a genuine friend that I know likes me and would not let me down, it is Yesu Persaud. He remains and always will be, one of my heroes. That night when blackout came, my eyes just went immediately to his autobiography. It is one of the best memoirs that I have ever read. I am simply fascinated by chapters 7 and 8. They are a compellingly lucid account of one of the most crucial moments in contemporary Guyanese history.
There were some fascinating lines in those two chapters, which young researchers will find rich in their revelations. When I was young, I was fed a diet of Burnham versus Jagan – the good guy; Cheddi versus the bad guy, LFSB. All of that vanished completely from my mind as I became a teenager and began to read books, some of which I stole from the National Library and the Michael Forde Bookshop where I worked as a sixteen–year-old.
But the complete picture was overturned when I became a UG student and met the really big, powerful players in Guyana from across class lines and the race divide. I got to know Opposition Leader Cheddi Jagan very well. I never met Prime Minister Burnham, though when as PM, he sent to call me for what I will never know. I think it had to do with the accolade of acquiring the President’s Medal as the best graduating student at UG.
I will always remember the night. I was by myself having a sundae at a Banks DIH outlet named Idiho (still has that name) below the famous Demico building on Brickdam. One of the PM’s assistants that I knew from my UG days, Vincent Britton, drove up. I can vividly recall the colour of that car. It was olive green and it was the model that many of the PNC ministers drove – the Mitsubishi Lancer.
Vincent had a most likeable personality. I was with the WPA at that time, but strangely, I got along with many top PNC apparatchiks who were fellow students at UG, a friendship that has fondly lasted up to this day. The memories of some of them will remain etched in my soul forever.
Vincent told me Mr. Burnham would like to see me. Obviously, at that time (the turbulent seventies) I was no fan of Burnham. Young, silly, adventurous and full of misplaced bravado, I told Vincent to tell Burnham to “eff off.” I don’t know if Vincent conveyed the exact exclamation, but Burnham hated me since that time in 1978. And he did things to hurt me, my wife and mother.
Anyway, sorry for this long digression; back to Yesu. Even though I will never, as a human rights activist reconcile myself with Burnham, as an academic, I will continue to acknowledge him as one of the most visionary and transformative leaders the post-colonial world has produced. That section in Yesu’s autobiography on Burnham just touched some nerve in my academic mind when I first read it, and continues to enthrall me about Burnham.
On page 213, Yesu describes the harassment that he received from PNC big boys after the nationalization of the sugar industry. One day Burnham sent to call him and told him to ignore them; that they only want to impress their leader, but he has no time for sycophants. If only our other presidents used to think like that, Guyana would have been a better country.

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