A Proxy Africa
Guyana, African Americans, and the Radical 1970s
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
Nestled between Brazil, Venezuela, and Suriname, Guyana is the third-smallest sovereign state in mainland South America, and one of its youngest. Originally a Dutch colony, Guyana remained under British rule from the late eighteenth century until gaining independence in 1966 and becoming a republic in 1970. Apart from the 1978 mass murder-suicide of cult leader Jim Jones’s followers in Jonestown, Guyana has been mostly peripheral to mainstream geopolitics. Yet for a generation of Black revolutionaries from around the world, Guyana was a vibrant site of pan-African activism. The country was particularly attractive to veterans of the US civil rights movement who sought alternative places to construct flourishing postcolonial, pan-African nation-states.
In this first, comprehensive history of Guyana’s core role in anticolonial, Black internationalist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, historian Russell Rickford traces the history of African Americans who traveled to the country to work with, learn from, and teach Guyanese politicians, activists, and other international figures in the long fight for Black freedom. With encouragement from Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, they eagerly accepted the invitation to move to Guyana to establish new cooperative settlements. Rickford compellingly narrates Guyana’s allure and promise for Black Americans, along with the limitations they faced when ideology clashed with lived realities—especially political ones—once there.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This meticulous study from historian Rickford (We Are an African People) spotlights a dramatic time in Guyana, when the nation held a heightened international profile as a hub of pan-Africanism. During the 1970s, the South American nation formed a deep web of connection to activists in the U.S. and Africa. Explaining that the ways Guyana eluded easy political classification are part of why it offered radical thinkers reasons for optimism, Rickford traces how Guyana's status as a "cooperative republic" with a "distinctive brand of socialism" drew expatriates from the U.S., including militant Stokely Carmichael, writer Julian Mayfield, artist Tom Feelings, and dancer Lavinia Williams—only to frustrate many of them as the government, headed by Forbes Burnham, grew more authoritarian. The 1980 assassination of academic and activist Walter Rodney was the culmination of the country's shift into a less welcoming place for dissident voices. Along the way, Rickford's account examines the relations between Guyana's various ethnic groups, among them a sizable Black community as well as residents of South Asian descent, the latter of whose experiences led to a gulf between Guyana's promise and its lived reality—Rickford bluntly writes that some expatriates from the U.S. found themselves in the position of supporting "a regime that subjugated South Asians." Wide-ranging and evenhanded, this offers a fascinating overview of a dynamic time and place.
