Remembering Cheddi Jagan
Remembering Cheddi - National Unity
Should be the Watch WordMarch 5, 2003 Guyana Chronicle
The world over, people campaign to change unjust systems or to support a cause that they feel strongly about. In Guyana, Cheddi Jagan was one such person. Throughout his life he fought to create a better world for each and every Guyanese and, in so doing, he made a very significant contribution to this nation’s history.
It is the supreme test of man’s character to overcome the trials of adversity and disaster. This, Dr. Jagan understood only too well, for his life was an exquisite statement of struggle, first as a child; then as a student; as a nationalist; a political leader and finally, as Guyana esteemed statesman.
In the hostile colonial environment in which the natural progression of his country was first frustrated and subsequently truncated by the Anglo-American Alliance, to the cruel travesty of twenty eight years in the political opposition, Dr. Jagan confronted unquestionable adversity yet he was forever optimistic, convinced that history and time were always on the side of the just.
Six years after his death there are undoubtedly many things on which we might choose to dwell. There was firstly the man himself- committed, honest, and compassionate. Then there was the contemplative scholar and reflective leader, forever thoughtful and analytical, discussing, advocating and, of course, writing. There was also the anti-colonial firebrand and nationalist political leader, ever championing the twin causes of the anti-colonial struggle and the national liberation process. There was, as well, the compassionate internationalist stridently advocating the cause of the dispossessed the world over.
Dr Jagan’s philosophical ideas and political actions constituted the foundation on which this nation was originally conceptualized. They were the well spring, the very seminal essence of the great man. Every Guyanese, great or small, understood where Dr Jagan stood. They knew that he felt their pain and their hunger. That he shared their hopes and aspirations and that he was committed to creating a better Guyana for them, their children and their children’s children. A society in which all were equal and were treated as equals. A society in which there was a place for the fullest development of their peculiar attributes. In Guyana, Dr Jagan was the most powerful voice for the poor, the dispossessed and ‘the wretched of the earth’.
Dr Jagan, has made a distinguished contribution, in theory and practice, to the transformation of the political culture, the termination of British imperial hegemony and the beginnings of the development of a modern independent state in Guyana. While there are other roles and contributions for which he will be revered, it is truly through his political leadership and for the formation of the Guyana state that he will be remembered by future generations in his own country and the world far beyond it.
It is apposite that we also remember his preoccupation with creating, facilitating and sustaining the process of national unity. It was his belief that unity was the primary means of attaining peace, progress and prosperity and he never stopped searching for ways and means of molding the classes and races into a strong and united Guyana. It is a sad but necessary commentary that with his passing this nation has been plunged into the abyss of ethic rancour and civil unrest.
The issue here must be the continuing quest for national unity. Certainly if we are truly convinced that Dr Jagan deserves the respect of this nation, and there will be few to deny that he does, then certainly Guyana owes it to his memory to redouble our efforts to ensure that national unity once again enjoys the type of priority he would have preferred.
by Hydar Ally
Guyana will be host to the Rio Summit in the latter part of this month which will bring together hemispheric leaders to the capital city of Georgetown. The Summit will take place immediately after the conclusion of the Mashramani celebrations, which has now become something of a national cultural institution.
And before the dust of Mashramani and the Rio Summit dust will have settled, there would be ‘the mother’ of all sporting activities- World Cup Cricket- which the country would be host to. Already the profile of the city and its environs are undergoing changes with the emergence of several new hotels and restaurants. Streets and avenues are being resurfaced and drains and canals are made free of vegetation and overgrowth.
Apart from World Cup Cricket which will obviously take centre stage especially as we come closer to the World Cup matches in the latter part of March and the first week of April, there will be yet another set of activities which are no less significant in the political calendar of Guyana and that is the commemoration of the life and death of the Father of the Guyanese nation, the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan, undoubtedly the greatest of all political leaders that the country has ever seen.
The PPP has already set up a Committee headed by Mr. Navin Chanderpal to plan activities in observance of this historic occasion. March this year would mark the 10th anniversary since the passing of this great leader, one who has dedicated almost his entire life to the service of the Guyanese people and for that matter the wider international community.
This year will also mark the 60th anniversary since the entry of Dr. Jagan to the Legislative Assembly. Dr. Jagan, at age 29, became the youngest member of the Legislative Assembly and has consistently been a member of the Assembly for two brief periods when the PPP was removed from government during the 1953-1957 periods and again during the late 1973-1975 period when the PPP boycotted the National Assembly after the PNC regime massively rigged the elections of 1973.
It was the resilience and fortitude of Dr. Jagan to combat injustice and oppression that distinguished him from other politicians of his period. Immediately upon his entry into the legislature, Dr. Jagan took a class position on issues and was never afraid to lend his voice on their behalf. As he mentioned in his book “The West on Trial,” he brought a “new dimension to politics, one in which the streets were taken to the legislature, and the legislature to the streets.” For the first time the working people had a genuine voice and a true friend in the highest decision-making forum of the colony.
