Walter Rodney, Gregory Smith, and Pamela
By Parvati Persaud-Edwards
FEAR stalked the land. Freedom then was only a word found in the dictionary, and a concept cradled in the soul of revolutionaries. Police were enforcers rather than protectors, and the soldiers were terrorists holding the nation ransom to a despot.
Food was a luxury, basic items were banned and practically everyone, except for the bureaucrats – for whom nothing was restricted - became a criminal because everyone was forced to buy foodstuff on the black-market.
Housewives spent most of their days, sometimes with infants in arms, queuing up for a pound of butter, a loaf of bread, a pint of ‘kero’, or a roll of toilet tissue, being lashed to stay in line by mounted police. Babies’ milk was also banned.
Infrastructural and organisational systems had deteriorated to the point of almost complete dysfunction, so that rats were eating babies in the hospitals and the educational system became an abysmal failure as a consequence. Children were kept out of school to look after younger ones while the mothers joined food lines that stretched for blocks; or they were forced to fetch water from long distances because GUYWA, like GPL and other utility providers, was on the brink of collapse. It was during that period of ‘Empty Rice Pots’ that the culture of children selling cigarettes and sweets on the streets evolved.
It was a time when wages of Public Servants were frozen at $2,000.00 and, in order to keep jobs, Public Service employees were forced to march in sun and rain to glorify the Supreme Leader, to work for free on their weekends and holidays at Hope Estate, and to replace cane cutters as scabs.
It was a time of rigged elections, when patriots were killed defending ballot boxes and revolutionaries were killed defending the truth.
To raise a voice in criticism of the Supreme Leader or the administration courted death, jail on trumped-up charges, or terror tactics targeting one’s family members.
Infrastructure and souls were degraded and decayed and hopelessness held the land in a grip that wrested acceptance from a beaten people.
It was into such an ethos, such a dynamic of terror, that a brilliant young historian named Walter Rodney decided to join forces with revolutionaries who were courageously, at great risk and sacrifice, trying to unseat a monolithic monster, up to that time with no success.
At the time, it was perilous to hold meetings because thugs from the administration-sponsored, infamous House of Israel beat and terrorized those who participated or attended. They did not even stop at murder, and many paid the supreme price, including the gentle, peaceful photographer of the Catholic Standard, Fr Darke, who was run down and stabbed with the bayonet of a rifle in plain view of onlookers.
To misquote – It was the worse of times for this nation, but it was also the best of times, because courage blossomed in hearts like budding flowers. Spring of hope was in the air and patriots were prepared to lay down their lives – and often did, for a long-cherished dream of real freedom, which had not been conferred on this nation even after the grant of the instruments of Independence by Great Britain. Terror and fear were palpable, but so was determination.
I quote from a WPA Press Release dated 13th June 2006. “In l974, he (Walter Rodney) returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor at the University of Guyana, but the Government rescinded the appointment. But Rodney remained in Guyana, joined the newly-formed political group, the WPA (Working People’s Alliance) and, between l974 and his assassination in l980, emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly authoritarian PNC Government.”
In defense of Arnold Rampersaud, Rodney said: “We have had too much of the foolishness of race…I think external intervention was important in bringing the races against each other from the fifties, and particularly in the sixties. But I’m concerned with the present. If we made that mistake once, we cannot afford to be misled on that score today. No ordinary Afro-Guyanese, no ordinary Indo-Guyanese can afford to be misled by the myth of race. Time and again it has been our undoing...”
Walter Rodney’s voice resounded in the corridors of power, through the dynamic which, although not conceptually new, was being embraced and expounded by a charismatic young black leader; and people across the divides were listening and responding, to the chagrin and fury of the despots. Walter’s denouement of the administration, and his open challenge, won the admiration and respect of the working class, to the extent where the WPA was quickly evolving as a vibrant Third Force on the political landscape of this nation and providing a catalyst that propelled Guyanese out of apathetic hopelessness into a new era of optimism. Even those who did not join him liked and respected him, because his sincerity was like a beacon of light in the darkness of the prevailing times.
He was rocking the long-entrenched foundation on which the bastion of tyrannical dictatorship was built, and bridging the divides in the nation on which it thrived. The powers-that-be were not amused. This voice preaching anarchy had to be silenced.
