This is Guyanese TV on Janet Jagan.
From British daily The Morning Star:
Leader of Guyanese freedom fight dies aged 88Sunday 29 March 2009
FORMER Guyanese president Janet Jagan died on Saturday in Georgetown, the capital of her adopted country. She was 88.
US-born Ms Jagan, who always described herself as a communist, was elected president after her husband Cheddi Jagan died in 1997. She resigned in 1999 due to poor health.
The couple met in Chicago in 1940, where Mr Jagan was studying dentistry and Ms Jagan was a Communist Party of the USA activist.
Despite their different backgrounds – Jewish and Hindu – they married and moved to Guyana. In 1950, they founded the People’s Progressive Party, with Ms Jagan elected general secretary.
Despite persecution by the British colonial authorities, the two led the strugle for freedom for the south American nation until independence in 1966.
Ms Jagan was a dedicated fighter for Guyanese independence and Caribbean unity during years of corruption, gerrymandering, election-fixing and repression by British colonialism and the People’s National Congress government of Forbes Burnham, which worked to divide the country’s black and Indian communities.
See also here. And here. And here.
From the obituary in The Independent:
In her later years “Comrade Janet” wrote children’s stories, including When Grandpa Cheddi was a Boy (1993), Patricia, the Baby Manatee (1995) and Anastasia the Ant-Eater (1997). She also became a noted patron of the arts, helping to found the National Art Gallery in Georgetown.
While I was in Suriname, I met people who had fled Guyana because of (United States government supported) Burnhamite communalist divide and rule policies. There are no such big intercommunal tensions in Suriname.
This is not a man’s world- ending violence against women in Guyana: here.
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