Because of the preponderance of pro-business interests in the Legislature he did not manage to get his way on many issues he represented on behalf of the working class. But he did not give up. He continued to oppose and expose the intrigues of the Colonial Office and the plutocracy to deny the working people a decent and dignified life.
Convinced that his efforts to win concessions for the working people could not be achieved without a strong political constituency, he was instrumental in forming the People’s Progressive Party which this year will observe its 57th year since its formation on January 1950.
The PPP has never departed from its class positions. It has consistently defended the working people during its years in the political opposition and promoting their class interests during its tenure in office. This is why the PPP has been so successful at the polls. It has demonstrated over the years that it has the capacity to deliver on its Manifesto promises.
The strength of the PPP is due in no small measure to the exemplary qualities of Dr. Jagan and his commitment and dedication to the cause of the ordinary people. Dr. Jagan was able to influence and win over men and women of character and resolve who were united in their desire to see a democratic and prosperous Guyana. Foremost among these was his wife Janet Jagan who was also a guiding light in the formation and development of the PPP.
There are other outstanding leaders as well. Among these are Ashton Chase, HJM Hubbard, Reepu Daman Persaud, Brindley Benn, Boysie Ramkarran among others. Janet Jagan, Ralph Ramkarran, Brindley Benn and Reepu Daman Persaud are still around today, having given decades of selfless and dedicated struggles to the cause of a better Guyana.
Interestingly, there are now second and third generation leaders who are today serving in leadership positions in the Party and government. Ralph Ramkarran, the current Speaker of the National Assembly is the son of Boysie Ramkarran and is a leading member of the PPP. He is a member of the Central and Executive member of the PPP. Robeson Benn, Minister of Public Works and Communications are the son of Brindley and Patricia Benn, both of whom were leading members of the Party especially during the 1960’s.
I would like to take the opportunity of this column to extend profound condolescences to the family, relatives and friends of Comrade Monica Benn who passed on a few days ago. Monica, like her father, mother, and brother was an ardent member and supporter of the PPP.
Guyanese are indeed fortunate to have had leaders of the caliber of Dr. Cheddi Jagan and Janet Jagan, people who have given of their entire lives in service to the cause of the country and its people.Printed in Mirror Feb 24, 2007
Cheddi Jagan and Pre-vision
By Eddi Rodney
Guyana Chronicle
March 17, 2003
DR. ODEEN Ishmael’s feature tribute, “Cheddi Jagan’s ideas will live on” must certainly be considered as one of the most lucid and comprehensive accounts of the political contribution of this truly remarkable and great man.
Cheddi Jagan’s involvement in politics, it should be recalled, did not commence in a serious, profound way in the country of his birth. Whatever influence his parents, especially his father (Jagan) would have had in the political sensibility would have been one where ‘mati’ solidarity was contrasted with the principle to “work hard” and make the life different to “state”.
It was whilst he lived and worked as a student in the United States at Howard and thereafter the Northwestern University Dental School, that the Guyanese radical embarked on his political activities.
JAGAN & DIALECTICS
When Dr. Ishmael asserts, “It was Cheddi Jagan who started the fight for the political Independence of the colonial territories in the Caribbean”, he is in fact reminding us that the colonial project was a gigantic hemispheric experience. That the “colonial powers” reproduced imperialist systems that were carved out of monopoly capital, its financial cartelization, industrial revolutions as well as massive plunder and bloodshed.
That system was designed to keep the ‘natives’ in bondage. And Cheddi Jagan chose consciously to link his ideas with those of the most advanced thinkers and intellectuals who he could become associated with.
Throughout his political life even the phase after 1992 he would refer to dialectics. A term that he used to define and analyze phenomena and complex change processes.
At another level his studies of Darwinian concepts of biology coupled with the historical perspectives of the American historian Charles Beard, would have created a vast reservoir of scientific as well as quasi-scientific and petit bourgeois philosophy and functionalism.
Cheddi Jagan, it should be noted, did not study in British institutions. This fact may have had at least a certain influence in the way the British ruling class regarded Jagan’s Marxism.
The British government and the Colonial Office (Churchill/McMillan - Duncan Sandys and Peter Thorneycroft etal) may have had the authority of the Westminster system; a trait that clearly was the force majeure for most people. But not Cheddi Jagan.
He always understood that these political leaders represented the interests of imperialist conglomerates such as Unilever, British Steel, ICI, Tate & Lyle and British Petroleum (BP). He understood the role that the Bookers transnational played in support of the colonial elite - all of whom were bitterly opposed to any notion of political rights and power for the working class.
JAGAN AND AMERICAN LIBERALISM, CONSERVATISM AND DIXIECRAT ATTUTUDES
Dr. Odeen Ishmael as this country’s UN Ambassador would have been at the very centre of the efforts to restore and stabilize the functions of his heart and other vital human organs; two - three weeks after February 14, 1997. Other tributes and accounts of this final period of Cheddi Jagan’s life have referred to how the hospital staff - doctors and nurses at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre endeared themselves to Cheddi Jagan.
