The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus Volume 13 Issue 4

The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 13 | Issue 4 |
Number 2 | Jan 26, 2015
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'Only a disciplined people can build a nation': North Korean
Mass Games and Third Worldism in Guyana, 1980-1992 「鍛錬
された民のみぞ国づくりに役立つ」ガイアナにおける北朝鮮のマスゲー
ムと第三世界主義1980-1992
Moe Taylor
Abstract: As the 1970s drew to a close, Forbes
Burnham (1923-85), Guyana's controversial
leader of 21 years, received Pyongyang's
assistance in importing the North Korean
tradition of Mass Games, establishing them as
a major facet of the nation's cultural and
political life during the 1980-92 period. The
current study documents this episode in
Guyanese history and seeks to explain why the
B u r n h a m r e g i m e p r i o r i t i z e d s u c h a n
experiment in a time of austerity and crisis, its
ideological foundations, and how Guyanese
interpreted and responded to Mass Games.
I argue that the Burnham regime's enthusiasm
for Mass Games can in large part be explained
by their adherence to a particular tradition of
socialist thought which holds education and
culture as the foundation of development.
While such a conception of socialism has roots

in the early Soviet Union and, in the case of
Guyana, was greatly influenced by the North
Korean model, it was also shaped by local and
regional contexts.
The deep aversion of parents to their children
losing class time to Mass Games training, along
with ethnic division and Indo-Guyanese hostility
to the Afro-Guyanese dominated government in
particular, proved the central obstacles to
widespread public support for the project.
Despite these contradictions, Mass Games,
which took on a local flavour distinct from its
North Korean progenitor, did in fact resonate
with those who believed in Burnham's promise
of a brighter, socialist future, while also
appealing to a certain widespread longing
w i t h i n G u y a n e s e c u l t u r e f o r a m o r e
" d i s c i p l i n e d " s o c i e t y .
Introduction
In the final months of 1979, while the Iran
hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan dominated international headlines,
the approximately 750,000 citizens of the South
American republic of Guyana (formerly British
Guiana) were informed by state-owned media
about the coming arrival of a strange and
mysterious new thing called Mass Games, a
spectacle event that would be, according to one
editorial, "the most magnificent in the history
o f o u r c o u n t r y . " 1 I t w o u l d r e q u i r e t h e
mandatory participation of their children in

primary and secondary school, parents were
told, and would take place at the National Park
a u d i t o r i u m o n 2 3 F e b r u a r y 1 9 8 0 t o
commemorate the tenth anniversary of the
founding of the Co-operative Republic, as part
of the broader Mashramani celebrations
( G u y a n a ' s v e r s i o n o f C a r n i v a l ) . I t w a s
presented to Guyanese as both a performance,
a spectacle, implying entertainment; but also as
fundamentally educational in nature, a project
of the Ministry of Education whose primary
value lay in what it stood to offer the nation's
youth. It was also made clear that this event
was the latest fruit of fraternal cooperation
between Guyana and the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea (DPRK), which had taken on
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increasing importance in the life of the country
during the last six years. It was the dawning of
a decade in which North Korean-style Mass
Games became a major facet of the cultural and
political life of Guyana, and it is this episode in
Cold War international relations the present
study seeks to document. More specifically this
article examines the ideological, political and
cultural factors which moved the ruling
People's National Congress (PNC) to import
and adapt North Korean Mass Games, and how
Guyanese interpreted and responded to the
state-driven experiment.

Guyana, North Korea and the Burnham Era
Guyana is the sole English-speaking country in
South America, bordering Venezuela, Brazil
and Suriname on the northern coast but
culturally affiliated with the Anglophone
Caribbean. First inhabited by indigenous
Amerindian peoples, successive periods of
colonial rule by the Netherlands (1648-1814)
and Britain (1814-1966) saw the arrival of
slaves from Africa and indentured labourers
from India, China and Portugal (in particular
the island of Madeira), forging a pluralistic
society with six official ethnic groups. However
modern society and politics would largely be
shaped by the often troubled relations between
the two largest communities: Indo-Guyanese,
mostly Hindu with a sizable Muslim minority,
working the sugar estates and rice farms of the
r u r a l c o a s t l a n d , a n d A f r o - G u y a n e s e ,
predominantly Christian, concentrated in the
capital and employed primarily in the civil
service, security forces, mining and urban work
force. Historically Indo-Guyanese constituted
the single largest group; by 1970 for example,
t h e y r e p r e s e n t e d 5 1 . 4 p e r c e n t o f t h e
population, with Afro-Guyanese constituting
30.6 percent.2
The arrival of North Korean Mass Games in
Guyana at the dawn of the 1980s was the latest
episode in the controversial 21-year reign of
Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham (1923-85),
leader of the People's National Congress

(PNC). A London-educated Afro-Guyanese
lawyer and trade unionist, Burnham's political
career began with the anti-colonial and labour
struggles of the early 1950s in the then
recently established People's Progressive Party
(PPP), led by the Indo-Guyanese dentist and
fellow trade unionist, Cheddi Jagan. As the
Marxist leanings of Jagan and other PPP
leaders stoked British and American fears
about a communist takeover in the colony,
Burnham led a breakaway faction that would
become the PNC in 1957, positioning himself as
a moderate socialist who would protect private
property and welcome foreign investment, in
contrast to the supposedly Stalinist Jagan.
Guyana's electoral arena was torn along ethnic
lines, with most Indo-Guyanese backing Jagan
and most Afro-Guyanese following Burnham,
while Washington decided the latter best
served its agenda of curbing Soviet influence in
the region. Covert intervention by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1960s was
instrumental in the PNC's ascension to power,
a dark period marred by ethnic violence,
sabotage and labour unrest.3 Burnham was
elected Premier in December 1964 in coalition
with the right-wing United Force (UF), and
became Prime Minister with Britain's granting
of independence in May 1966. As Guyana
stepped into independent statehood, Burnham
inherited an underdeveloped plantation
economy dominated by the production of sugar,
rice and bauxite for export, and a population
deeply divided by years of communal strife.
The first indication that the honeymoon

between Burnham and his American patrons
would be short-lived came on 23 February
1970, when, having shed his cumbersome
coalition partner in a rigged 1968 election,
Burnham formally declared Guyana a "Co-
operative Republic," and proclaimed a new
revolutionary course for the nation under an
official ideology he called "co-operative
socialism." He vowed to "establish firmly and
irrevocably the co-operative as the means of
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m a k i n g t h e s m a l l m a n a r e a l m a n 4 a n d
changing, in a revolutionary fashion, the social
and economic relationships to which we have
been heir as part of pure monarchial legacy."5
Like the Juche idea in North Korea, co-
operative socialism would be simultaneously
articulated as the brainchild of the maximum
leader and as an indigenous adaptation of
Marxism-Leninism, based in Guyanese history
and conditions.6 At its core was the principle of
self-reliance (primarily manifested in the
nationalization of all foreign-owned enterprises
a n d t h e b a n n i n g o f i m p o r t s d e e m e d
unessential), a multitude of ambitious
educational and cultural reforms designed to
create a "new man" free of colonial influences,
and a programme, never fully realized, to build
a new economic structure based on co-

operatives. In explaining this sudden shift to
the Left, the Comrade Leader (the formal title
Burnham adopted in the 1970s) maintained
that he had always been a Marxist, but had the
wisdom and tact to put ideology aside until he
had secured independence for his country.
W h i l e t h e r e w a s s o m e b l o w b a c k f r o m
Washington, the PNC regime was spared the
kind of overt American hostility received by
other Leftist states of the region in the same
period; with the staunchly pro-Soviet PPP the
only other serious contender for power,
Burnham remained the lesser evil in the eyes of
Washington throughout the Cold War.
Burnham's foreign policy priorities were
securing aid, favorable trade agreements and
outside support in Guyana's territorial disputes
with neighbors Venezuela and Suriname,
particularly the former, which historically
claims two-thirds of Guyana's territory and was
threatening military action in the period. As
Burnham snubbed the Western powers which
had once backed him as Guyana's best defence
against communism, he hoped to find an
alternate source of support in the socialist bloc
and Non-Aligned Movement. The outcome of
these efforts presents an interesting case study
of what options existed for developing
countries located in "America's backyard"
against the politics of the Cold War and the
Sino-Soviet rivalry. Traditionally, the Soviet
Union recognized Burnham's opposition, the
PPP, as the legitimate Marxist-Leninist party in
Guyana. With Burnham's rise to power having

been bankrolled by the CIA, and his routine
condemnation of the "Soviet threat" during his
opposition years, the Brezhnev administration
had plenty of reason to be sceptical. Moscow's
r e a c t i o n w a s t o r e c o g n i z e G u y a n a a s a
"socialist-oriented" (rather than socialist)
country, rejecting Burnham's bid to have the
P N C a d m i t t e d i n t o t h e C o m m u n i s t
International (reserving that honour for the
PPP), and his request that Guyana be accepted
i n t o t h e C o u n c i l f o r M u t u a l E c o n o m i c
Assistance (COMECON), 7 the economic
organization of socialist states. At the same
time, Moscow continued its fraternal relations
with Burnham's opposition, and offered
scholarships to Guyanese students – not
through formal government channels, but
through the PPP. By the late 1970s there was
thinly-veiled animosity between the two states,
with the PNC charging Moscow with "flip-
flopping" on commitments of aid and of
supporting a "fifth column" within Guyana.8
Cuba was a more constructive ally, and
provided Guyana with substantial medical
personnel, scholarships and military aid.
However the Cuban Communist Party (PCC)
had also traditionally been aligned with
Burnham's opposition, and provided guerilla
training to PPP militants. Burnham grew
frustrated with what was perceived as Fidel
Castro's unwelcome interest in influencing the
course of Guyana's "revolution," and in 1978
five Cuban diplomats were expelled for
allegedly offering guerrilla training to members
of the Working People's Alliance (WPA),

Guyana's second major Left opposition group.9
In June of 1972 Guyana became the first
country in the Commonwealth Caribbean to
recognize the People's Republic of China,
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thereby accessing a vital market for Guyanese
sugar and bauxite and becoming the recipient
o f s u b s t a n t i a l a i d , m o s t n o t a b l y t h e
construction of a textile mill and clay brick
factory in the mid-1970s. 10 However Beijing's
p o l i c y i n t h e r e g i o n w a s c a u t i o u s a n d
pragmatic, unwilling to back insurgencies or
shore up Leftist governments under threat, and
by the late 1970s it was drastically curtailing
aid to even its closest allies in the Third
World.11 Moreover, in the context of the Sino-
Soviet rivalry, Burnham's overtures towards
China only exacerbated tensions with Moscow.
Burnham was a zealous champion of the Non-
Aligned Movement (NAM), hosting the 1972
Non-Aligned Foreign Ministers Conference, an
occasion he used to unveil a monument to
movement founders Nasser, Nkrumah, Nehru
and Titoin the capital. But as a coalition of
developing nations facing their own economic
difficulties, NAM could hardly be a source of
capital, nor could it be of much assistance in
the event of a military conflict with Venezuela.