An explosion at 8.00 p.m. on June 13, l980, rocked the nation and simultaneously brought an end to the life of Walter Rodney, along with the budding hope for a unified nation.
The plot involved betrayal so ugly that it paralleled the story of Judas. Army Sergeant Gregory Smith pretended friendship and loyalty to the WPA and Walter Rodney. He persuaded Rodney that he needed a walkie-talkie set to aid communication in his work, and that he (Smith) was in a position to provide one.
Rodney uplifted the set from the Russell Street apartment of Smith’s girlfriend, Gwendolyn Jones, unaware that a deadly explosive device, timed to detonate at 8.00 pm, had been installed inside of the receiver. Rodney was directed to park his vehicle at a distance that took him near to the Georgetown Prison and await Smith’s communication in order to test the effectiveness and range of the set.
This was an elaborate plot to blame Rodney’s assassination on misadventure, due to a failed attempt of his to bomb the Georgetown Prison. The counter-accusations of devastated WPA members, who knew the absolute impossibility of Rodney wanting to harm helpless prisoners, that Rodney had been assassinated, and that Sgt Gregory Smith had actualized the plot, brought denials from the administration that such a person ever existed. He had been spirited, together with Gwendolyn Jones and their children, out of the country by army personnel. Every trace of his existence had been obliterated and the then Government, and the army administration, maintained their contention that Gregory Smith never existed, and that he had never been a member of the GDF.
But one woman exposed this lie.
Pamela Beharry had shared the Russell Street apartment with Gwendolyn Jones, mother of two of Smith’s children, who was rebuilding her relationship with her former estranged lover, Smith, while her husband was abroad.
Beharry, who used to read the WPA pamphlets Smith brought when he visited Jones, had grown to admire the courage of young Rodney, not realizing that the radio set stored in a carton behind the sofa was destined to be the instrument of his death.
On many occasions, Smith and other army personnel often locked her out of the apartment for hours, forcing her to stay with a friend in Alberttown until they left.
On the evening after Rodney’s assassination, Beharry, who had heard that Smith was being implicated, was on her way to her friend’s house when she saw soldiers with drawn guns surrounding the house. She immediately ducked behind some bushes, crawled away, and hid under a bridge. The next morning, she telephoned her friend who worked at the Ministry of Health. Her friend was terrified and warned Pamela to hide because soldiers were looking for her.
Beharry knew that the administration was denying Smith’s existence and recognised the threat to her life, since she was the only civilian, apart from Gwendolyn Jones, who knew of Smith’s covert activities, the nature of which she was unaware prior to Rodney’s death.
Beharry still has nightmares from the days when she was a fugitive from Guyana’s army, hiding under cardboard on the streets, under bridges, behind bushes, because her relatives and friends, afraid for the safety of their families, refused to give her sanctuary in their homes, which were occasionally staked out by soldiers, so any guarantee of her safety was questionable.
Remembering a lawyer named Moses Bhagwan from the WPA pamphlets, Beharry fearfully made her way to his office. \There was a long line of people in his reception area so the secretary requested that she wait; but she scribbled a note to him, mentioning Rodney, and was granted immediate audience. When she recounted her experiences, Bhagwan took her to Miles Fitzpatrick.
Miles showed her a picture of Rodney, and she immediately recognised him as the man who had been given a radio set at the Russell Street apartment by Gregory Smith on June 13.
Beharry was secreted in the home of a religious order, and the WPA went on the offensive, forcing the government and the army to eventually admit to the existence of Smith, although they continued to deny complicity in his assassination.
Today, Beharry, a true heroine of the revolution, albeit by default, subsists on an income below $l0, 000 per month in a squalid apartment without electricity or running water. The tenement yard in which she lives is located in one of the most dangerous areas of Georgetown.
Gregory Smith was never brought to justice for his heinous crime, but justice was meted out in any case. Living all one’s life as a fugitive, with the sword of Damocles hanging over your head, scorned and reviled by all, losing a solid career with potential for a wonderful future, and being branded murderer of a national figure is no small punishment. Imprisonment within one’s soul is the worse imprisonment of all.
