“Enter the Political Kingdom” by Moses Bhagwan.

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦GUYANA

“Enter the Political Kingdom” by Moses Bhagwan. Ian Randle Publishers, 2026. 386 pp.

Book Review by: Christopher Ram

One afternoon in 1957, a young civil servant batting in the nets at the East Indian Cricket Club looked up and found Cheddi Jagan running in to bowl at him. Next morning, on impulse, he telephoned Jagan’s dental clinic on Charlotte Street, was shown into a corner of the surgery, said he admired what Jagan was doing, and was handed a bundle of pamphlets scooped off the floor. He walked out with the Daily Worker, the Soviet Weekly and an old Thunder, and read his way into a life.

What follows is a tell-all in which the teller refuses to cast himself as the hero. That is the most striking feature of this book – and the reason to trust it. A self-styled country boy, Moses Bhagwan, a lawyer by profession and a politician by vocation, spent fifty years in the front line of Guyanese politics, was detained by the British and jailed by Burnham, sat at Lancaster House and in Nkrumah’s office, and helped found the movement that broke a dictatorship.

Yet in over four hundred readable pages he effortlessly avoids shining the spotlight on himself. Even the title is borrowed and the loan declared: Nkrumah’s cry to seek first the political kingdom, which Burnham took up at Bourda Green in 1957, where Bhagwan notes only that he was in the crowd. A kingdom he entered, not one he craved.

The comparison is Tyrone Ferguson’s To Survive Sensibly, or to Court Heroic Death (1999), still the indispensable account of how Guyana’s political economy was managed between 1965 and 1985, and a book that never had the readership it earned. Ferguson’s account is of two decades behind a desk, formulating policy.

Bhagwan spent five decades wrapped in politics, and gives us his from the platform, the picket line and the lock-up. Together they cover a period much of the country now knows only as rumour.

He was the last of six children of a Presbyterian catechist and a plantation labourer. The frankness appears early. He described his placement at Berbice High School as undeserved, but equally comfortable with comic books and with those by Hugo, Dickens and the Brontës. He judges himself a failure as a teacher. He was more than an occasional drinker and recalls a weekend back at the dormitory that had housed him and smashed two chairs, an ingratitude he considers inexcusable.

Banished to a school up the Mahaicony Creek, he sat alone one evening watching the lights on the water and asked himself what he was doing to himself. The same page gives the lie to his modesty: ignored for two months after applying to the civil service, he wrote to the Chief Secretary accusing it of discriminating against country people, and was called for interview a fortnight later. A man building a legend would have made that letter a set piece.

His political ascent was fast – Comrade X in the party paper, chairman of the Progressive Youth Organisation, MP for the Essequibo Islands at age twenty-six, Chief Whip, and a seat in Jagan’s inner circle. And here he does what almost nobody does.

The slogan that consecrated Jagan as Son of Guyana, Teacher of the People, Father of the Nation – founding text of a personality cult that outlived its subject – was his, written to shore up the leader when the party looked unsteady, and he sets it down and accepts responsibility. The same instinct preserves the embarrassing moments most memoirists lose – the budget speech with the plainly wrong calculation, the schoolchildren giggling in the gallery.

The break came over independence of mind. Detained without charge at Mazaruni in June 1964 – soldiers on his stairs before daybreak, a helicopter off a cricket field – he and the PYO leadership spent five months drafting the Mazaruni Papers, arguing for a Guyanese road to socialism distinct from the Soviet model. He wrote poetry there too, a Creolese piece about a cane cutter walking home short-weighted that won a prize fifty-five years later.

A year on, speaking in Ghana, he named race as central to Guyanese politics, and the repudiation reached him by cable before he returned home. His own diagnosis is the coolest sentence in the book: he had cast doubt on the party’s reliability to Moscow, and that was fatal. Banished and disowned. He recounts that his erstwhile hero Cheddi Jagan refused to share a platform with him, and only relented on the insistence of ASCRIA, a pro-black organisation.

That did not prevent Bhagwan attending Jagan’s cremation and shedding a tear.

He never held public office again; indeed, he refused it. He had been expelled for the very thing to which he would then dedicate the better part of his life, and it became his mission. It began in a corridor at Lancaster House in 1962, where without clearing it with his own delegation he approached the opposing camp to float a PPP-PNC coalition. It travelled with him on the Ghanaian mission of 1964; into IPRA, the Indian Political Revolutionary Associates through which he convened a joint race commission with its African counterpart, ASCRIA, and carried it to bottom houses in the East Coast villages; and into the Working People’s Alliance.

At eighty-nine he is still proposing it and still arguing it properly – from Arthur Lewis on the immorality of winner-take-all and Tocqueville on the tyranny of the majority to a constitutional threshold requiring two-thirds of Parliament to form a government.

Sixty-four years, one idea, and a mind still working.

Burnham tried repeatedly to buy him – the speakership dangled, audiences granted in a study where the visitor’s chair had been set conspicuously low. Refusing Burnham was itself an act of bravery. Bhagwan took nothing, and spent nineteen days in Camp Street rather than pay a fine over an opposition newsletter.

He had by then become one of the better lawyers of his generation, having earned his place at the table with the likes of Miles Fitzpatrick, Peter Britton, Doodnauth Singh and Benjamin Gibson, though the book will not say so. His account of thirty years at the bar is titled “Law and Politics” and the title is exact: treason, sedition, arson, capital murder, the activists for whom he was permanently on house call. His own practice gets one paragraph at the very end. The instinct was the public defender’s from the start – his first appearance in the Full Court was an appeal for a rice farmer from Mora Point who had once taught him to plough a field at night, and he won it.

The establishment noticed his politics, not his professional competence: his application for silk was never even acknowledged.

Somebody paid for this, and Bhagwan honours his late wife Samia as one of its victims. She watched soldiers take him, scaled a fence with two small boys when troops surrounded the house, and was the sole earner during his London law years. That a political autobiography ends on the tribute to Samia says as much about her as about the author.

It also explains the four forewords: because the author will not characterise himself, others had to. Vanda Radzik reads the book as a book, tracking its shifts from lyrical country passages to thriller pace to analytical legal prose. Nigel Westmaas supplies the man the pages omit – the office where comrades came for politics and a free meal, the joke that his Mass Activities Unit was the Menshevik department to their Bolshevik one, Bhagwan calm at the wheel of the WPA tapir as thugs set upon it.

What Bhagwan leaves is a legacy already being lost. Set the outspoken Bar Association of his day against the culture of habitual obedience Burnham bred – obedience not to the law but to its enforcers. Students who will not speak, public servants who will not sign, lawyers gone quiet or gone after the money. The dictatorship we thought was bad is gone; the habit has outlived it, and the courage that broke it was never handed down.

That loss is not Bhagwan’s. He files no complaint, and offers a programme rather than a lament.

Bhagwan now lives in New York, where for years he drove a school bus with Samia beside him as counsellor; she knew every route on the island. A man who once sat across a desk from Nkrumah, delivering children to school in Queens, and reporting it in the same level voice he uses for everything else. The country he left is rich now and still governed by the elections arithmetic he spent his life trying to break. His proposal has been on the table since 1965, and this book – precisely because its author never asks to be admired – is the most persuasive case anyone has made for it.

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