And like other Third World leaders, Burnham
discovered that strident support for the "Arab
cause" in international fora – which the PNC
took active part in – was not guaranteed to be
repaid in Middle Eastern oil dollars.
However, the PNC's foreign policy objectives
proved neatly compatible with those of another
country eagerly seeking new allies on the
international stage in the same period: North
Korea. The two states became natural allies as
their respective representatives came face to
face via the Non-Alignment Movement in which
both took an active role. Charles Armstrong
(2013) described this phase in North Korean
foreign policy thusly:
T h e 1 9 7 0 s w e r e a d e c a d e o f
unprecedented outward expansion
for North Korea. Admission to
several UN bodies, active lobbying
at the UN General Assembly, a
successful diplomatic offensive in
t h e T h i r d W o r l d , a n d n e w
economic and political ties to
advanced capitalist countries all
reflected a new global presence for
the DPRK. Long a partisan of the
socialist side in the global Cold
War, Kim Il Sung presented his
c o u n t r y i n t h i s d e c a d e a s
"nonaligned," and a model for
postcolonial nation-building.12
While Pyongyang had begun reaching out to

governments in Asia, the Middle East and
Africa in the 1960s, it extended this activity
into Latin America and the Caribbean with
renewed vigour by the following decade.13
Pyongyang succeeded in building a substantial
base of support among the radical and non-
aligned governments of Africa and the Middle
East, but encountered more difficult terrain in
Latin America and the Caribbean, where in the
turbulent atmosphere of the Cold War potential
allies were few and their time in power often
short. One notable exception was Cuba, and
North Korea established diplomatic relations
with it in August 1960. However while friendly
cooperation between the two states existed,
there was a discernable distance as well,
suggesting that the Cuban leadership's
commitment to Moscow, and North Korea's
ambiguous position in the Sino-Soviet split,
placed certain limits on the potential of such a
partnership.
North Korea's Third World diplomacy was in
large part an attempt to build international
support for its geo-political objectives in the
Korean peninsula, and its strategy was not
unsuccessful: votes from Third World states
made possible a number of political victories at
the United Nations in this period.14 Meanwhile
Guyana under Burnham's leadership had
gained a reputation for its outspoken support of
radical causes worldwide – from the Palestinian
intifada to Basque separatism – and became
one of the most vocal advocates of North Korea

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on the world stage. Guyana consistently
defended North Korea in international fora,
hosted the first "Latin American-Caribbean
Conference for the Independent and Peaceful
Reunification of Korea" in January 1979, and
played a leading role in similar activities
worldwide.
While for the Soviets and Cubans the PNC's
distance from orthodox Marxism-Leninism was
a flaw, diplomatic pronouncements from North
Korea praised the fact that co-operative
socialism, like Juche, was a "unique line" of a
national character, and furthermore one which
incorporated the self-reliance philosophy of
Kim Il Sung. 1 5 Relatedly, it appears that
idiosyncratic regimes like the PNC, lacking a
firm commitment to the Soviets or Chinese,
were attractive allies to Pyongyang because it
allowed them the opportunity to play the
patron-mentor role so important to their
desired domestic and international image. If
the Soviets had Cuba and the Chinese had
Albania, North Korea could boast that Guyana
was "carrying out socialist construction under
the banner of the Juche idea created by the
great leader Comrade Kim Il-Sung."16
Forbes Burnham and Kim Il-Sung in
Pyongyang, late 1970s

In addition to the pragmatic need for aid and
diplomatic support, other factors drew the PNC
to North Korea. In the prevailing atmosphere of
T h i r d W o r l d i s m , a n d t h e B l a c k P o w e r
movement rocking the Caribbean of the 1970s,
Soviet socialism had limited credibility; at the
s a m e t i m e , M a o i s m w a s n o t u s e f u l t o a
thoroughly urban-based ruling party encircled
by a hostile countryside. By contrast, Juche
seemed to perfectly reinforce the Burnham
brand, notably his obsession with self-reliance,
his emotionally-tuned nationalism and his faith
in the power of education and culture to
transform concrete reality. North Korea's self-
identification as a member of the Third World,
and Kim Il Sung's emphasis on anti-imperialism
and the attention he paid to issues facing post-
colonial states had a special appeal to the left-
wing of the PNC, as it did to other Third World
radicals. By the 1970s North Korea had
recovered from the devastation of the Korean
War, underwent rapid industrialization and
developed a seemingly robust economy; to the
scores of Latin American and Caribbean
activists, intellectuals and artists who made the
pilgrimage, the grandeur of Pyongyang seemed
to offer proof that the so-called Third World
could in fact achieve rapid development
through a socialist path.17
State media coverage of the first Guyanese
Mass Games in 1980

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The outcome of this diplomatic junction was
roughly a decade of extensive political,
economic, military and cultural relations
b e t w e e n G u y a n a a n d N o r t h K o r e a
unprecedented in the Western hemisphere.
North Korea's extensive aid focused on
supporting the regime's goal of self-sufficiency
in food; this included material gifts (e.g.
tractors, harrows, boat motors), efforts to raise
the productivity of traditional food sectors such
as rice and fishing, as well as agricultural
projects designed to introduce new crops
Guyana had to otherwise import, such as
potatoes. North Korea also aided the PNC's
desire to vastly expand its military capabilities -
particularly in the areas of artillery and naval
warfare – in preparation for a potential conflict
with Venezuela. Burnham's former vice-
president Hamilton Green has even alleged
there were North Korean troops stationed
along the Guyana-Venezuela border, prepared
to impel any incursion,18 although such claims
have been vigorously disputed. Nevertheless,
N o r t h K o r e a n a g r o n o m i s t s , c h e m i s t s ,
engineers, doctors and military officers, as well
as contingents of English students, become
guests in the country, as Juche study groups
popped up in every major city and town, and
party members and civil servants were
implored to attend public rallies in solidarity
w i t h t h e i r c o m r a d e s i n A s i a . C u l t u r a l
collaboration flourished as well, as North

Korean and Guyanese artists, musicians and
dancers engaged in state-sponsored exchanges,
c o l l a b o r a t i n g a n d p e r f o r m i n g i n b o t h
Pyongyang and Georgetown. North Korea's
most substantial gifts in material terms
included the construction of a glass factory at
Yarrowkabra and Guyana's first acupuncture
clinic, staffed by North Koreans, in the capital;
h o w e v e r , s e v e r a l o t h e r p r o j e c t s w e r e
announced or initiated only to be abandoned
following Burnham's death in 6 August 1985.
Burnham's successor, Desmond Hoyte,
representing the "right-wing" of the PNC,
believed Guyana's long-term interests were
better served repairing its relationship with
Washington and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), and his ascension to power began
the gradual decline of the North Korean
partnership in the 1985-92 period. The aborted
North Korean ventures included a small hydro-
electric project in the north-west, a spare parts
factory capable of producing ten to fifteen tons
annually, a gold mining operation in the
interior, a new national stadium in the capital
capable of seating 20,000, and a North Korean-
style "Students and Children's Palace."
Mass Games
While Mass Games in North Korea were first
observed by PNC leaders during the latter half
of the 1970s, they date back to the birth of the
Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea
following liberation from Japanese rule in
A u g u s t 1 9 4 5 . A l t h o u g h t h e h i s t o r i c a l

development of Mass Games is beyond the
scope of this article, they have their roots in the
European group-gymnastics clubs of the
nineteenth-century, whose traditions were
eventually adopted by socialist parties and
became part of the cultural sphere of the early
Soviet Union (see Nolte 2002, Stites 2009,
Burnett 2013, Frank 2013). It should be noted
however that mass spectacle and mass
mobilization were part of a broader zeitgeist of
the interwar period, appealing to ideologues
and artists of both the Left and Right, and mass
gymnastics displays made their appearance in a
number of European countries. Their most
recent incarnation in North Korea commenced
in 2002 under the formal name TheGrand Mass
Gymnastics and Artistic Performance Arirang.
("Arirang" is the title of a traditional folk song,
which, through the metaphor of two separated
lovers, has become a kind of anthem of Korean
reunification).19 Today an Arirang performance
in North Korea involves approximately 100,000
performers, the bulk of them primary and
middle school students, and typically takes
place annually in August through September in
Pyongyang's massive Rungnado May Day
S t a d i u m
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungnado_May_Day_Stadium
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(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungnado_May_D
ay_Stadium).20 They are without comparison the
largest choreographed performance in the
world.21
There are three central components to Mass
Games: gymnastics, music, and the panoramic
backdrop; however the gymnastics portion is
supplemented with dance, singing, drama, and
in recent years the entire performance has
been enhanced with lasers and pyrotechnics.
The gymnastics are mass group gymnastics,
whose dazzling effect is achieved through the
s h e e r n u m b e r o f b o d i e s p e r f o r m i n g i n
synchronized unity. The backdrop is created
through tens of thousands of children aligned
in one side of the stadium seats holding books
of illustrated cards positioned contigously with
each other to give the illusion of an imperforate
surface; by changing the pages of the book in
precisely coordinated unison following the
signals of a conductor, the backdrop image is
transformed throughout the performance. The
entire spectacle is coordinated to thematic
music, which according to Burnett (2013) can
bring to mind, conversely, "a four-part
Christian-style hymn, military march, operatic
quasi-recitative, folk song, classical symphony
or ballet, or Hollywood Golden Age film
score."22
The Guyana Committee for Solidarity and
P e a c e h o s t s a n e v e n t f o r " M o n t h o f
Solidarity with the DPRK," June 1980, at
the Guyana Mines Workers Union hall in