Dr. Ishmael describes aspects of that final phase in the Guyanese leader’s fight.
“As his physical strength waned (the attending physicians) could not help admiring the fighting qualities of our legendary leader - qualities that his political friends and foes alike can attest to.”
Again to learn how profound this experience would have been for these physicians many of whom would have accumulated professional attributes in similar traditional disciplines separated by the generations as those that sustained Cheddi Jagan at Howard and Northwestern University, we must probe how Cheddi Jagan viewed the “objective circumstances” that determined life in the United States.
In many ways the kind of life contributions of intellectuals and social activists such as Claude Mckay (Jamaican born poet, writer and civil rights personality), Paul Robeson, whose greatness demonstrated how it was possible to overcome official ostracism and persecution, as well as Langston Hughes and WEB Dubois, would have shaped the way Cheddi Jagan interpreted the realities that he himself experienced whilst living and working in different ethnic communities in America.
Whilst at Howard University, the leading black educational institution of that period, Cheddi Jagan never failed to become involved in what were actually ‘campus debates’. There were also off-campus activities that enriched his understanding of American society.
He had the opportunity to come under the influence of professor Sinha, an Indian exile (Nadira Jagan, 1998:33). From all accounts including that provided in The West On Trial, Dr. Sinha enabled the young Jagan to master the art of building and elaborating a political programme. It is not known whether Sinha was Marxist.
However it is very clear that in the final analysis Cheddi Jagan came to understand what it meant to make that historical option and chose the Marxist option - the scientifically socialist view of World civilizations.
At the theoretical level Cheddi Jagan studied the methods of recording factual data as practised by Prof. Herbert Aptheker, perhaps the most erudite of all America professors of Negro history. In fact when I read Cheddi Jagan’s “Straight Talk” as well as his “Forbidden Freedom” and “Bitter Sugar”, there is that ‘scholasticism’ and influence that Aptheker represented in his regular articles; many of which were published in journals such as Opportunity and the Journal of Negro History in the 1938 - 42 period prior to America’s entry into WW11.
Perhaps after the collapse of the 1950s West Indian Federation Cheddi Jagan realized that the very same perspective he had set out to his amigo Orrin Dummett in September 1942 had to be revisited if his people were to gain liberation.
This anti-colonial element of Cheddi Jagan and his understanding of the historical value of solidarity in the struggle against that oppressive social system is brought out by Dr. Ishmael when he writes:
“His epic struggle against the might of the British Empire is legendary and he was glorified by anti-colonialists and freedom fighters all over the world.”
This is certainly true. However as Cheddi Jagan himself has recorded it, the initial confrontation between the young (Hegelian) Jagan took place inside the United States during the Depression years of the 1930’s. This was the period of Roosevelt/Wallace years that led to the New Deal as a political and eco-social instrument for reform in American capitalism.
It was here that he experienced racial discrimination; learnt what it was like to be victimized by institutionalized racist legislation and had to evolve a “survival strategy adequate to meet the demands of the pre-Mc Carthyite period in the US.
POSSIBILITIES FOR GANDHISM
Nadira Jagan-Brancier in her researches of her father’s life work has observed his private expressions of solidarity in a correspondence written to his friend Orrin Dummett. It is dated September 4, 1942.
“At present I am brushing up on a book of pulmonary tuberculosis. I agree with you that the South and its prejudices will have to go. Now is the time for the Negro population to demand equality, and to see that the Atlantic Charter materializes and bear fruit at home. Now is the time for all suppressed and minority groups to demand not only theoretical but also practical equality, so that the common foe will be resisted by all on an equal footing. It is only in this light can the civil disobedience campaign of Gandhi be viewed. How can a country or people be asked to fight for something they do not possess? To ask the Indians or for that matter anyone else, to fight for the four freedoms, when those principles of the Atlantic Charter are denied them is morally invalid. Britain is fighting to liberate Poles, Czechs, Greeks and what not, but the liberation or countries under its own clothes are out of the question. Yes my friend, war is more murderous and bloody but at the same time, it initiates changes - changes that are necessary for us. History is in the making whether anyone likes it or not.
There has been an awakening - the status quo that was, is gone. Yes, now is the time for us to organize, to lobby, and to make propaganda and demands for new changes can be most rapid and to our benefit. To be poor is a crime, but to be ambitious is a sin. You have to do things which you otherwise do not care to do. Finance, social and economic status have influenced me so much that were I to write an autobiography, I would perhaps call it ‘The Struggle of Complaisances’.”
Nadira Jagan-Brancier, 1998:34
Was the young Cheddi Jagan so much impressed by the autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru “Towards Freedom” that he had already chosen an anti-British model that could be reference point for his own subjugated countrymen?
