Forbes Burnham

Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham was born in Kitty, British Guiana, on the twentieth of February 1923. He took his secondary education at Queen's College in Georgetown, his law degree at the University of London, and was called to the bar at Gray's Inn in 1948.

He returned to British Guiana in 1949 and entered politics as the founding chairman of the People's Progressive Party — alongside Cheddi Jagan, also placed in this archive. The two men split the party along ethnic lines in 1955: Jagan retained leadership of the Indian-descended PPP, Burnham founded the African-descended People's National Congress (PNC). He led the PNC for the rest of his life.

He served as Premier of British Guiana from 1964 through independence (May 1966) and as the first Prime Minister and later first Executive President of independent Guyana from 1966 until his death in 1985. The 1968 and subsequent general elections in Guyana were widely understood — including by U.S. and British observers — to have been manipulated to maintain PNC control; opposition parties and most international observers have characterized the period from 1968 onward as authoritarian.

His sustained political achievements were the nationalization of the bauxite and sugar industries (1971-1976), placing Guyana's two major export industries under domestic control; the founding of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) under the Treaty of Chaguaramas in 1973 — Burnham was one of the four prime ministers who signed it — and Guyana's hosting of the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement Foreign Ministers in 1972.

He died in Georgetown on the sixth of August 1985, age sixty-two, during throat surgery conducted by Cuban physicians. His successor Desmond Hoyte oversaw the gradual liberalization of the political system through the 1990s.

He is honored here as the founder of independent Guyana and a principal architect of CARICOM, in a presidency whose democratic record his country has spent the decades since reckoning with.