Black Power in the Caribbean

6. “Sitting on a Volcano”: Black Power in Burnham’s Guyana

6 “Sitting on a Volcano” Black Power in Burnham’s Guyana KATE QUINN The Rodney Riots in Jamaica (October 1968) and the February Revolution in Trinidad and Tobago (February–April 1970) have been seen as watershed moments in the history of the postindependence Anglophone Caribbean. Symptoms of a region-wide upsurge of popular discontent with economic and social conditions in the postcolonial Caribbean state, these two episodes delivered an unsettling message to political leaders in the Caribbean. Popular protest—once channeled into grievances against the colonial state—was now clearly directed at local governments condemned as puppets of the neocolonial order. News of the disturbances in Trinidad broke the same week that Guyana celebrated the founding of its Co-operative Socialist Republic.1 What began in Trinidad as a protest against the arrest and trial of West Indian students in Canada (the Sir George Williams University affair) quickly escalated into large-scale demonstrations protesting local conditions, foreign exploitation of Trinidad’s economy, and the perceived failure of Eric Williams’s PNM government to deliver meaningful change. The February Revolution, led by an organized opposition under the banner of Black Power, was quelled under a state of emergency after months of demonstrations, the mass mobilization of organized labor, and a mutiny by a section of the Trinidad Regiment. Notably , the key disturbances of 1968 and 1970 both had Guyanese connections: Cheddi Jagan Jr., son of the opposition People’s Progressive Party leader, was among the West Indian students whose arrests in Canada had catalyzed the formation and early demonstrations of the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) in Trinidad. More significantly, the Jamaican protests of 1968 witnessed the emergence of Guyanese academic and activist Walter Rodney as “Sitting on a Volcano”: Black Power in Burnham’s Guyana 137 a powerful figure capable of galvanizing the political energies of a cross-class opposition of students, intellectuals, and the urban unemployed. The lessons of Jamaica and Trinidad were not lost on Guyana’s Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham, who perceived in these events a “direct challenge to the whole establishment.” Returning from the Caribbean Heads of Government Conference in Kingston, Burnham was “depressed” by the complacency of his regional colleagues, observing, “We are all sitting on a volcano.”2 This chapter will explore the implications of this “volcano” for Guyana, first examining the complex relationship between the government and domestic Black Power organization ASCRIA (the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa) and the impact this relationship had on Burnham’s domestic and regional policies. Burnham’s strategy toward this potentially volatile ally was one of containment and compromise, a “bargaining process”3 through which he sought to mollify Black Power elements by granting certain policy concessions—explored here through an analysis of Burnham’s response to the crisis in Trinidad; policies of cooperative socialism; and issues of political asylum. The chapter then assesses local interactions with U.S. Black Power, focusing on the presence in Guyana of a significant community of African-American exiles/émigrés. The conflicts that erupted when variants of U.S. Black Power ideology were transplanted to the Caribbean context highlight both the contradictions within Burnham’s stance on domestic and external Black Power, and the tensions and fragmentation within the imagined community of the “black international.”4 In analyzing the dynamics of Caribbean Black Power, Guyana offers a different perspective to other cases in the region where relations between Black Power movements and the state were mutually antagonistic. Burnham was unique in the Anglophone Caribbean in the extent of his public declarations of support for Black Power; in the welcome he accorded to high-profile Black Power activists banned elsewhere in the Caribbean (with the notable exception of Rodney); in actively courting relations with black militants from the United States; and in providing material support for liberation movements on the African continent. Addressing the Seminar of Pan-Africanists and Black Revolutionary Nationalists (held in Georgetown to coincide with Guyana ’s inaugural Republic celebrations), Burnham declared that his government “was not hostile to Black Power, was not afraid of Black Power, and thinks that Black Power has a contribution to make, especially here in the Caribbean.”5 Partly as a result of this stance, and partly as a result of Guyana’s ethnically divided politics, Burnham was also unique in the support—ini- Kate Quinn 138 tially at least—that he levered from internal and external Black...