Linden. Left to right: Committee President
Edwin James, Committee Secretary Jean
Smith and Sim Sang Guk of the DPRK
embassy.
Kim Jong-il, in his April 1987 speech "On
Furthering Mass Games Gymnastics," divides
the value of Mass Games into three areas: its
impact on the development of the children
participating as performers, its impact on the
"party members and workers" who constitute
the audience, and its contribution to North
Korea's relations with foreign countries.23
Firstly, Mass Games plays an important role in
turning school children into "fully developed
communist people."24 His definition of such
people merges the intellectual with the
physical, and contains echoes of the same
language used by nineteenth century European
advocates of mass gymnastics: "one must
a c q u i r e a r e v o l u t i o n a r y i d e o l o g y , t h e
knowledge of many fields, rich cultural
a t t a i n m e n t s a n d a h e a l t h y a n d s t r o n g
physique."25 While Mass Games are an excellent
way to "foster particularly healthy and strong
physiques,"26 they also install "a high degree of
organization, discipline and collectivism,"27 as
the performance forces them to "make every
effort to subordinate all their thoughts and
actions to the collective."28 While participating
in Mass Games helps mold school children to
become ideal citizens, they also educate the
a d u l t a u d i e n c e , a s a f o r m o f i d e o l o g y -
reinforcing entertainment: "they are a major
means of firmly equipping the Party members

and other working people with the Juche idea
and of demonstrating the validity and vitality of
our Party's lines and policies."29 They remind
North Koreans of "the line and policy put
forward by our Party on the basis of the Juche
idea at each period and stage of the revolution,
as well as the history and achievements of the
struggle of our Party and people to carry them
out."30 And lastly, Kim Jong-il explains that by
inviting foreigners to attend Mass Games, as
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well as working to assist other nations in
a d a p t i n g M a s s G a m e s , N o r t h K o r e a ' s
international prestige is enhanced while "trust
between our country and other countries is
deepened."31
Mass Games come to Guyana
North Korean Mass Games instructor Kim
Il Nam (far left) oversees Guyanese
students preparing the backdrop for the
first Guyanese Mass Games in 1980.
In September 1979 a seven-member team of
North Korean Mass Games instructors arrived
at Guyana's Timehri International Airport. They
were headed by visual artist Kim Il Nam,

reported to have ten years of experience in
Mass Games training and personally selected
for the mission by Kim Il Sung himself.3 2
According to the Guyanese press, the group
spent two months familiarizing themselves with
Guyanese history and culture, touring schools,
factories, farms, historical sites, and Guyana's
famous Kaiteur Falls.33 This was followed by
three weeks of training school teachers, and
two and half months of training student
participants.34 During this final phase, the
illustration work to create the panoramic
backdrop went on eleven hours a day in
alternating shifts at the Sophia auditorium,
while gymnasts and dancers trained five hours
a day with North Korean instructors and the
well-known Guyanese performer Dawn
Schultz.35 Burnham apparently visited often to
observe these preparations firsthand.36 Father
Andrew Morrison (1919-2004), a Jesuit,
opposition activist and tireless critic of Mass
Games, claimed that for the occasion the
government imported eight tons of decorations
from North Korea, 100,000 balloons from North
America and distributed 200,000 lapel buttons
bearing Burnham's image.37
Initial efforts to recruit a prominent Guyanese
artist to the position of artistic director were
unsuccessful. Keith Agard, known as a devout
member of the Nichiren Buddhist Soka Gakkai
sect and for his Mandala-like paintings full of
heady cosmic-mystical themes, politely
declined the offer, as did the well-known

abstract painter and draughtsman Dudley
Charles; both were apprehensive over its highly
structured format and political orientation. The
job went to George Simon, a Lokono Arawak
painter and graphic artist who had once
studied fine art at the University of Portsmouth
in England, at the time working as a lecturer at
Guyana's E.R. Burrowes School of Art. Today a
renowned painter (and archeologist) known for
his acrylic paintings steeped in Amerindian
folklore and spirituality, Simon may have
s e e m e d a n u n l i k e l y c a n d i d a t e , b u t h i s
background in graphic art engendered an
appreciation for the new medium.38 "I suppose I
took to it," Simon recalls,
…because as a printmaker, one
had to restrict oneself to get an
i m a g e o n t o p r i n t . I f i t w a s a
silkscreen print that one was
preparing, one had to prepare the
drawings in a particular way to suit
that technique. If it was lithograph,
t h e n a g a i n , t h e r e i s s o m e
r e s t r i c t i o n . A n d s o i t i s w i t h
intaglio printmaking. So it didn't
bother me. I understood that to
make this work, and to make these
drawings be dynamic, they had to
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be simple, yet it had to have the
p u n c h t h a t w o u l d m a k e i t a
s p e c t a c l e .
Following an apprenticeship period in which
Simon learned the new techniques from his
North Korean teachers, the 50x80 centimeter
boards that together constituted the panoramic
backdrop were painted by students from the
E . R . B u r r o w e s S c h o o l o f A r t u n d e r t h e
supervision of Simon and the North Koreans.39
As artistic director, Simon also served as the
conductor during the performances, who
directs the succession of backdrop images with
a series of coloured flags.
Appointed as musical director was Patricia
Cambridge, who had graduated from America's
B o s t o n C o n s e r v a t o r y i n 1 9 7 5 a n d h a d
previously worked for Guyana's Ministry of
Culture. Cambridge describes her compositions
for Mass Games as "eclectic in style to match
the choreography and the overall storyline"40
which included "some calypso-flavored
elements, folk songs, national songs, and
marching music woven into the production."41
This music in turn was performed by the
Guyana Police Forces Band aided by the City
School's Choir.
How much creative freedom did people like
George Simon and Patricia Cambridge have?
Both artists describe a process in which the

Ministry of Education deferred to their
judgement and vision in terms of design and
composition; however they worked under the
understanding that their output must reflect
the themes and messages presented to them.
Their preliminary work needed to be approved
by the Minister of Education, who was tasked
b y t h e P a r t y l e a d e r s h i p w i t h e n s u r i n g
ideological pedigree, and "changes could be
required if anything was deemed ideologically
incorrect."42 Simon also recalls one year when a
mishap in the performance made the grandiose
portrait of Burnham appear to have one eye
closed, sparking a call in one local newspaper
that the artistic director be punished. 4 3
Although the threatening remarks were never
acted upon, it gives some impression of the
authoritarian atmosphere in which the artists
worked.
As the state-owned media began hyping the
event with much fanfare in the months leadings
up to Mashramani, many Guyanese were
apprehensive and somewhat confused, and
Burnham's opposition wasted no time in
concluding that Mass Games would "serve no
educational purpose but merely to divert
attention from the general economic and social
situation of the country." 4 4 The Working
People's Alliance (WPA), a radical Left
opposition party led by the scholar Walter
Rodney, called for parents and teachers to
boycott the event. Nevertheless, Guyana's first
Mass Games went ahead on 23 February 1980,

with Burnham, the PNC senior leadership and
foreign diplomats in attendance. Students from
different regions of the coastland were
organized into different chapters: West
Demerara students re-enacted Burnham's
proclamation of the Co-operative Republic in
1970, while the five chapters handled by
Georgetown students dealt with industry,
agriculture, education, defense and the PNC's
"Feed, Clothe and House" (FCH) campaign.45
Students from the east coast completed the
b o o k w i t h a f i n a l c h a p t e r o n G u y a n a ' s
international relations, the entire performance
taking ninety minutes, as is standard in North
Korea.46
Needless to say, in a country with a population
of approximately 750,000, Guyanese Mass
Games did not approach the grandeur of those
h e l d i n P y o n g y a n g : a t t h e i r p e a k t h e y
n e v e r t h e l e s s i n c l u d e d 3 , 0 0 0 s t u d e n t
performers (780 of whom held the card-books
which constituted the backdrop) drawn from
twenty-six primary and secondary schools
(although a total of 10,000 students were said
to have been involved in an entire production)
APJ | JF 13 | 4 | 2
10
a n d t h e b a c k d r o p c h a n g e d s i x t y t i m e s
( c o m p a r e d w i t h 1 8 0 i n a N o r t h K o r e a n

production). If we accept media reports that
tickets for the first Mass Games, which cost
three Guyana dollars, were completely sold out,
we can roughly gauge the attendance, as the
National Park's open-air auditorium seats
upwards of 10,500. In addition to the main
event open to the public, there were three, free
subsequent performances for school children in
the following weeks, a practise that became
standard.
Guyanese Mass Games, 1983
Although the state-owned media was compelled
to heap praise on the event, its coverage is
useful for conveying an idea of the visual
character of the performance. The journalist
Raschid Osman, writing for the state-owned
Chronicle, offered the following description:
Mass Games came alive yesterday
f o r t h o u s a n d s o f M a s h
[ M a s h r a m a n i ] r e v e l l e r s , a
spectacular sweep of colour and
pageantry and informed by a
precision that had to be seen to be
believed. Viewed for the first time,
Mass Games with their cinema-like
tableaux and seemingly endless
possibilities, prove to be just a bit
awesome.
The giant pictures segmented into
p a g e s o f b o o k s h e l d a l o f t b y
hundreds of children, gymnastics

b y f u r t h e r h u n d r e d s i n t h e
foreground, the swirling rhythm of
gaily-coloured costumes and the
sense of pomp and circumstance
which always accompanies the
unfurling of flags, all merged to
make the performance at the
National Park a memorable one.
At a signal from a director perched
in a box up in the north stand they
turned the leaves and fashioned
pictures relevant to honouring
Prime Minister Forbes Burnham,
economic independence, the
development of agriculture, the
welfare of the people, defending
the Republic, holding high the
banner of anti-imperialism and
independence, and developing
socialist education and culture.
There is little doubt that Mass
Games has instilled the children
with discipline that would be hard
to beat. For the most part, the the
particpants moved as if they were
a l l p a r t s o f o n e b i g m a c h i n e
operated by a single operator."47
The state-controlled press made out Mass
G a m e s t o b e a m a g n i f i c e n t s u c c e s s o f
tremendous historical importance, even while
quietly acknowledging the "many criticisms"
among the public.48 Mass Games continued
throughout the 1980s, expanding in size and

sophistication under the direction of the
M i n i s t r y o f E d u c a t i o n ' s M a s s G a m e s
Secretariat. The North Korean team stayed in
Guyana for nine months, training staff from the
M i n i s t r y o f E d u c a t i o n a s M a s s G a m e s
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11
instructors before departing with a lavish
farewell ceremony hosted by the PNC top brass
at the National Cultural Centre.49 In addition to
the Republic Day performance at Georgetown's
National Park, additional annual performances
c o m p a r a b l e i n s i z e w e r e h e l d i n t h e
predominantly Indo-Guyanese region of Berbice
on the east coast, and the predominantly Afro-
Guyanese mining town of Linden, Guyana's
second most populous town. The PNC boasted
that the former involved 2,600 student
performers from thirty-six schools and was
attended by 40,000 local residents.50 By 1982
Mass Games training was incorporated into the
public school system's year-round physical
education curriculum.51 By the mid-1980s, the
Guyanese military (Guyana Defence Force)
w e r e i n c o r p o r a t e d i n t o t h e a n n u a l
performance, as were members of the Guyana
N a t i o n a l S e r v i c e ( G N S , a c o m p u l s o r y
paramilitary service program for youth). Local
steel bands were also included in subsequent
years, increasing the Caribbean flavour of the
production. As for the WPA's boycott campaign,

four months after the first Mass Games, party
leader and respected scholar Walter Rodney
was killed by a bomb detonated in his car, in
what is widely accepted to have been an
assassination perpetrated by Burnham's
security forces. It was a massive blow from
which the party never fully recovered.
Guyanese Mass Games, 1986
The content of Mass Games in Guyana reflected
a distinctly Guyanese appropriation of the
North Korean medium. The portrait of Forbes
B u r n h a m p l a y e d a c e n t r a l r o l e i n t h e
backdrops, as did the image of Kim Il Sung in
North Korea. In general the tone was highly
nationalistic and echoed common PNC themes
of patriotism, education, unity, self-reliance,
non-alignment, and international solidarity.
Inter-ethnic unity and homage to the Guyanese
peoples' diverse points of ancestry was often
emphasized by, for example, dancers from the
r e s p e c t i v e c o m m u n i t i e s a p p e a r i n g i n
t r a d i t i o n a l d r e s s . T h e c e l e b r a t i o n a n d
encouragement of youth was also a consistent
theme, reflecting the fact that it was this group
who the event was seen as primarily serving.
The backdrops commonly depicted Guyana's
natural beauty and wildlife, as well as typically
socialist realist-style portrayals of "reality in its
revolutionary development" populated with
happy workers, students and scientists, all
interwoven with standard political slogans such
as "Produce or Perish," "National Unity for
Prosperity" and "Practise the Virtues of Self-

