Melanie and Ulele Burnham, the daughters of the late Viola Burnham and President Forbes Burnham grew up in difficult times for Guyana. And while they had a privileged upbringing it was at times hard for them. It was a mother’s love and patience which helped them through.

Melanie, the older daughter, is married and has lived in Florida for the past nine years. She said that though her mother was a public figure, she was first and foremost a mother. When her parents got married back in the sixties, her mother stopped working out of the home to raise them, primarily, because their father was “so active in politics and away a lot of the time. They felt one of them needed to be at home.”

While their father was not actively involved in their lives given his other commitments, “it was Mommy who was the main force, particularly, when we were younger,” Melanie said.

Ulele, who is two years younger than Melanie and ten years older than her brother Kamana, does not entirely agree with Melanie that their mother did not work out of the home though she had left teaching. “She hadn’t an official role but she had always been active in politics and women’s rights.” She added that Mrs Burnham got more involved later on in the roles for which she became known.

When Ulele was about four years old, Mrs Burnham was involved in the Dynamic Youth Corps, a rice-farming group at Belfield where the Burnhams had a farm.

She recalls her mother taking them along to her work. As a child at Belfield she remembers “being on top of a combine harvester. We would slide down the chute where the paddy would come through. That had to do with her and not my father... We used to sew up rice bags. She taught us all that stuff. I must have been four or five when it started. In a way she integrated her mothering into these other activities that she did... In the youth co-op, for example, we met a lot of young people, boys in particular in the neighbourhood who became involved in these weekend projects.”

She said that she recognised a lot of the women, who greeted them when they returned with their mother’s ashes, from the days of the WRSM, now the National Congress of Women. They were involved in the appropriate technology projects, making coal pots, tie-dying among other things. These activities became a critical part of the girls’ childhood. They attended WRSM meetings with their mother, which involved moving from one meeting place to another so they were not left at home on holidays and at weekends. “It is just that we may not have always wanted to do what we were required to do,” Ulele said. The girls also had their own kitchen gardens which their father ensured they cared for.

Home life
Dinner was probably the most important time of the day for the family. Everyone rushed off in the mornings. Sometimes their paths would cross during the day, but dinner was always a family affair. Their father would come home every night for dinner even if he had to return to work. Because there would be guests at dinner, at times they would take part in discussions and were sometimes sent away based on the discussion, but because of the mixed company they “learnt about the world at dinner.”

School was never an option. They were “vigorously” encouraged to do well at school. The activities their mother got them involved in were not to the detriment of school. They both attended St Margaret’s Primary and the Bishops’ High School.

Primary school was not always a pleasant affair for the girls. Melanie said that when parents are public figures there is some natural scrutiny. As children of a prime minister and subsequently president, they had bodyguards. There were strict rules as to where they could and could not go and when. “As a matter of fact we didn’t like it. We didn’t enjoy having our lives pretty structured in a way,” Melanie said.

Ulele described it as a peculiar situation. “For example, school friends had sleepovers. We couldn’t, for security reasons, stay out of the house. Those were things that would annoy a child.”

However, Melanie said that their mother would speak to them about the issue of security and would compensate by allowing them to have sleepovers — sometimes eight to ten children — at their Belfield home.

Bomb scares
As a child in the 70s and early 80s, Ulele recalled the student protests when the late historian Walter Rodney had become quite popular. “It reverberated for us in school. I remember people, who are now friends of mine, who would call us names because of the position our father held. There was this guy who would call us names. There would be camps. There would be people who would associate with me and people who would associate with him. It all had to do with political issues. I didn’t have any politics in me. It was based on Daddy’s politics. It was difficult for me as a child having to cope with people who thought they could visit the sins of my father on me. That was particularly unpleasant.”

She said there was a period when “we had bomb scares, threats on our lives... this started at St Margaret’s so there were armed guards at the school. It never materialised and those bits were difficult.”

Probably because of that situation at school, Melanie said she “didn’t like being left alone at school. I remember having the feeling that they would never come back for me. I don’t know where that fear came from. Not that we did not enjoy going to school.”

How was this dealt with? One day, Ulele said she was very upset because “this guy had been teasing me and calling me names.” Her mother called one or two parents and asked them to speak to their children. She told them that whatever objections they had about what their father was doing politically, was not the girls’ fault and their children ought not to make her children’s lives unpleasant.

