Last April, British Guiana, the Kansas-sized land of jungle, mountains and coastal sugar lands that is Britain's only colony on the South American continent, held its first popular elections under a newly granted constitution—and returned the first openly pro-Communist government ever to hold office in the British Empire. Last week, after six months of mounting frustration over the colony's Red-created unrest and subversive intrigues, Britain suspended the constitution and sent in troops to guarantee public safety. Said Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton: "Her Majesty's government is not willing to allow a Communist state to be organized within the British Commonwealth."
Chicago Schooling. Habitually less concerned than Americans about the menace of international Communism, the British had hoped by the example of good manners and management to cool off the hothead East Indian and Negro leaders elected in backward Guiana. But the crown-appointed governor, Sir Alfred Savage, soon found that the Reds of the victorious People's Progressive Party, holding 18 of 24 seats in the legislature, were too hot to handle. Their Premier was a 33-year-old East Indian dentist named Cheddi Jagan (rhymes with pagan), a rapid-fire orator in both English and Creolise (an abused English spoken in the colony). But the real brains of the Communist movement was his blonde, Chicago-born wife, Janet Rosenberg Jagan, 32.
Alone among Guiana's "Progressives," Janet Jagan, graduate of the U.S. Young Communist League, was trained in international Communism (although she says she now has no Communist Party connections). Daughter of a prosperous plumbing contractor who lived in Chicago and Detroit, she had finished 3½ years of college (Michigan State, Wayne, Detroit), and was a student nurse at Chicago's Cook County Hospital when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student at Northwestern in 1942. Ditching five other suitors, she married Cheddi, converted him to Marxism, helped him set up practice in British Guiana's capital of Georgetown in 1943.
Rumania Refresher. Starting the colony's first women's political group, stumping through the canebrakes to demand better housing for low-paid East Indian sugar workers, slim, serious Janet Jagan soon became the most talked-about woman in British Guiana. The waiting room of the Jagans' dental office became the meeting place of the discontented, and especially of those who sought independence for the colony. In 1947, after Jagan won a seat in the legislature, the Jagans sparked a bitter sugar strike in which five workers were killed. Founding the Progressive Party, Janet became secretary general and went from village to village making speeches and organizing study and propaganda cells. In 1951, her husband traveled to East Berlin. This year, after their April electoral sweep, Janet left her four-year-old son Joe with her husband and went first to Denmark to address the Copenhagen congress of the Communist-run Women's International Democratic Federation, then on to Rumania.