Reliance." Another common element was the
recital and visual representation of text from
renowned Guyanese poets, such as Martin
Carter and A.J. Seymour (which was not
without irony, as the former was an opposition
supporter, beaten by PNC militants while
participating in an anti-government rally in
1978). Generally speaking, Mass Games
reflected a Guyanese aesthetic, more free in
form and more cheerful than its North Korean
progenitor. While an ideological factor was
certainly paramount, and the tragic history of
slavery and indentureship were sometimes
i n v o k e d , t h e s e w e r e b l e n d e d w i t h t h e
temperament and rhythms of the Caribbean.
The resulting performance was less bellicose,
less militaristic, more light-hearted and
internationalist; it lacked the solemnity and
hard-hitting character of North Korean Mass
G a m e s , l e a n i n g m o r e t o w a r d s a j o v i a l
patriotism. I asked Yolanda Marshall, a
Guyanese writer and poet who performed in
the 1986 Mass Games as a dancer, to watch a
APJ | JF 13 | 4 | 2
12
video recording of a contemporary North
Korean performance and share her thoughts.
She commented:
It is very similar, in terms of the
display cards and gymnastics etc.

Our Mass Games was like a well-
organized Carnival show. Bigger,
brighter costumes, Caribbean
m u s i c , d a n c e s e t c . O u r M a s s
Games resembled some type of an
African celebration from slavery
with a mixture of militancy and
blending of cultures. I personally
feel my Guyanese Mass Games was
more fun, after all, most Guyanese
love to dance to good music.52
The following brief descriptions of a few Mass
Games performances offer examples of their
general style and content. The 1985 Mass
Games, the last one before Burnham's death in
August of that year, was entitled "Youth –
participation and development for peace." It
was conceived as a tribute to the United
Nation's International Youth Year (IYY), and in
addition to this overriding theme, relayed the
story of the arrival of Guyana's six ethnic
groups through settlement, slavery and
indenture, and congratulated Burnham on the
occasion of his sixty-second birthday.53 The
1986 Mass Games was entitled "Standing up
for Guyana," and its chapters were "in honour
o f t h e y o u t h o f G u y a n a , t h e c e n t e n a r y
celebration of the Guyana Teachers Association
and Guyana's eighteenth independence
anniversary."54
The 1987 Mass Games "Guyana – Oh Beautiful
Guyana" opened with a shower of praise for
Burnham's successor, Desmond Hoyte, and a
patriotic tribute to the Co-operative Republic.

The subsequent seven chapters were a
celebration of the nation's natural resources,
devoted in turn to flora, forestry, rivers,
mineral wealth, wildlife, Guyana's holiday
resorts and a concluding chapter extolling "the
b e a u t y , f i r m s p i r i t , d e t e r m i n a t i o n a n d
resoluteness of the Guyanese people as they
continue to build a united and free country."55
Mid-way through the performance time was
taken to declare Guyana's recognition of the
United Nation's International Year of Shelter
for the Homeless(IYSH).
The 1988 Mass Games, "Guyana – a Nation on
the Move" is particularly interesting, as it was
based on Burnham's theory of Guyanese history
as the natural and spontaneous impulse
towards co-operative living, supressed under
colonialism but emerging triumphant under the
leadership of the PNC. The performance begins
in the colonial past with the harsh realities of
s l a v e r y a n d i n d e n t u r e d l a b o u r ( n o t ,
interestingly, with Guyana's indigenous people,
among whom Burnham had posited Guyana's
original co-operative spirit). In the second
chapter, emancipation has been declared and
free Africans, refusing to continue working on
the plantations as wage-labourers, pool their
resources and establish communal villages
s u s t a i n e d o n a g r i c u l t u r e a n d f i s h i n g .
Subsequent chapters portray the growth of
Caribbean unity, the struggles of sugar workers
and the development of the trade union
movement with Burnham, Jagan56 and Hubert

Critchlow57 as its guiding lights. This leads
towards the achievement of independence, the
proclamation of the Co-operative Republic in
1970, and concludes with Guyana's march into
the future in a final chapter entitled "Guyana –
Boldly Reaching out for Progress."58
Why did Guyana adopt Mass Games?
The period in which the Burnham regime
decided to embark on the ambitious and costly
project of bringing Mass Games to Guyana was
one of crisis and austerity. Despite its rhetoric
of self-reliance, the PNC never succeeded in
substantially diversifying the country's narrow
export base or outgrowing its dependency on
foreign oil and other imports. Like most
APJ | JF 13 | 4 | 2
13
developing nations Guyana was hit hard by the
1973 oil crisis, whose effects were compounded
by mismanagement and corruption in the vastly
expanded state sector and the punitive
measures of the United States, which cut aid
and blocked loans from the Inter-American
Development Bank.5 9 In 1978, a desperate
Burnham turned to the IMF, which in return for
economic assistance demanded an end to
subsidies and massive layoffs in the state
sector, in effect forcing the PNC to punish its
base. A serious rise in crime, goods shortages,

a flourishing black market, labour unrest and
mass outward migration were among the
symptoms. The majority of Indo-Guyanese, the
country's single largest ethnic group, remained
intransigently opposed to the regime, viewing it
as illegitimate and discriminatory, leading
Burnham to routinely rig elections in order to
remain in power.6 0 Under threat, the PNC
unleashed its security forces and gangs of party
militants on the opposition, and there were
several murders of opposition activists linked to
the government.61 Like many radical regimes
before them, the PNC leadership justified
authoritarian tactics (if not always publically)
on the grounds that "the revolution" required
discipline and steadfastness: democracy was a
luxury they could not afford.
Also like other self-appointed vanguards before
them, the PNC leadership attributed Guyana's
economic hardships and public discontent in
large part to the low levels of "consciousness"
of the Guyanese masses, something which was,
in their analysis, the product of centuries of
colonial rule. In the worldview presented
through official organs, a citizen with "socialist
consciousness" had full faith in the Party and
was willing to work hard and sacrifice for the
betterment of the nation, exhibiting the virtues
of "self-reliance" and "self-help," while those
still poisoned with "individualist consciousness"
complained of daily hardships, craved foreign
goods, thought only of their individual plight
and expected others to solve their problems for
t h e m . A n d w h i l e s u c h i d e a s a b o u t

consciousness may have been a Leninist import
unfamiliar in the discourse of ordinary people,
in PNC rhetoric they were closely related to the
theme of "discipline," something, as we will
see, which was much more ubiquitous in
Guyanese society, forging an intellectual bridge
between the two. "Discipline" became a meme
that filled newspaper editorials, radio
broadcasts and official speeches in the period,
while the government's "Self-Denial Month"
encouraged citizens to forfeit a portion of their
wages to the state, and volunteer work
brigades were mobilized to aid the sugar
harvest. Typical were New Nation headlines
throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s,
always emblazoned in capital letters: "Every
Citizen A Solider" (a variation of Leon Trotsky's
"every worker a soldier" slogan adopted during
the Russian Civil War), "Everyone Will Have To
Work Harder," "Treat Unruly Behaviour
Harshly," "The Importance Of Sacrifice To The
Nation," "Grow More Food Now," "Women
Urged To Be Involved In Higher Productivity,"
"Limers Turned Into Productive Citizens,"62
"Let's Talk About Indiscipline: at Work, at Play,
at Home, in School, in the Streets."63
For Burnham, the problem of consciousness in
Guyana left the PNC with the task of creating a
"new man," of refashioning the minds of
Guyanese with a new value system through
education and cultural revolution.6 4 This
d e c i s i o n t o r e s p o n d t o t h e c r i s i s w i t h
intensified education efforts was not an
innovation, but the natural extension of

Burnham's long-held political thought. He had
always proclaimed that education was the
cornerstone of his plans to transform society,
and that constructing a new national culture
based on truly "Guyanese" values – which by
the 1970s were defined as one and the same as
socialist values – was central to this process.
One PNC document of the 1970s entitled
"Principles of Authority" defines the Party's role
a s " l e a d i n g t a s k s o f s t i m u l a t i n g a n d
implementing that learning and unlearning,
that education and re-education without which
APJ | JF 13 | 4 | 2
14
transition [to socialism] will be impossible."65
The idea of implementing socialism through
education and cultural reinvention – and the
related fixation with discipline and efficiency –
has its roots in the early Soviet Union, and can
be seen, in different forms and to varying
extents, in many socialist experiments of the
twentieth century. However this tradition
reached its pinnacle in North Korea, where
Stalinist ideology merged with a Korean
philosophical tradition in which the perfection
of society depended on the perfection of the
individual. Under Kim Il Sung's leadership
North Korea developed an all-pervasive system
for the central control and regimented
dissemination of ideas. The Great Leader called

for a never ending war against unhealthy ideas
and values, and placed special emphasis on the
indoctrination of the young, as nursery school
and kindergarten teachers were told that it was
their "honorable revolutionary duty" to begin
the process of "revolutionizing and working-
classizing" the population.66 In the 1970s when
North Korea was presenting itself as a model
for Third World development, Kim Il Sung's
message for countries like Guyana was that
cultural development and educational reform
were of even greater importance for them, as
they faced the double burden of building the
objective conditions of socialism and freeing
themselves from the psycho-cultural legacy of
c o l o n i a l i s m . T h i s r e q u i r e d t h a t t h e
r e v o l u t i o n a r y s t a t e n o t o n l y s e i z e a n d
thoroughly revamp existing educational
institutions, but also forge a new national
culture that could install a "noble, moral and
beautiful mental character" in the masses.67
PNC leaders, as well as delegations of Juche
students, artists and journalists, were
frequently hosted in Pyongyang during the
1 9 7 4 - 8 5 p e r i o d , a n d t h e r e m a r k a b l e
achievements they observed there – widely
reported in the PNC press – vindicated the idea
that the key to the socialist society they sought
lay in education and culture. Time and time
a g a i n , P N C o f f i c i a l s m a r v e l e d a t t h e
"discipline," "dedication" and "loyalty" of the
North Korean people – both those they
observed in Pyongyang, and the scores of
skilled workers, technicians, agronomists,

