Guyana’s historiography: An iconoclastic input

Mar 31, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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I am writing this column here in complete oblivion that I am a social activist. The analysis that will follow is the work of an academic. I am writing these notes as if I was requested to lecture to a class of university students studying Guyanese sociology or to contribute to an academic forum.
When one writes history one should know that unintended dimensions can occur and one therefore can introduce into polemical forums, interpretations that differ from what one has published.
Mr. Miles Fitzpatrick, a formidable intellect and a nationally recognized human rights personality passed away recently. There have been some vivid panegyrics published in the newspapers and at the night of tributes at the DCC.
I believe all of those qualities attributed to Fitzpatrick he did possess. This column is not on Fitzpatrick (I have my analysis of his contextual activism which I will dwell on in the future using class and Marxist analysis, but it is not germane to this analysis here) but about discussing Guyana’s historiography in the context of those panegyrics and looking for answers about that historiography.
There are four great periods of the dialectical interplay between power and struggle in Guyanese history. I will leave out discussion of the first – the great Berbice slave rebellion – and the second – the anti-colonial struggle. Emphasis is on the immediate post-colonial fight against the Forbes Burnham-led PNC government which I will date from 1968 to Burnham’s death in 1985. I will not devote any words to the PPP’s anti-government activism, 1964 -1968.
The second historical struggle is against the Jagdeo presidency 2002-2015. I have subsumed the Ramotar presidency under the hegemony of Jagdeo, because I think Jagdeo was the driving force behind Ramotar’s reign.
Which of the two periods constitutes the most vital struggle to preserve human rights, human dignity, freedoms, justice, moral values, ethnic respect, workers’ rights, nationalist instincts? Which of the two periods was the most dangerous, life –threatening, and deadly to want to enter into struggle against a volatile, reckless regime bent on preserving authoritarian power?
This is where the eulogies on Fitzpatrick come in, and the unintended dimensions I alluded to above, when one sets out to write history. Those who participated against the autocracy of Burnham, and who are still alive and writing and episodically speaking about that period, genuinely believe it was the most oppressive moment in post-colonial Guyana, and they want to preserve its richness and the legacies of those who fought Burnham.
I do not agree – and I do so with a mountain of facts to support my theory – that the fight against Jagdeo was a more terrible period for struggle than the Burnham epoch. In another column I will elongate. I find the praise heaped on Fitzpatrick by his admiring colleagues from that era of the seventies (I emphasis again; I don’t disagree with those sentiments) has thrown up some confusion which have implications for understanding Guyana’s historiography.
Writer after writer, speaker after speaker, painted an immense canvas of Fitzpatrick’s positive and superb contributions to the struggle against the Burnham autocracy. But what is missing is the supply of evidence of his victimization, targeting, oppression or repression by the maximum leader Forbes Burnham. The lack of this evidence brings in a situation of confusion.
The following juxtaposition should engender polemical responses. On the one hand, you have a maximum leader, Burnham, who is intoxicated with power and tolerates no challenge to his authority. Then you have this learned human rights lawyer, also a political activist, Miles Fitzpatrick. One rules, the other opposes his rule. Where is the confusion that poses a threat to Guyana’s historiography?
Why is there no evidence cited of Burnham’s relentless targeting of a ubiquitous activist that is pivotal to the opposition against him? They say in life you cannot eat your cake and have it too. Burnham was either a tyrannical leader that hounded and hunted you down when you sought to challenge and undermine his rule (as the admirers of Fitzpatrick adumbrated about Fitzpatrick’s activism) or he was a benign and tolerant autocrat that wasn’t relentless against many of his detractors, including Fitzpatrick.
I will end with one note on my theory why the Jagdeo totalitarian period was worse than the Burnham epoch, and a clue as to why Burnham didn’t touch Fitzpatrick at all. Fitzpatrick’s counterpart in the 2002-2015 period of struggle would be Nigel Hughes. Jagdeo sent the taxman on Hughes suing him for millions and openly said he would not be awarded silk. Finally, a reading of the released files on British Guiana by Britain’s MI-5 will reveal a lot about the players from the fifties and sixties, and why Burnham didn’t touch Fitzpatrick.

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