A Proxy Africa: Guyana, African Americans, and the Radical 1970s - Book Event w/ author Russell Rickford

A Proxy Africa - how Guyana became the epicenter of anticolonial pan-African movements

Nestled between Brazil, Venezuela, and Suriname, Guyana is the third-smallest sovereign state in mainland South America, and one of its youngest. Originally a Dutch colony, Guyana remained under British rule from the late eighteenth century until gaining independence in 1966 and becoming a republic in 1970. Apart from the 1978 mass murder-suicide of cult leader Jim Jones’s followers in Jonestown, Guyana has been mostly peripheral to mainstream geopolitics. Yet for a generation of Black revolutionaries from around the world, Guyana was a vibrant site of pan-African activism. The country was particularly attractive to veterans of the US civil rights movement who sought alternative places to construct flourishing postcolonial, pan-African nation-states.

In this first comprehensive history of Guyana’s core role in anticolonial, Black internationalist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, historian Russell Rickford traces the history of African Americans…