doctors and military officers who visited
Guyana in this period - and asked themselves
how they could reproduce the same ethos
among their own populace.
The PNC's zeal for mass education also had
Caribbean and specifically Guyanese roots.
Tyrone Ferguson (1999) points out that in the
1970s the centrality of education to building
socialism was a position shared by Burnham's
chief rivals – the pro-Soviet PPP and the radical
Left WPA.68 The idea that the people of the
Caribbean, specifically the African majority,
had been impacted intellectually, culturally and
spiritually by slavery and colonialism, and that
some process of mental emancipation was
central to their struggle for a just society, was
and remains a staple of Caribbean thought, and
ran through the currents of Caribbean Marxism
and Black Power of the 1960s and 1970s. On
the other hand, belief in the central priority of
education and discipline is something deeply
rooted in Guyanese culture, and in its vision of
an enlightened vanguard leading a backward
populace out of darkness, the PNC leadership
demonstrated certain unmistakable traits of the
Guyanese middle class.69 And while the PNC
leadership did indeed draw from a mix of the
lower- and upper-middle class, an examination
of its Central Committee in any given year
r e v e a l s t h a t t h e s i n g l e m o s t c o m m o n
occupational background of its 31 members
were teachers and headmasters trained in the
tradition of the British colonial school system.
Many more were the sons and daughters of
teachers and headmasters, including Burnham

himself. The habits, values and mentality of this
occupational group – the importance of
discipline, hierarchy and respect for authority,
the paramount role of the educator in society –
shaped their interpretation of the socialist
project. It is only by understanding these local
and regional contexts – in conjunction with
APJ | JF 13 | 4 | 2
15
T h i r d W o r l d i s m , t h e C o l d W a r a n d t h e
historical contradictions of socialism as a
development strategy – that we can fully
appreciate the appeal of the North Korean
model to the PNC leadership.
With North Korea as an inspiration and a
source of material support, the PNC undertook
a massive overhaul and expansion of the
education system, nationalizing all schools held
in private hands and by religious groups and
decreeing education free from nursery to
university. The total number of schools in
Guyana increased from 432 in 1970 to 1214 by
1979,70 as Burnham declared his priority of
"revolutionising the formal education system, a
process aimed at eradicating the old colonial
and capitalist values and introducing and
emphasizing new and relevant ones." 7 1
Throughout his reign ambitious educational
a n d c u l t u r a l p r o j e c t s , m a n y b a s e d o n

institutions and practises observed in North
Korea, remained Burnham's priority to the
point of obsession. As Guyana entered the
1980s and its economy continued to decline in
the face of global recession and a new hardline
s t a n c e f r o m W a s h i n g t o n ' s R e a g a n
administration, Burnham's zeal for mass
education only intensified. In fact, an inverse
relationship existed between the two, as if
Burnham was in a race to achieve the "new
man" before the "old man" lost patience with
the hardship and deprivations of socialist
construction. Although he remained the Party's
unquestioned leader until his passing in August
1985, Burnham was increasingly isolated
within the leadership in his fixation on costly
educational projects in a time of scarcity. In
1983, defending his decision to prioritize the
creation of a new elite boarding school for the
nation's top seventy-two students when the
country was bankrupt, Burnham stated: "The
eventual cost will run into several millions of
dollars. This will be found. It is a small price to
pay for preparing the younger generation to
carry on the revolution to its ultimate goal and
success."72 The President's College, as it was
called, said to be modeled on the Mangyongdae
Revolutionary School in Pyongyang, opened its
doors a few months after Burnham's passing.
This is the context in which the PNC leadership
adopted Mass Games as the 1970s drew to a
close. By demanding the participation of all
primary and secondary students, and its annual
occurrence involving nearly three months of

training, it stood to have a broader and deeper
impact on the lives of Guyanese than any other
of the PNC's projects of educational and
cultural reform. On the eve of the first Mass
Games of February 1980, an editorial in the
state-owned Chronicle made its purpose clear:
W e a s a n a t i o n m u s t p u r s u e
discipline or we will certainly be
unable to maximize our productive
efforts, and also raise the level of
o u r p r o d u c t i v i t y . W e e x p e c t
discipline to be an overriding
consideration in all avenues of
society. And we expect discipline
to be inculcated in the very young
w h o a r e t h e n u c l e u s o f o u r
aspirations. Discipline of mind and
body are the prerequisites for
p o s i t i v e a c h i e v e m e n t a n d
development, not only of ourselves,
but the nation as a whole.73
However, Mass Games was about more than
discipline. It was part of Burnham's broader
attempt to institutionalize a hegemonic master-
narrative over Guyanese society. As mentioned,
Mass Games was established as part of the
broader Mashramani celebrations, which take
place annually in February and function as
Guyana's equivalent of the Carnival celebrated
at the same time across the Caribbean.
Originally hoping that it would come to eclipse
Christmas in importance, Burnham established
Mashramani in 1970 by elevating the annual
A f r o - G u y a n e s e c a r n i v a l o f t h e t o w n o f

Mackenzie into a national celebration,
APJ | JF 13 | 4 | 2
16
appropriating the title of a traditional Arawak
harvest festival. This project reflected
Burnham's desire to replace the colonial legacy
with a new, pan-ethnic and "co-operative"
culture with himself as universal figurehead. By
choosing the date of 23 February – the
anniversary of Burnham's proclamation of the
Co-operative Republic, three days after
Burnham's birthday - it tied the national
celebration to Burnham's individual persona
and the broader PNC nation-building project.
Even prior to Mass Games, the PNC established
the People's Parade as an integral component
of Mashramani, where workers representing
their trades and workplaces were encouraged –
some would argue coerced – to march in a
show of solidarity with their government.
Grand theatrical productions at the National
Cultural Centre to mark the Comrade Leader's
birthday also became customary during the
same time each year. Mass Games then was
part of a broader effort to politicize Carnival in
Guyana, to place it in service of the Burnham
personality cult, pulling it in the opposite
direction from the "ritual of inversion" that it is
commonly analyzed as constituting in the
Caribbean. By attempting to fuse these
concepts – the birth of Burnham, the birth of

the Co-operative Republic, an idyllic pre-
Columbian past, patriotism, socialism, loyalty
t o t h e S t a t e - i n t o a p r e m i e r e n a t i o n a l
celebration, the PNC were attempting to create
something fitting the description Stites gave to
the forms of mass spectacle which emerged in
the early Soviet Union: "a kinesthetic exercise
of revolution, a massive performance of
revolutionary values and myths that were to
infuse the new society-in-the-making."74
H o w d i d G u y a n e s e r e s p o n d t o M a s s
Games?
Not all Guyanese shared the PNC's enthusiasm
for discipline, or accepted that the kind
embodied in Mass Games stood to have any
positive impact on their children's education or
personal development. One letter to the editor
of the Stabroek News described students
training for the 1989 Mass Games at the
Farnum Playing Field in the Subryanville
district of Georgetown thusly:
There hundreds of children, in
normal school-hours, twice a week
are put through their boring and
repetitive paces, soaked by rain,
burnt by sun, shouted at, abused,
and threatened by a loud-mouthed
instructress, day by day being
wound up to their futile task like
little, brow-beaten automatons.75
However, the discipline aspect of Mass Games

was its least controversial. While the PNC's
preoccupation with it may appear a Leninist
import, it also reflected a widespread sentiment
within society at the time that indiscipline was
a major problem of contemporary society.
Lamentations on lack of discipline - routinely
expressed in letter columns and editorial
sections of newspapers across the partisan
divide - could refer to lazy and indifferent
public servants, or absenteeism, corruption and
theft in the workplace – things the PNC could
attribute to a lack of socialist consciousness,
and which critics of the regime could blame on
an allegedly bloated and dysfunctional state
sector created through socialism. Absent
fathers, children born out of wedlock and the
deterioration of the traditional family unit
frequently entered discussions of societal
indiscipline, as did the supposed bad influence
of Jamaican reggae music or violent films from
Hollywood and Hong Kong. It was also, of
course, a problem of the youth, exhibited in
delinquency, loitering, truancy, foul language,
loud music, immodest dress, and lack of
respect for elders. In fact, the letter quoted
above was responded to by another reader who
claimed her child was among those training for
Mass Games at Farnum Playing Field:
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17
Are the children to be allowed to

k i c k a n d f i g h t w i t h o u t b e i n g
disciplined? Should they pelt dogs
and cows and even pull sheep tails
without being scolded? Must they
be allowed to behave like a pack of
monkeys without being punished
after trying to spoil the overall
effect of the presentation?76
Mass Games was also commonly derided as an
exercise in "brainwashing" with questionable
educational value, and of course the debate
born of such charges unfolded predictably
along partisan lines: what was education and
c u l t u r e t o a n a d m i r e r o f B u r n h a m w a s
propaganda and indoctrination to an opposition
supporter. However this type of criticism of
Mass Games was part of a broader frustration
with a Burnham era phenomenon of mandatory
participation in Party-controlled activities,
whether forcing workers and students to attend
political rallies, or conscripting citizens into
auxiliary organizations like the People's Militia
and the Guyana National Service (GNS). While
parents and students typically based their
views on Mass Games on the experience of
their children or students, liberal intellectuals
and journalists critical of the regime often
focused on the association with North Korea in
order to demonstrate its supposedly sinister
purpose:
It is robot-like. This, however, does
not necessarily mean that it is
without a purpose. North Korean
instructors were brought here

because they were "experts" in this
t y p e o f e x e r c i s e . W h y ? I s i t
because the political culture of
that country has gone further,
perhaps, than any other in the
d e l i b e r a t e a n d r e l e n t l e s s
d e s t r u c t i o n o f h u m a n
i n d i v i d u a l i t y ? 7 7
It is clear, however, that the greatest obstacle
to Mass Games gaining popular support was
the widespread fear of parents that their
children's education was suffering due to the
training which occupied nearly three months of
the school year. This concern was voiced by
parents and teachers repeatedly from the
inception of Mass Games in 1980 until its
demise with the fall of the PNC in 1992. From
the beginning the government attempted to
assure parents that all lost class time would be
compensated for, but whether this was being
adequately achieved remained an unsettled
debate between supporters and critics.
Ironically, the same Guyanese cultural
disposition - especially strong within the middle
class - that places tremendous emphasis on the
importance of education both explains, at least
in part, the PNC's great enthusiasm for projects
like Mass Games, and the difficulty they had in
getting parents to embrace it.
That notwithstanding, parents' fears that their
children's education was suffering as a result of
Mass Games was also symptomatic of a broader
p u b l i c a n x i e t y o v e r t h e s t a t e o f p u b l i c
education during the 1980s. The severe

