The past decade has witnessed the publication of groundbreaking scholarship on Black internationalism and Pan-Africanism beyond the effervescence of the 1960s. Yet even in this company, Russell Rickford’s superb study of encounters between African American radicals and Guyana in the 1970s stands out as an example of deft analysis and compelling narrative. At the heart of the book is Black left-wing internationalism during what Rickford calls “the radical 1970s,” as African American activists, intellectuals, and cultural workers engaged politically with the diaspora in large numbers—belying narratives of radicalism in decline after the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Indeed, as Rickford shows, US Black radical horizons during the 1970s were global in part because the hard limits on freedom under American racial capitalism and white supremacy had become so apparent. Some looked to Africa, particularly Tanzania after the 1966 coup that ousted Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, as a terrain of racial belonging and egalitarian possibility—and to Guyana, imagined by many Pan-Africanists as an anglophone “African proxy” in the Western Hemisphere.

Engagingly written, this is a captivating and erudite exploration of a largely forgotten epoch of US Black engagement with Guyana. As Rickord shows, the South American nation intrigued with a wide range of African American radicals, some of whom became expatriates and took jobs with Guyana’s government. A few became political asylees from legal trouble or persecution stateside. The cast of protagonists examined in the book is long, and while luminaries such as Stokley Carmichael appear, Rickford’s primary focus is on lesser-known figures who embodied the grassroots nature of 1970s US Pan-Africanism. These include itinerant New York writer William Worthy, Georgia-born teacher Tchaiko Kwayana, Harlem activist Mae Mallory, artists Tom and Muriel Feelings, activist and Malcolm X associate Herman Ferguson, dancer Lavinia Williams, self-styled religious figure Rabbi David Washington (also known as David Hill), and others who emigrated to Guyana and helped shape African American perceptions of the nation through civilian diplomacy.

The Guyana that these internationalists and radical sojourners encountered, Rickford shows, often challenged neat narratives. Geographically South American but culturally and historically Caribbean and composed primarily of a South Asian-descended majority and an African-descended minority, the former British colony’s trajectory after its 1966 independence was shaped by the diverging visions of its two leading anticolonial figures: Cheddi Jagan, a Marxist-Leninist of South Asian descent whom the African American Old Left of previous decades had traditionally supported as Guyana’s most authentic revolutionary, and Forbes Burnham, a Black nationalist of African descent who was favored by younger US Pan-Africanists in the 1970s. Bridging these ideological factions at times, but also charting a distinctly independent course, was Eusi Kwayana, a venerated Afro-Guyanese radical intellectual and Pan-African community organizer.

Jagan, Burnham, and Kwayana all play central roles in the book. Yet it was Burnham, Rickford shows, who most skillfully cultivated African American support after he became prime minister. For a time, Burnham seemed to embody Guyana’s promise as a Black-led, postcolonial stronghold that was building “cooperative socialism” while challenging the trappings of antiblackness and Eurocentrism. To critics, however, Burnham was an opportunist and a CIA stooge, part of a global moderate left that Washington supported to undermine the threat of communism, embodied in Guyana by the iconic Jagan, whom US intelligence officials perceived as far more menacing to US global designs than Black nationalism alone. By the end of the decade, Burnham was widely viewed as an imposter who had wrapped himself in a veneer of socialist rhetoric while eschewing the class-based politics that would have engendered broad redistribution. Brutally repressing his opposition, Burnham fanned the flames of racial animosity between Guyanese of African and South Asian descent. Guyana’s contradictions under Burnham reached a climax with the assassination of acclaimed Black Marxist historian Walter Rodney, a vocal Burnham critic and Kwayana ally. By the end of the decade, Guyana’s image as an outpost of Third Worldism had faded. The 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown of some eight hundred religious devotees, most of them African Americans who had emigrated to the remote settlement, would scar Guyana’s image for generations. Rickford’s book is a fascinating and nuanced examination of these dynamics, a rare work that will hopefully become a classic reference in its field.