THE
recent decision by the South Africa Government to confer on Guyana's
late President Forbes Burnham its highest national honour designated
for outstanding foreign citizens- — the Oliver Tambo Award (gold) —
has drawn strong criticisms from two well-known Jamaican scholars and
Pan-Africanists — Dr Rupert Lewis and Dr Horace Campbell.
Both have
expressed shock and sadness in wondering aloud whether President
Jacob Zuma's Administration had in effect posthumously rewarded the
former Guyana head of state for the June 13, 1980 assassination of
Walter Rodney, the internationally famous Guyanese historian and
Pan-Africanist crusader for freedom and justice.
While
professors Lewis and Campbell were agonising over this surprising
"recognition" by South Africa, Burnham's eldest daughter,
Roxanne Van West Charles, was heading a family delegation to South
Africa to receive the Oliver Tambo Award, on behalf of her father, at
a ceremonial event scheduled for yesterday.
Rodney, noted
for his widely treasured scholarly examination of How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa, was killed in his car from a bomb explosion,
subsequently uncovered as the work of an officer of the Guyana
Defence Force, Gregory Smith, who was secretly working as an agent of
the then Burnham regime.
Smith died
years later in nearby French Guiana to which he had fled following
Rodney's assassination. Despite a long campaign for an independent
inquiry, with international support, into the circumstances of
Rodney's death, no such action was ever taken.
Horace
Campbell, author of Reclaiming Zimbabwe (The Exhaustion of the
Patriarchal Model of Liberation), and Rupert Lewis, whose seminal
work, Walter Rodney's Intellectual and Political Thought, would have
had no problems in separately expressing, within days of each other,
their grievous disappointment over the Oliver Tambo Award to Burnham.
In a column
last week for 1804CaribVoices (Pan-Caribbean Voices for Integration
and Social Justice) online, Campbell noted that Oliver Tambo "was
unstinting and unrelenting in his opposition to all forms of
oppression". Consequently, he firmly declared:
"It is
my view that the granting of this posthumous award will demean the
memory of Oliver Tambo. If there are still progressive forces within
the African National Congress (ANC) they should rescind this award so
that this (scheduled April 27) ceremony will instead be one that
honours the memory of Walter Rodney..."
Such a
development was virtually impossible to expect. But in his own
response that came as this column was being written, Lewis was quite
clear in observing:
"Anyone
who witnessed Forbes Burnham on television gloating about the killing
of Walter Rodney by a bomb nearly 30 years ago would be shocked to
learn that South Africa is to posthumously reward him with the Oliver
Tambo Award...
"It is
not that Burnham did not contribute to the anti-apartheid cause, but
unlike other Caribbean political leaders of the time he eliminated
individuals in the political opposition within Guyana. Rodney was the
best known of these opposition activists and the most prominent
Pan-Africanist in the 1970s..."
The historian
Lewis further recalled that while at the University of Dar es Salaam
(in Tanzania) from 1966 (year of Guyana's independence) until the
early 1970s, Rodney "was actively engaged in the debates and
educational programmes of several of the Southern African liberation
movements, including the ANC".
Therefore, in
Lewis' reasoning, this posthumous Oliver Tambo Award "can only
help to cover up Burnham's assassination of Walter Rodney".
It is quite
relevant to record the viewpoint of a senior researcher for the South
Africa Broadcasting Corporation, Tula Dlamini, who has been following
reactions to the award to Burnham, who died on August 6, 1985.
As part of
his own contribution on 1804CaribVoices in relation to the
controversy, Dlamini said that "regardless of the merits or
demerits of the positions taken against the award, it is within
reason to support those who are calling for a serious debate on this
issue...
"For
example," he contends, "the South Africa Government must
explain what rationale is there for the honour to be given to Burnham
when it has never been given to Julius Nyerere (Tanzania's first
president who died in October 1999)."