economic turmoil of the decade meant that the
PNC was unable to adequately sustain the
greatly expanded system of universal free
education they had initiated in the 1970s, and
qualified teachers were among the mass exodus
of educated Guyanese taking place at the time.
Common complaints from parents and teachers
were of crumbling facilities, poor salaries,
overcrowded classrooms, unqualified teachers,
"political" appointments and dismissals, and
s h o r t a g e s o f t e x t b o o k s a n d m a t e r i a l s .
Naturally, in these circumstances it was easy
f o r G u y a n e s e t o q u e s t i o n t h e t i m e a n d
resources being devoted to Mass Games. "The
collapse of the education system" became a
major theme of the government's opposition,
and one which it could link to the PNC's overall
handling of the economy and its unpopular
decision to accept IMF loan programs.
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The other central obstacle to achieving public
support for Mass Games lay in the complicated
intersection of race and politics in Guyanese
society. Generally speaking, most Indo-
Guyanese loathed Burnham, and viewed PNC
rule as an illegitimate racial dictatorship in
which their community was excluded, silenced
and neglected. While Burnham's handling of
"the race issue" in Guyana is beyond the scope
of this article, suffice it to say that the PNC had

an enthusiasm for programs which took young
Guyanese out of their neighborhood or village
and placed them in new, Party-controlled
environments where they would interact with
youth of other ethnic groups and from different
regions while being exposed to PNC ideology.
In addition to Mass Games, the central project
designed to achieve this was Guyana National
Service (GNS), in which all citizens were
required to spend one year in military-style
settlements in the hinterland engaged in basic
c o m b a t t r a i n i n g , a g r i c u l t u r e a n d
manufacturing, in order that that they might
become "truly Guyanese citizens."78
In the 28 years of PNC rule, possibly no other
policy generated as much fear and resentment
within the Indo-Guyanese community as GNS
did. Most Indo-Guyanese parents were
mortified at the idea of their children –
particularly their daughters – being taken from
their homes and sent to remote camps where
they would have little protection or recourse
against potential abuses by Afro-Guyanese
soldiers, all in order to serve the agenda of a
regime they despised. Moreover, over time,
stories began to circulate within the Indo-
Guyanese community of daughters returning
home from GNS pregnant, giving birth to
"dugla pickney" (children of mixed Indian and
African ethnicity); graver still, reports of sexual
assaults and rapes emerged. While Mass
Games was not as threatening as GNS in this
regard, similar stories of sexual assaults of girls
during Mass Games training emerged as well.
Like so many issues in Guyanese politics, it is

impossible to draw a neat line between a very
real and serious problem (sexual violence
against young women, whose victims and
perpetrators are not limited to any ethnic
group), a traditional, patriarchal view of gender
within the Indo-Guyanese community which
denied women independence in relationships,
Guyana's deeply partisan political culture and
anti-African racism. Regardless, what is clear is
that Guyana's deep-rooted ethnic division, and
Indo-Guyanese mistrust of the government in
particular, was a major barrier to gaining
widespread acceptance of Mass Games.
In late 1988, simmering public discontent over
Mass Games erupted into a fiery debate carried
out through the newspapers and radio. Central
to this dialogue was Stabroek News, founded
two years earlier and the first independent
daily newspaper to arise since the PNC's
nationalization of the country's media industry
in the 1970s. This public discourse over Mass
Games, like the rise of Stabroek News itself,
was symptomatic of the gradual liberalization –
what was sometimes referred to as "Guyana's
glasnost" – occurring under Burnham's
successor, Hoyte.
O n e o f t h e f i r s t m a j o r i n i t i a t i v e s w a s
undertaken by the distinguished poet and
novelist Ian McDonald, who launched an attack
o n M a s s G a m e s o n t h e r a d i o p r o g r a m
Viewpoint. In addition to reiterating the
common complaint about the students' loss of
class time, he argued that Mass Games was

desperately out of sync with Guyanese culture:
There may at first have been
nothing wrong in at least trying a
kind of exercise that produced
such spectacular and colorful
e x a m p l e s o f m a s s p o p u l a r
discipline in other countries.
N o t h i n g w r o n g w i t h
experimenting. But the simple
truth is that Guyana is not North
Korea and it is surely obvious by
now that the idea has not travelled
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19
well. It is not for us. It does not fit
our psyche. The attempt to enforce
mass discipline and call it fun does
not suit our temperament, our
t r a d i t i o n s , o r o u r d e e p e s t
inclinations. Let us admire the
massed phalanxes of North Korean
children as they wave and smile
and dip and move and gyrate in
strict unison. But let us admire
from afar.79
McDonald's editorial set off a flurry of
responses and rebuttals in the letter sections
and op-ed columns of newspapers and on public
radio, and the North Korean embassy protested

to the management of the Guyana Broadcasting
Corporation (GBC). One of the most virulent
replies to McDonald was a front-page editorial
in the PNC party organ New Nation entitled
"Mass Games and McDonald's Quackery." The
anonymous piece claimed that McDonald's
"class prejudice" and "emotionalism" prevented
him from appreciating Mass Games, and
accused him of defaming school teachers,
demanding a "gentlemanly retraction."80 The
editorial questioned whether McDonald had
even seen a Mass Games performance, and
suggested that in choosing such negative
phrases to describe the event, he "had no
regard for meaning and was merely engaging
in an illicit sexual encounter with words."81 It
further argued that anyone who attended a
Mass Games performance could see clearly the
"great creativity and the joyous enthusiasm
with which the children perform,"82 and that
although North Korean in origin, they had
become something thoroughly Guyanese:
It is true that we have been taught
the techniques of Mass Games by
the North Koreans. But we have
developed our own style and our
own approach to organization and
choreography. There is nothing
North Korean about the spirit of
our Games. They have a distinctive
Guyanese flavor.
…We must beware of any kind of
idiotic mind-set that prevents us

from drawing upon the cultural
heritage of the world to stimulate
a n d e n r i c h o u r o w n c u l t u r a l
d e v e l o p m e n t . " 8 3
Moreover, New Nation attempted to counter
the image of Mass Games as something radical
and distinctly North Korean by grouping it with
other forms of mass spectacle found worldwide:
Surely, [McDonald] would have
s e e n o n h i s T V m o n i t o r t h e
marvelous exhibition put on by the
South Koreans for the Summer
Olympic Games in Seoul. And did
h e n o t s e e a s i m i l a r k i n d o f
spectacle put on by the Canadians
for the Winter Games in Calgary?
He has never seen, or read or
heard of similar kinds of shows in
t h e U S A ? T h e s e c u l t u r a l
manifestations are found in one
form or another, under one name
or another in many countries in the
w o r l d w i t h d i f f e r e n t s o c i a l
s y s t e m s . 8 4
Additional rebuttals to McDonald put forward
other arguments in support of Mass Games, for
example, that it improved children's academic
performance, and that it was on its way to
becoming an internationally recognized sport,
on par with football or cricket, in which Guyana
stood to excel and produce world champions.85
The latter suggestion was not so far-fetched in

the Cold War 1980s, as several of North
Korea's allies were staging Mass Games,
including Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East
Germany, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Meanwhile as
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20
the exchange continued critical parents and
teachers began to coalesce around the demand
that the government produce data that proved
Mass Games had any tangible benefits for the
student participants.
Ian McDonald shot back at his critics on the
following episode of Viewpoint. He argued that
Mass Games, in its exclusion of individual
achievement, and its "mechanical, utterly
unalterable discipline"86 made it incomparable
to the great sports such as football or cricket;
there could be no Rohan Kanhai or Michael
Jordan of Mass Games, as some of his critics
had suggested. Likewise, the comparison to the
Seoul Olympics or Canadian Winter Games was
weak:
Do Canada and South Korea have
Mass Games enshrined in their
school curricula from the earliest
age? There is a difference after all
between the occasionally staged
grand military parade which
everyone can enjoy and military

marching up and down as a way of
life.87
Perhaps aiming for compromise, McDonald
toned down his earlier calls for Mass Games to
be abolished, instead proposing it be reduced
to one performance every three years, that
children under twelve participate less and the
youngest children be exempted altogether, to
make children's' participation dependent on
parental consent, and to ensure student class
time was not compromised.88 History, however,
would favour McDonald's original demand,
when four years later Burnham's successor
Desmond Hoyte allowed the first free elections
in Guyana since 1964, and the PNC was swept
out of office, bringing an abrupt end to its
twenty-eight-year reign. The new Indo-
Guyanese-based PPP administration began a
dramatic reversal of course in Guyana, Mass
Games was discontinued, and efforts were
taken to extirpate all trace of its twelve-year
legacy.
Conclusion
The PNC's decision at the end of the 1970s, in a
time of severe economic and political crisis, to
divert considerable state resources in order to
force Mass Games on a wary public, followed
the logic of Burnham's ideological convictions.
Burnham subscribed to a particular strain of
socialist thought which essentially inverts
M a r x ' s c o n c e p t o f s u b s t r u c t u r e a n d
superstructure, arguing economic development

is dependent on the proper transformation of
peoples' ideas and values, therefore making
radical, ambitious educational and cultural
projects like Mass Games a central priority of
the regime. In this, Burnham inherited a
tendency within the Marxist-Leninist tradition
which dates back to the Russian Revolution,
but which reached its most extreme form in the
North Korea of Kim Il Sung, presenting a model
from which Burnham and other PNC leaders
took inspiration. Such a strategy of socialist
development, however, also had antecedents in
Caribbean leftist thought, particularly the idea
that the people of the Caribbean needed to
break the "mental chains" of colonialism as a
prerequisite to building the new society.
Moreover it appealed to the large number of
teaching professionals within the PNC
leadership, to a certain elitism typical of the
Guyanese middle class, and a more ubiquitous
Guyanese cultural sensibility which places
tremendous importance on formal education.
Ironically, the latter was also a chief obstacle to
Guyanese embracing Mass Games, as parents
proved unable to happily accept their children
losing class time during the nearly three
months of training each year. This, along with
Guyana's historical ethnic divide and in
particular Indo-Guyanese intransigence
towards the government, were the primary
f a c t o r s p r e v e n t i n g w i d e s p r e a d p u b l i c
acceptance of Mass Games.
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21
Ian McDonald's argument that Mass Games,
with its rigid collectivism, discipline, uniformity
and leader-worship, was simply incompatible
with Guyanese cultural sensibilities, certainly
hits upon a certain truth. To many Guyanese
living under the PNC, the array of communist-
style trappings introduced – the propaganda
billboards urging Guyanese to work harder and
produce more, the giant portraits of the
Comrade Leader, people addressing one
another as "comrade" – always seemed like an
alien import, hastily forced into a society in
which they did not belong. Even some former
PNC officials today concede that the attempt to
institutionalize a Burnham personality cult was
grossly at odds with Caribbean political
culture, in which leaders are viewed as quite
ordinary people by a cynical public, and, as
Burnham's vice-president Hamilton Green
remarked, "we cuss them when the time
comes."8 9 There seems an insurmountable
distance between the Kimist aesthetic of North
Korea and the uninhibited, organic character of
Caribbean art; likewise, familiar clichés about
the easy-going tempo of Caribbean life seem a
world removed from the Stakhanovite rhetoric
of discipline and efficiency introduced by the
PNC.
On the other hand, it is important to remember
that those libertine and lackadaisical elements
t h a t c o l o u r p o p u l a r s t e r e o t y p e s o f t h e
Caribbean – the wild abandon of Carnival, the

