Shadows of a broken fellowship

Dec 07, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – There are certain deaths that arrive not simply as the extinguishing of a life but as the reopening of old wounds. The announcement—almost furtive, tucked away in the letter pages of another newspaper—that one of the old but not well-known anti-dictatorship warriors had passed on, alone and apparently after difficult years, carried with it the soft rustling of unease.

It triggered, as these things do, a private sorrow and a quiet interrogation of history. Not the history written in books or laid out in speeches, but the more delicate one, the one that lives in the memory of those who survived the long night and long knives of the Burnham dictatorship.

That dictatorship—people are now inclined to speak of it with the politeness that nostalgia allows—was brutal. Extremely brutal. The kind of brutality that deforms the inner life long after the outward violence has ended. Those who resisted it did so not because they imagined a reward but because something in them refused to bow.

Many came from modest circumstances, from lives without great promise. Yet they risked everything. To see one of them die in obscurity, after the great wheel of politics had turned and turned again, is to be reminded of the fragility of gratitude in public life.

There is a narrative, polished by repetition, that the PPPC became the ungrateful heir of the democratic struggle after 1992. In this telling, the party turned its back on its comrades in the WPA, men and women whose courage helped loosen the dictatorship’s grip.

Some of these fighters, it is said, slipped into lean times—into the crevices of society where memory is short and assistance shorter. From this emerges the claim that the PPPC somehow mutated into a dictatorship of its own, or at least into something cold, dismissive of its own past.

It is a seductive narrative. All stories of betrayal are. They give shape to hurt; they give the comfort of clarity, even when clarity is not deserved.

Yet, when one strips the emotion from the story, something more complicated appears. People usually part ways not through a single betrayal but through accumulation: misunderstandings, egos, unmet expectations, the intoxication of power, the quiet bitterness of unrealized dreams. It is tidier to lay responsibility at the feet of one party. It absolves the other. It allows one to mourn without the burden of introspection.

But history, that impolite companion, insists on reminding us that mistakes were made on both sides. The PPPC, victorious and triumphalist in 1992 after a prolonged and righteous struggle, bore the greater responsibility to be magnanimous. Victors always do; it is the tax success imposes. And yet the party, finding itself suddenly in the seat of power after decades of exclusion, began to speak a new language—the language of the state. It is a language that can estrange even old friends.

The WPA, for its part, confronted the difficult transition from revolutionary opposition to an obscure party. Some saw compromise as betrayal; others saw it as necessity. Principles, once clear in the harsh light of dictatorship, became murkier in the softer, deceptive glow of democracy.

What was once a fellowship forged in danger slowly dissolved into suspicion. Old jokes became sources of irritation; small slights became symbols of disrespect; ideological differences that once seemed manageable became insurmountable. It is astonishing how quickly affection can turn to estrangement when history moves on and refuses to wait for the unprepared.

Meanwhile, opportunists—those agile figures who always survive regime changes—found easy purchase in the new order. Some who had cheered the dictatorship walked untroubled into the warm embrace of the new government. They were not weighed down by memories or old loyalties. They had no scars. They came bearing usefulness, and usefulness became the currency of the new PPPC politics. These opportunists prospered where genuine fighters faltered. It added to the bitterness; it deepened the wound.

But it is too simple to speak of ingratitude alone. It is too easy to romanticize unity that was always fragile, always contingent on circumstance. In the end, what lingers most painfully is not the fact of the parting but the refusal, by both sides, to admit its shared responsibility. Selective amnesia has become the quiet author of the modern narrative. It permits nostalgia but not truth. It allows mourning but not reconciliation.

The death of the old warrior, then, is not merely the passing of a man. It is the resurfacing of an unresolved past. It forces us to inhabit again that brief moment after 1992 when the darkness had lifted and the country imagined itself capable of generosity, gratitude, and healing. That promise was lost, squandered perhaps by both friend and friend-turned-stranger. And so, the memory of that untidy ending continues to poison our reflections, reminding us that the wounds of victory can sometimes be as deep as the wounds of defeat.

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

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• broken fellowship, old wounds, Peeping Tom, shadows

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