Speaking of their mother as a negotiator, Ulele said that Melanie, being the bigger sister was “the bully” when they were children, but their mother always was around to “negotiate”. She could always rely on her mother to sort out their grouse, but “fairness” was Mrs Burnham’s watchword so if Ulele had done something wrong it meant that she, too, had to be corrected. Bullying was out of the question when Ulele became older and was able to fend for herself.

Love for children
The girls remember Mrs Burnham as a woman who simply loved children. Ulele said she was ten years old and her mother, Mrs Burnham, then 50, when she told them that they were “going to have a little brother.” Immediately she asked, “Aren’t you too, old?” Her mother then explained that she was too old to bear a child but not too old to be a mother. Her little brother, Kamana, actually came from Aishalton, brought to the family by Sister Asumpta Tang. They were “very excited. We were two sisters and wanted a brother.” Their brother’s upbringing, Melanie said, was no different from what they experienced.

Because of her concern for children, Mrs Burnham until recently gave extra lessons to children writing the Secondary Schools Entrance Examinations; she baby-sat for friends of hers during her sixties and even in her seventies.

In their teens, the girls recalled asking her why she had children and her reply was simple. She said she thought she “would be good at it [mothering].”

The girls could never remember their mother losing her temper. She would sit down and talk about the issues. “We wouldn’t necessarily agree. Don’t get me wrong, but it was never a situation where anyone would feel antagonistic or anything like that,” Melanie said.

Melanie said that in the 80s when she went away to the University of the West Indies at 18, their relationship evolved “into something more than mother and daughter. As an adult she was a person I could say anything to. We hadn’t secrets. I could tell my mother anything to the extent that she could listen and advise from a distance. I could pick up the phone. Ulele, more often than me, called her and explained the situation.”

Ulele said her relationship with her mother was a bit different. “She was older than my friends’ mothers. She was 39 years when she got me,” she said adding that her mother “was a very proper woman believing in decorum… how young women should carry themselves, added with that she had to empower women as well.”

She said “we would often run up against each other about these things because I was much more liberal. I was much less inclined to believe that we were required to behave in certain ways. Nevertheless, she respected my opinion. Often I would say, `Mommy you wouldn’t know about that because you’re too old’. But she was wise. As much as I found her old-fashioned when I sat and talked with her... she had very important advice to give.”

Family-oriented
Mrs Burnham, the girls said, was family-oriented. Their mother ensured that they knew all their relatives on her side of the family. During the August holidays the girls would visit their cousins, aunts and uncles overseas. Her only brother who resides in Guyana, Herbie Harper, would have breakfast with her at her farm over the past 15 years.

During this current period of bereavement, Ulele said that their extended family went beyond the boundaries to help. When Mrs Burnham was ill and in the US for four months, a niece or nephew was always there to help look after her. Many of them called her their `second mother’. She was either Mom Vi or `Auntie Vi’.

Politics
Asked about following in the political footsteps of their parents, Melanie is adamant “that kind of lifestyle I don’t like...” Working in finance and accounting in the USA, she said that she has “absolutely no desire” to enter politics. The girls have avoided the political limelight by not living in Guyana, but Melanie said that once you put yourself in politics, then you open your life up to that kind of censure or scrutiny.

Ulele said that what she saw while living in the political limelight she does not “want to visit that on my children... That is why I have shied away from becoming involved in Guyana’s politics... so far.”

Cautioning her sister to “never say never,” Ulele agreed that scrutiny is something she does not want “but at the same time I’m very conscious of the fact that Guyana needs people like me, like us, who have been educated... who could contribute to its development. So that for me there is a constant battle, a tension between wanting to become politically active but on the other hand... Well yes... we’ll see.”

Now a lawyer, like her father was, and working in London, Ulele said that she was always “interested in politics.”My work as a lawyer is work of a political, with a small `p’ nature.” She works in a chamber that specializes in human rights, civil liberties and the underprivileged. She acts for clients with mental health difficulties, persons racially or sexually discriminated against in the work place and in society at large. “So I have maintained my political interests in terms of the work that I do and I am interested in politics,” she said.

“It was instructive being the daughter of a politically active person. I was politicized from a very young age. I had a political consciousness from very young, which has led me to the job I now do. I hadn’t intended to do law at first and then I found my way through it. My Dad was a lawyer and I think there is always a connection... an issue of children following in their parents footsteps.”