vulgar lyrics of calypso and reggae music, the
vices of rum and marijuana – mask another side
of Caribbean life, one much more conservative,
which holds firm the virtues of modesty,
etiquette, hard work, eloquence, education,
sobriety and piety. In Guyana, and throughout
the Anglo-Caribbean, these two currents co-
exist in constant tension, and the PNC were
quite in tune with the public mood in their
constant agonizing over the "indiscipline" seen
as plaguing society. It is in this way that the
PNC project of remolding people into a more
disciplined, educated, civic-minded body
resonated with many Guyanese.
While Guyanese people today remain divided
on the legacy of Mass Games, its image has
actually improved with the passage of time, as
student performers have grown up and begun
t o s h a r e t h e i r e x p e r i e n c e s . A l t h o u g h
perspectives and opinions among former
performers vary, it is fair to say that many,
quite possibly a majority, remember the
experience in a positive light. The explanations
as to why are not complex – Mass Games was
fun, and it offered relief from the standard
routine of the classroom. A kind of nostalgia
market within the Guyanese diaspora has
emerged, with people sharing their stories of
participating in Mass Games via online forums
a n d s o c i a l m e d i a . D r . P r i n c e I n n i s s , a
sociologist at Saint Leo University in Florida,
has shared her childhood recollections as a
Mass Games participant for the blog Everyday
Sociology. Yolanda Marshall, a poet and writer
based in Toronto, has written an in-depth

account of her experience as a dancer in the
1986 Mass Games, an event that remains for
her a cherished piece of her childhood.
Interestingly, rarely do former participants
remember the experience as indoctrination or
"brainwashing," and many are unaware that
there was any political or ideological purpose
to the event at all. What they remember is a
celebration, a performance; the physicality and
emotion, bodies, sounds, images, colours,
anticipation, excitement. This, coupled with the
fact that among former performers a positive
memory of Mass Games does not necessarily
correlate to positive sentiment towards
Burnham or the PNC, suggests that Burnham
may have vastly overestimated what his project
would achieve. It also, however, lends credence
to the arguments sometimes put forward by the
PNC that Mass Games was not something
r a d i c a l o r e x t r e m e , t h a t i t w a s n o l e s s
authoritarian or propagandistic than other
forms of mass spectacle seen in the Western
democracies, and that it was generally enjoyed
by the young performers.
Can it be said that the seven-member team of
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22
North Korean artists who spent a year in
Guyana imparting the artistic techniques of
Mass Games have had a lasting influence on

the world of Guyanese art? It is a worthy
question. George Simon went on to become one
of Guyana's most prominent artists, his acrylic
paintings on canvas, paper andtwill fabric
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twill) gaining him
international recognition, including the
Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for
Excellence in 2012. Citing Mass Games as a
pivotal chapter in his development as an artist,
he continues to use the method of painting
while sitting cross-legged on the floor, as his
N o r t h K o r e a n s t e a c h e r s d i d , a n d t h e
techniques of large-scale painting allowed him
to later transition into the medium of mural art,
which today includes some of his best known
work.90 Today these skills have been passed on
to a new generation, as Simon has continued in
his role as teacher and dedicated himself to
fostering young talent, particularly within the
Amerindian community, an effort that has given
birth to a virtual renaissance of indigenous
peoples' art in Guyana. Critically acclaimed
murals by Simon and his students now adorn a
number of prominent public sites, including the
National Cultural Centre (Universal Woman,
2 0 0 8 ) t h e U m a n a Y a n a ( T h e S p i r i t u a l
Connection Between Man and Nature, 2008)
and the University of Guyana (Palace of the
Peacock: Homage to Wilson Harris, 2009).
To North Korea watchers, on the other hand,
the story of Guyana's adoption of Mass Games
remains a lens into the shifting perspective
with which the secretive regime views the
outside world, and its own place within it. The
decade in which Mass Games was a major facet

of Guyanese cultural and political life was
possibly the greatest success of North Korea's
experiment in exporting its culture and
ideology to the rest of the world, particularly
the developing world. More broadly, it leaves
us with a fascinating case study of the kind of
artistic innovation and trans-national cultural
collaboration borne of the post-colonial era
under the pressures of the Cold Warms1, and the
way in which socialist ideas and the promises
they embodied were received and reinterpreted
by Third World intellectuals and politicos
struggling with the challenges of the post-
colonial terrain.
Moe Taylor is a writer and documentary
filmmaker living in Toronto. He holds an MA in
Latin American and Caribbean studies from
Columbia University.
Recommended citation: Moe Taylor, 'Only a
disciplined people can build a nation': North
Korean Mass Games and Third Worldism in
Guyana, 1980-1992, The Asia-Pacific Journal
Vol 13, Issue 4, No.2, January 26, 2015.
Related articles
•Rudiger Frank, The Arirang Mass Games
o f N o r t h K o r e a
(http://apjjf.org/-R__diger-Frank/4048)
Notes
1 "Mass Games will be stupendous affair," New

Nation, 27 January 1980.
2 George K. Danns, Domination and Power in
Guyana: A Study of the Police in a Third World
Context (New Brunswick, USA and London:
Transaction Books, 1982) 108.
3 Ralph R. Premdas, "Guyana: socialism and
destabilization in the Western hemisphere,"
Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 3, Social
Change (September 1979): 25-43.
4 Italics in the original.
5 Forbes Burnham, A Destiny to Mould:
Selected Discourses by the Prime Minister of
Guyana, C.A. Nascimento and R.A. Burrows, ed.
(Trinidad and Jamaica: Longman Caribbean,
1970) 70.
6 Forbes Burnham, Declaration of Sophia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twill
http://apjjf.org/-R__diger-Frank/4048
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23
(Georgetown, Guyana, 1974), PNC Collection,
National Archives, Georgetown, Guyana.

7 Timothy Ashby, The Bear in the Back Yard:
Moscow's Caribbean Strategy (Massachusetts:
Lexington Books, 1987) 143-145.
8 Tyrone Ferguson, To Survive Sensibly or to
Court Heroic Death: Management of Guyana's
Political Economy, 1966 -1985 (Georgetown,
Guyana: Public Affairs Consulting Enterprise,
1999), 251-255.
9 Ashby, 145-146.
10 Gail A. Eadie and Denise M. Grizzell, "China's
Foreign Aid, 1975-78" The China Quarterly, No.
77 (March 1979), pp. 217-234.
11 Ibid.
12 Charles K. Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak:
North Korea and the World, 1950-1992 (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 2013)
168.
13 John Chay, "North Korea: Relations with the
Third World," in Jae Kyu Park and Jung Gun
Kim, eds., The Politics of North Korea (Seoul:
Institute for Far Eastern Studies, 1979), pp.
263-276.
14 Chay, p. 268-269, 273-274.
15 "After 34 years the struggle continues," New
Nation (Georgetown, Guyana) 1 July 1984.
1 6 "Pak Song-Chol Speaks at Banquet for
Guyanese Vice President," Pyongyang Domestic

Service in Korean, reprinted in Korean Affairs
R e p o r t ( U S D e p a r t m e n t o f C o m m e r c e ,
Springfield, VA) 21 May 1982.
17 Ibid.
18 Hamilton Green, interview with the author,
11 December 2010.
19 Rudiger Frank, "The Arirang Mass Games of
North Korea," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 11,
Issue 46, No. 2 (December 2013) .
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
2 2 Lisa Burnett, "Let Morning Shine over
Pyongyang: The Future-Oriented Nationalism
of North Korea's Arirang Mass Games," Asian
Music, Vol 44, No 1 (Winter/Spring 2013): 3-32.
2 3 Kim Jong-il, On Furthering Mass Games
G y m n a s t i c s : T a l k t o M a s s G y m n a s t i c s
Producers, April 11, 1987 (Pyongyang: Foreign
languages Publishing House, 2006), 1.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 1-2.
30 Ibid., 2.
31 Ibid., 2-3.
32 New Nation, 27 January 1980.
3 3 " T h e P e o p l e W h o M a d e M a s s G a m e s
Possible," New Nation, 16 March 1980.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Fr Andrew Morrison, SJ, Justice: The struggle
for democracy in Guyana, 1952-1992 (Guyana:
self-published, 1998), 106.
38 George Simon, interview with the author, 30
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24
April 2012.
39 New Nation, 27 January 1980.
4 0 Patricia Cambridge, interview with the

author, 29 July 2013.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Simon, 30 April 2012.
44 Ibid.
45 This was the title of one of the PNC's earliest
and most central development goals: national
self-sufficiency in food, clothing and housing
production. The original target date was 1976,
but as this proved overly ambitious FCH
morphed into an open-ended campaign
throughout the Burnham era.
46 New Nation, 16 March 1980.
47 Raschid Osman, "Mass Games a resounding
success…and spectacular," The Chronicle, 29
February 1980.
4 8 " T h e P e o p l e W h o M a d e M a s s G a m e s
P o s s i b l e , " N e w N a t i o n , 1 3 A p r i l 1 9 8 0 .
49 Ibid.
50 "Mass Games at Albion: a truly spectacular
affair," New Nation, 17 June 1984.
5 1 "MASH – our biggest mass participation
event," New Nation, 12 January 1986.
52 Yolanda Marshall, interview with the author,

2 November 2010.
5 3 " T h o u s a n d s T h r i l l e d A t M a s s G a m e s
Spectacle," Guyana Chronicle, 24 February
1985.
5 4 MASH – our biggest mass participation
event," New Nation, 12 January 1986.
5 5 "Mass Games '87 to highlight Guyana's
beauty," New Nation, 17 August 1986.
5 6 Such a tribute to Jagan, leader of the
opposition, would have been unthinkable in
Burnham's time, and reflected the new
direction being initiated by Hoyte.
57 Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow(1884–1958),
dock worker who founded the British Guiana
Labour Union (BGLU) in 1917, the first trade
union in the Caribbean.
5 8 " P r e p a r a t i o n s f o r M a s s G a m e s ' 8 8
underway," New Nation, 20 December 1987.
59 On Guyana's economic challenges during the
Burnham era, see Hope (1985), Jeffery & Baber
(1986).
6 0 Clive Y. Thomas, "State Capitalism in
Guyana: an Assessment of Burnham's Co-
operative Socialist Republic," in Crisis in the
Caribbean, Fitzroy Ambursley and Robin
Cohen, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1983): 32-36.

