Book review : Forbes Burnham : the life and times of the Comrade Leader

Abstract

Substantively, Forbes Burnham: The life and times of the Comrade Leader is a political biography of Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, one of the two founding leaders of the anticolonial nationalist party and the first post-independence leader of the former British colony of Guyana, South America. Using archival research and recent interviews, Linden Lewis provides an exegesis of the complexities and contradictions of Burnham’s leadership of the nationalist People’s Progressive Party and, subsequently, of his role as the first Prime Minister and first President of the country. The narration is imbricated, relatively seamlessly, with the well ploughed historiography of the country’s nationalist movement and its postcolonial governance under Burnham’s quasi-dictatorial rule. Lewis documents Burnham’s eventual consolidation of near exclusive power through shifting allegiances and conflicting ideologically-rooted alliances, his mobilisation of black racial sentiment, his deployment of fear and intimidation, and his effective use of electoral rigging over the period beginning in 1950 until 1985, when he died in office.