Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana's Struggle for Independence

6. The Politics and Trauma of Race

(  ) The Politics and Trauma of Race The leader of the opposition was obviously in a reflective mood. Cheddi Jagan had lost the election the previous December and the politics of race had played the principal role in the voting.Writing in the World Marxism Review in October 1965, Jagan admitted there was a “tendency of anti-African racism” in the People’s Progressive Party that he led.This racism, he said, had emerged “almost as a reflex action” to “the racist anti-Indian putsches engineered since 1962 by the People’s National Congress and the Imperialists.” The PPP was “forthrightlycombating racism in the party since it realized that racism is not only reactionary, but a device of the imperialists to divide the working class and thus maintain colonial rule and exploitation.” His party’s “first objective” was “the achievement of national unity and racial harmony.”1 Dr. Jagan was not being insincere when he articulated the objectives of his party. Bedeviled by a decade of overt racial disharmony, most Guianese would have echoed his sentiments about the divisive nature of racism even if their political and social relationships contradicted them. On the other hand, many would have disagreed with his partisan explanation of the racial climate and its origins. In 1965 British Guiana was the most racially tense society in the Anglophone Caribbean, for which its leaders bore a significant responsibility. The Politics and Trauma of Race (  ) Neither Cheddi Jagan nor Forbes Burnham nor Peter D’Aguiar created Guiana’s racial cauldron. A racialized colonial orderdeveloped in thewake of the arrival of the Europeans; it was enhanced by the introduction of African slavery and later the system of indentured labor. A tiny European minority had presided over the colony for decades, invoking white supremacy as the ideological justification. The society was held together by the use of, or the threat of, force. British Guiana, as it came into being, possessed no shared sense of common history among its peoples. It was, after all, a colony of exploitation based on racial difference for its legitimacy, and that reality was a recipe for disunity and social unrest. When the PPP was founded in 1950, the Jagans invited Burnham to join it, recognizing that the Indo-Guianese and the African Guianese peoples needed one another to achieve political independence and maintain harmony within the colony. It was a recognition of the centrality of race in the colony’s zeitgeist, the proverbial elephant in the room. The collaboration of the leaders from the two ethnic groups in the PPP augured well for the colony’s future, and the spectacular victory the party achieved in the elections of April 1953 was an expression of its efficacy. After the constitution was suspended, there was intense speculation that Britain’s action would precipitate a break between Jagan and Burnham. In answer to a question posed to them at the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on October 21, 1953, Jagan emphasized that “this division between the natives and the British, between black and white and as far as [that] goes, between Indians and Africans, is being kept alive by the British themselves, not by us. Look at both of us. I am Indian, Burnham is African.That difference does not affect us. Moreover my wife is a white American woman.”2 Jagan exaggerated when he ascribed the vitality of the racial “division” to the British, but they certainly bore a major responsibility for the racial cauldron the society was to become. The political alliance between Jagan and Burnham survived, temporarily, the trauma of the coup d’état. Their final break in 1955 was essentially the product of political rivalry, underlying ideological and racial differences, and the colonial regime’s mischief. Eric Huntley, a PPP stalwart, believed that the split “wasn’t significantly racial. It was Cheddi’s radical politics they [Burnham and his supporters] were against.”3 Brindley Benn, an African minister in the deposed government, maintained that “personal ambition was the main thing,” an observation directed at Burnham.4 Martin Carter, who helped found the PPP, saw the rupture as being both “racial and cultural because there were Indo and Afro-Guyanese party members, and those who (  ) The Politics and Trauma of Race belonged to Georgetown, generally Afro-Guyanese, were against those from the countryside who were generally Indo-Guyanese.”5 Dr. Jagan himself denied that the breach was racially inspired since “both Blacks and Indians...