61 Percy Hintzen, The Cost of Regime Survival:
Racial mobilization, elite domination and
control of the state in Guyana and Trinidad
(Cambridge: University Press, 1989), 93-94.
6 2 In Burnham-era Guyanese parlance, a
slacker.
63 Taken from various issues of New Nation
during 1979-81.
64 Burnham (1970), 61-62.
65 Ferguson, 158.
6 6 Kim Il Sung, Works, Vol 20 (Pyongyang:
Foreign Language Publishing House, 1984),
451-452.
67 "National Cultural Construction is an urgent
question in the independent development of
APJ | JF 13 | 4 | 2
25
newly emerging countries," Kulloja, No. 12,
(December 1983): 55-60.
68 Ferguson, 158.
6 9 A number of scholars have discussed a
historic tendency of the middle-class leadership
of the Caribbean Left to gravitate towards a

particularly elitist variety of vanguardism. See
James 1962, Wilson 1986, Mars 1998.
70 Ferguson, 189.
71 Burnham (1974), 26.
72 Ferguson, 332.
73 "A Mass Games Perspective," New Nation, 2
February 1980.
7 4 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams:
Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the
Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 94.
75 Paraphrased by McDonald on the Guyana
Broadcasting Corporation radio program
Viewpoint, 22 November 1988. The author
thanks Ian McDonald for sharing the written
transcript of the broadcast.
76 Jenny Persaud, letter to the editor, Stabroek
News 30 November 1988.
77 Janet Forte, letter to the editor, Stabroek
News, 16 Nov 1988.
78 "Where national service beckons we follow,"
government advertisement, 1980, PNC
Collection, National Archives, Georgetown,
Guyana.
7 9 R a d i o p r o g r a m V i e w p o i n t , G u y a n a
Broadcasting Corporation, 22 November 1988.

The author thanks Ian McDonald for sharing
the written transcript of the broadcast.
80 "Mass Games and McDonald's Quackery,"
New Nation, 27 November 1988.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
8 5 R a d i o p r o g r a m V i e w p o i n t , G u y a n a
Broadcasting Corporation, 6 December 1988.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid.
89 Green, 11 December 2010.
90 Simon, 30 April 2012.
The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 7 | Issue 23 |
Number 4 | Jun 2009
1
The Beijing Olympics as a Turning Point? China’s First
Olympics in

East Asian Perspective
Susan Brownell
The Beijing Olympics as a Turning Point? China’s
First Olympics in East Asian Perspective
Susan Brownell
It is commonly stated that the 1964 and 1988
O l y m p i c s w e r e “ t u r n i n g p o i n t s ” f o r t h e
i n t e g r a t i o n o f J a p a n a n d S o u t h K o r e a ,
respectively, into the global community. It was
anticipated that the Beijing Olympics would be a
“turning point” for China. Now that the Beijing
Games are over, we can ask whether anything
“turned,” and if so, in which direction? This
essay deals with a central paradox of the
Olympic Games – they reinforce nationalism and
internationalism at the same time. A one-sided
focus on nationalism, such as characterized much
of the media coverage of the Beijing Olympics,
can lead to the erroneous conclusion that the
Olympic Games exacerbate rather than moderate
political conflicts. Wishful thinking that the
Beijing Games would be a turning point for
h u m a n r i g h t s a n d d e m o c r a c y l e d t o t h e
conclusion by China watchers in the West that
the Beijing Games were not the turning point that
was hoped for. However, reflection on what
actually “turned” in Japan and South Korea helps
us to see what we should actually be looking for
in the case of China. This retrospective suggests
that the interplay between nationalism and
internationalism was similar in all three Olympic
Games, and offers a more optimistic prospect for

C h i n a ’ s p e a c e f u l i n t e g r a t i o n i n t o t h e
i n t e r n a t i o n a l c o m m u n i t y .
Most of the modern Olympic Games held
between 1896 and 1988 took place in the shadow
of wars, past, present, and future. The political
a n i m o s i t y s u r r o u n d i n g B e i j i n g 2 0 0 8 w a s
especially highlighted by contrast with the
comparatively tranquil background of the four
preceding Olympics. The Albertville 1992 Winter
Games had been the first Olympics in history
considered to have “100% participation,” with no
boycotts or IOC-dictated exclusions (in addition
to these reasons, before World War II nations
often did not compete for lack of funding or
indifference from the central government). South
Africa’s exclusion since 1964 had ended in 1988,
but the tail end of the Cold War had extended
into the Seoul Games with the boycott by North
Korea, Cuba, and Ethiopia. The Barcelona 1992
Summer Olympics were marred only by the
IOC’s barring of Yugoslavia; both there and at
the preceding Albertville Games, the former
Soviet Union was represented by the Unified
Team. From the Barcelona Olympics onward the
Games were considered to forward integration
and reconciliation, and the political issues that
dominated public opinion were domestic or
regional (Catalonian sovereignty in Barcelona
1992; the rise of the American South and racial
integration in Atlanta 1996; Aboriginal rights in
Sydney 2000; Greece taking its place as a
respected EU member in 2004).
Although after the Tibetan uprisings in March

2008 some Chinese expressed the hope that the
B e i j i n g O l y m p i c s m i g h t p r o m o t e e t h n i c
reconciliation like that between Aborigines and
Whites in Sydney 2000, a closer look would have
r e v e a l e d t h a t i n A u s t r a l i a t h e w o r k o f
reconciliation through the Olympic Games had
begun at least as early as 1996, when the use of
aboriginal symbols in the Sydney segment of the
Atlanta closing ceremony had provoked protest.
APJ | JF 7 | 23 | 4
2
In Beijing, however, the use of ethnic minority
symbols, including Tibetan symbols, was notably
absent in the opening ceremony, which was
especially significant since the use of dancing and
singing minorities to symbolize national unity is
a c o m m o n f i x t u r e i n C h i n e s e n a t i o n a l
celebrations. The restoration of dialogue with the
Dalai Lama and a discussion about whether to
invite him to the opening ceremony only
emerged after the March uprisings, which
suggests that previous to that time no serious
attempt had been made to utilize the Games
toward reconciliation between Tibetans and
Han. Indeed, the National Traditional Games of
Ethnic Minorities of the People’s Republic of
China, which had been one of the showpieces of
the P.R.C.’s ethnic policy since their initiation in
1953, suffered from a lack of attention due to the
focus on the Olympics when the 8th installment
was held in Guangzhou in December 2007. Most

of the opening ceremonies performers were Han
students dressed as minorities and many of the
athletes were Han students at sport institutes
recently recruited to learn “traditional ethnic
sports.”
Another reconciliation that did not take place at a
symbolic level was that between the people and
the Communist Party as represented in the figure
of Chairman Mao. As Geremie Barmé and
Jeffrey Wasserstrom have observed, Chairman
Mao was absent in Zhang Yimou’s opening
ceremony, which skipped from the Ming dynasty
to the late 1970s and gave the spotlight to
Confucius, whom Wasserstrom has called “the
comeback kid” of the Beijing Games. [1] The
Communist Revolution was also generally absent
from Olympic symbolism. This was due to a
decision that traced its roots back to the 1990
Asian Games, China’s first hosting of a major
international sport festival. The cultural
performance in the Asian Games ceremony had
been choreographed by the same national team
of choreographers that had designed the cultural
performances for the previous three Chinese
National Games – starting in 1979 with the first
post-Cultural Revolution performance, which
had the theme “The New Long March.” The
themes and symbols utilized by this team of
choreographers had gradually evolved away
from the political symbols that dominated
ceremonies after 1949 and toward “cultural
symbols.” The 1990 Asian Games had taken
place one year after the Tiananmen Incident,
w h i c h h a d b e e n a d i s a s t e r f o r C h i n a ’ s

international relations and a severe setback for its
plans to reach out to the world through the Asian
Games. (The Asian Games were, nevertheless,
the occasion for the first official cross-straits
exchanges, and Taiwan sent a large official
delegation.)[2] In 1990 it was recognized that
“ethnic cultural” （民族文化）symbols were
more attractive to the outside world in general
and also constituted a shared cultural repertoire
with East Asians and overseas Chinese.[3]
B y t h e t i m e t h e p l a n n i n g f o r t h e B e i j i n g
ceremonies had begun, this strategy for drawing
in international audiences was known as the
“cultural China” （文化中国）strategy. It traced
its roots to multiple international developments,
including the 1980s and 1990s works of Harvard
historian and philosopher Tu Weiming and other
“New Confucianists,” as well as government
policies for promoting the “cultural industry” in
Japan and South Korea in the mid to late 1990s;
the international orientation of the Korean
cultural policies had gained impetus from the
1986 Asian Games and 1988 Olympic Games in
Seoul.[4] “Cultural China” was also expressed in
t h e C h i n e s e g o v e r n m e n t ’ s s u p p o r t f o r
“Confucius Institutes” around the world, and it
was linked to Hu Jintao’s concept of “soft
power.” For the Beijing 2008 Olympics, a key
policy recommendation from the People’s
University concluded, “On this basis, we
cautiously propose that in the construction of
China’s national image, we should hold the line
on ‘cultural China,’ and the concept of ‘cultural
China’ should not only be the core theme in the
dialogue between China and the international

community in Olympic discourse, but also it
APJ | JF 7 | 23 | 4
3
should be added into the long-term strategic plan
for the national image afterwards”[5]. Although
the vast majority of educational and cultural
programs surrounding the Beijing Olympics
targeted the domestic population (see the
discussion of Olympic education below), a debate
about the target audience for the opening and
closing ceremonies was resolved in favor of the
international audience. Film director Zhang
Yimou, the choreographer of the ceremonies, is
not well-regarded inside China, where his work
is seen as pandering to Western tastes with a
superficial and exoticized picture of traditional
Chinese culture. His “Eight Minute Segment” in
the closing ceremony of the Athens Olympics
was so disliked that the bid competition for the
choreography of the 2008 ceremonies was re-
opened. That Zhang was finally re-confirmed in
2005 indicates that the final decision was to
prioritize international tastes over domestic.
Tang Dynasty Symbolism in the Opening
Ceremony. From BOCOG official website
(http://en.beijing2008.cn)
In the end, the only significant violence did not
pit sovereign states against one another but took

place in China’s Tibetan areas. However, this
should not mislead us into thinking that the
Beijing Games did not take place in the shadow
of war – a point that, I believe, was very present
in the minds of the East Asian audience but was
missed by Westerners with shorter and more
spatially distant memories. And it is important
to remember that the Beijing Olympics were the
first Olympics to take place in an East Asian
country that is not host to U.S. military bases.
This was the “present absence” in 2008 in
comparison to Tokyo 1964 and Seoul 1988.
Shimizu Satoshi, Christian Tagsold, and Jilly
Traganou remind us that many of the symbols of
the 1964 Tokyo Olympics established continuity
with pre-war Japanese national symbols.[6]
Japan did not have an official national flag or
anthem in 1964: the hi no maru flag and the kimi
g a y o a n t h e m h a d b e e n p r o s c r i b e d b y t h e
occupation authorities after World War II and
were not officially reinstated as the national flag
and anthem of Japan until 1999, and indeed, they
have been plagued by controversy ever since.
However, the logo of the Tokyo Olympics
consisted of the rising sun over the five Olympic
rings, which was also used in the first of the four
official posters. While designer Kamekura
Yūsaku denied that his design was the hi no
maru, stating that it was meant simply to be a red
sun, he had played an active role in nationalist
representations of Japan in wartime propaganda.
Tokyo Olympic Poster. From IOC official
website (http://www.olympic.org)

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