The Open Door -The Uses of a Ghost

OPEN DOOR

A Diamond Jubilee meditation on history, accountability, and who gets to hold the mirror

By Guyana Business Journal · May 26, 2026

There is a particular genre of anniversary writing that arrives every May in the Guyanese press, reliable as the heat. It catalogues the sins of one era, names one man as the source of national suffering, and closes with a gesture toward redemption — a redemption, conveniently, that the present administration embodies. At sixty years of independence, this genre has calcified into something worse than partisanship. It has become a substitute for thought.

The arguments are familiar. Burnham chose May 26 deliberately, as an insult. The rigged elections of 1968 emptied Independence of meaning. The assassination of Walter Rodney killed the dream. These claims contain genuine historical truth — and it is precisely their partial truth that makes their deployment so dishonest.

Let us begin with the date. The assertion that Independence Day was chosen as a racial provocation requires, by the admission of those who make it, no evidence whatsoever. The violence of 1964 was a genuine atrocity — one of the darkest chapters in Caribbean history. But the negotiation of an independence date involves colonial ministries, constitutional calendars, and the logistics of a British Empire simultaneously managing decolonisation across multiple territories. To transform an administrative timeline into a deliberate racial insult, on pure speculation, and then present it as historical fact in a national anniversary series is not scholarship. It is the manufacture of grievance. Guyana cannot build a shared future on invented wounds layered over real ones.

Guyana cannot build a shared future on invented wounds layered over real ones.

The rigged elections argument is more serious and should be taken on consistent terms. The fraudulent manipulation of elections is a fundamental betrayal of a people’s sovereignty — the negation of independence. Every Guyanese of conscience should say so. But that accounting must be honest about the world in which those decisions were made. The elections of 1968 did not occur in a vacuum. It followed a decade of documented Anglo-American interference: CIA funding to opposition labour movements, British constitutional manipulation to impose proportional representation, and Washington’s explicit determination that Cheddi Jagan — deemed too far left — would not govern a Cold War-adjacent territory. The foreign hand built the corridor through which Burnham walked. If we are honest, we must insist that the full cast of characters be named.

The invocation of Walter Rodney deserves the most careful handling of all. Rodney’s assassination was a state crime, and its moral weight is not in dispute here. But Rodney’s intellectual project — the one these anniversary essays claim to honour — was structural analysis. Rodney did not explain Burnham’s authoritarianism as the expression of one man’s psychological pathology. He located it within the colonial state’s institutional inheritance, within Cold War geopolitics, within the plantation economy’s transition to a post-independence order that kept the same extractive logic under new management. To invoke Rodney’s name while abandoning his method — to reduce the Burnham period to a personality disorder and an ethnic grievance — is to use Rodney as an ornament while dismantling his argument. It is, in its way, a second erasure.

To reduce the Burnham period to a personality disorder and an ethnic grievance is to use Rodney as an ornament while dismantling his argument. It is, in its way, a second erasure.

What these anniversary essays reliably omit is the structural context that produced the Burnham years. The CIA-backed destabilisation of the PPP government in the early 1960s. The proportional representation system engineered with British and American complicity specifically to prevent an Indian-majority party from governing a Cold War-adjacent territory. The plantation state’s institutional architecture handed any incoming government a security apparatus, a patronage network, and a press environment designed for control rather than accountability. This does not excuse what followed. It explains the terrain on which it happened — terrain that any honest accounting of sixty years must map.

What these essays also omit is what endured. The multilateral school system, whatever its later deterioration, was a serious act of decolonisation — an attempt to bring elite education to working-class Guyanese children. The Hindu and Muslim public holidays, the national shirt-jack, the cultural sovereignty frameworks — these are not nothing. They are the bones of a national identity that survived the Burnham period, survived the Jagan restoration, and persists today. A serious reckoning would ask why those cultural gains proved durable while the democratic institutions did not. That question is more interesting than the prosecutorial summary these anniversary pieces offer.

But the deepest problem with this genre is not what it gets wrong about the past. It is what it refuses to see about the present.

A state newspaper, funded by public resources, publishing a multi-part historical series during a Diamond Jubilee — in a media environment where broadcast licences have been instrumentalised, where press freedom indices have deteriorated, where the advantages of petrostate incumbency are increasingly structural — is not a neutral act of historical reflection. It is the use of history as political architecture. When a ruling administration’s newspaper catalogues the authoritarianism of its predecessor tradition while its own democratic deficits go unexamined in those same pages, the history lesson is not really about history. It is about who controls the narrative of a nation sitting on one of the world’s most significant oil discoveries.

When a ruling administration’s newspaper catalogues the authoritarianism of its predecessor tradition while its own democratic deficits go unexamined in those same pages, the history lesson is not really about history.

Guyana at sixty deserves better than this. It deserves a press capable of asking: what do both of our major political traditions owe the nation? What does the pattern of authoritarian tendency — visible across PNC and PPP administrations alike — tell us about institutions, rather than about individuals? What does the oil bonanza change about the stakes of democratic accountability? What did Burnham get right that no one in power wants to acknowledge, and what is the current administration getting wrong that its own newspapers will not say?

The ghost of Forbes Burnham is real. His failures were real. But ghosts are most useful to those who need you looking backward. At sixty, Guyana’s unfinished work is not the autopsy of one era. It is the construction of institutions strong enough to survive the next one.

At sixty, Guyana’s unfinished work is not the autopsy of one era. It is the construction of institutions strong enough to survive the next one.

The Open Door is open to all who wish to enter that conversation.

The Guyana Business Journal’s Open Door column publishes perspectives from across Guyana’s political, intellectual, and civic spectrum — including from those who disagree with positions taken in these pages. Scholars, practitioners, diaspora voices, and citizens with no institutional affiliation are equally welcome. Submissions to terrence.blackman@guyanabusinessjournal.com.

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