Burnham is damaged goods

Mar 12, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Forbes Burnham was initially announced as the posthumous recipient of the Order of the Companions of the Oliver Tambo, an honour accorded to eminent non-nationals in South Africa. His induction into this esteemed pantheon was however jettisoned by persons with and without connections to the Working People’s Alliance (WPA).

The Rodney family is reported to have appealed directly to the then South African President, Jacob Zuma, asking that the award be rescinded. According to an article in Groundings (Volume 1, Issue 1, 2014), the family claimed that it was the Guyanese people who made personal sacrifices to contribute and to offer solidarity with the people of South Africa. The letter to Zuma, it was said, noted that, “though Burnham may have portrayed himself as a freedom fighter to the world, the reality and history of Guyana clearly shows that he was a dictator and leader of a brutal and murderous regime at home.” The Rodney family was also reported to have written that, “to place the name of Forbes Burnham alongside that of such an illustrious man as Tambo is reprehensible and disturbing in any level of discourse.”

Horace Campbell, a noted academic based in the United States, asked whether the African National Congress, the ruling party in South Africa, was rewarding Forbes Burnham for the assassination of Walter Rodney. His concern was echoed by Jamaican professor Dr. Rupert Lewis.

Campbell even challenged the anti-colonial credentials of Burnham (one of the reasons for the announcement of the award. He accused Burnham of publicly praising anti-colonialism in Africa but of collaborating with French colonialism in the Caribbean. It was suggested that it was this collaboration which allowed for Rodney’s killer to find refuge in French Guiana.

A petition was circulated that was damning of Forbes Burnham. It accused him of being an agent of imperialism (declassified documents subsequently have established that Burnham was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency). It further described Burnham as heading a corrupt, brutal and murderous regime that was a disaster for Guyana.

In calling for its rescinding, the petition stated the award amounted to an “affront to the legacy and memory of Walter Rodney, Father Darke, Ohene Koama, Edward Dublin, and the numerous others who paid with their lives or liberty for challenging the increasing repression of the Burnham government.”

In withdrawing the award indefinitely, the South African government tried not to show that it was on any side. The South African government used the word ‘deferral’ rather than ‘rescind’.

But that withdrawal had significance because it showed that Burnham’s name was permanently tarnished by his government’s assassination of Walter Rodney, and that henceforth there would be great circumspection in using Burnham as an example of anything that was good for Africa.

Even the two goodly professors that came out against the award did not attempt to deny that he did play a role in the African freedom struggles. But they implied that role always had to be checked against his own dictatorial practice in Guyana and his earlier scheming with imperialism.

Burnham in effect is ‘damaged goods.’ And that is the framework in which the PNC/R, his party, may wish to examine why in the recent Nelson Mandela Lecture, the Prime Minister of Barbados mentioned a number of Caribbean leaders but left out Forbes Burnham as part of the anti-apartheid struggle. It would have been politically imprudent of Mottley to have mentioned Forbes Burnham. This would only attract adverse comments about her associating the anti-apartheid struggle with a man who was accused in his own country of moving towards an apartheid state and who a Commission of Inquiry fingered in the death of a world-renowned historian who is still adored today on the African continent.

But those who are criticizing the Barbadian Prime Minister also miss that she had segued to Caribbean and Commonwealth support for the anti-apartheid struggle to make a more substantial point. For her, each generation has to carry the baton of the struggle forward and thus she traced the support for that struggle over different decades. This was part of her wider argument that those who criticize Mandela for not doing more in the area of economic justice for Black South Africans fail to appreciate that each generation has to do its duty and it is for the present generation to assume the baton for economic justice in South Africa.

As for Burnham, in this the centennial year of his birth anniversary, no attempt at political renovation will succeed. He will forever be tarnished by going much too far in assassinating Walter Rodney.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• damaged, Forbes Burnham, Jacob Zuma, South African President, Zuma

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