British Guiana: Decolonisation, Cold War and the Struggle for Self-Rule, 1961-1963
While the Kennedy administration saw British Guiana as an important aspect of their regional Cold War strategy, British Guiana had become little more than a politically obstinate and economically draining burden for Great Britain by the early 1960s.
As Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys claimed in 1961: “the sooner we get these people out of our hair the better.” Historians have interpreted such comments as evidence that the primary objective of Great Britain by 1961 was to grant the colony independence at the earliest possible date.
Although it is certainly true that British officials were eager to withdraw from British Guiana as soon as possible, this interpretation overlooks the importance that British officials placed on ensuring that a government “capable of maintaining stability” was in power in the colony before it was granted independence.
Indeed, following the catastrophic and devastating European withdrawals from Africa after the Second World War, the international community had become increasingly concerned about the humanitarian consequences of decolonisation.In an effort to preserve a degree of national pride, therefore, British officials were determined to disassemble their empire in “a dignified manner,” thereby achieving “a stable conclusion” to their “colonial legacy,” even in a relatively insignificant territory like British Guiana.
British officials understood first hand that granting independence to a colony prematurely could result in violence as memories of the ethnic warfare that followed the partition of India, which had left millions dead, still weighed heavily on the conscience of British administrators. Thus, Great Britain would only entertain withdrawing from British Guiana when the country was able to maintain “a stable self-government.”
Here is a piece of history . I can post the whole document ,some here will think it's too old.