Hardly the socio-political analyst as others claim qualifications to be, I’ll limit this lead item to my personal remembrances, anecdotes and opinions – the latter deduced from both reasonable belief and speculation.
I’ve chosen to share comments on the personality that is Elder Eusi Kwayana for three reasons: to me he personifies, as does Senior Counsel and Senior Citizen Ashton Chase, one of a duo of political players who lived the dream of what might have been, from our political forties and fifties; secondly, because of a letter in another section of the local print media and written in harsh “tones” by a Sultan Mohammed politically-oriented, which advised the Elder to seek some form of redemption for his past; the third reason is more frivolous – I did not make opportunity to greet Mr Kwayana on his last visit to his homeland a few weeks ago. (I feel he must remember me – for various reasons.)
Personal views of a personality
As a teenaged Pupil Teacher I easily made myself interested in Guyana’s history, politics and political history. (Blame partly my old grandmother for taking me and an old wooden bench to numerous political meetings at Bourda Green and elsewhere beginning in the mid-fifties)
I started teaching in 1961. From 1962 to 1966 any conscious or concerned young Guyanese could not escape or ignore our politics and its politicians. Besides your Jagans and Burnhams, later D’Aguiar, I wondered about personalities such as J. Hubbard, Boysie Ramkarran, “Browsie”, “Vigilance”, RBO Hart, Rudy Luck, W.O.R. Kendall, John Carter, Randolph Cheeks, Ramjohn Holder, so many others. Especially Sidney King out of Demerara’s Buxton.
I read about him and heard him comment infrequently. Two of my Teachers College lecturers Mr Ogle and Mr Agard (?) (1964-1966) were close to the Buxton Sage, Sidney King. I constructed my own profile: King was the school-masterly, perhaps reluctant, politician; quietly erudite but even ascetic whilst being Rosicrucian-like in his vegetarianism and fierce love for and of Africa. (Mind you, as I grew into patriotic and “political” adulthood, I knew not anytime he flaunted his African pride, even as he promoted African heritage.)
So by, say, 1975, I had completed a picture of an austere, slender Buxtonian Teacher-Politician whose language could be both elegant and filled with quiet intellectual venom. Of course, he was also Afro-folkloric with insights into folk-poems, proverbs and traditions. I had to consult him about his work on “Buxton-People-Stop Train” for my own published school version. (His compatriot-villager George Young also assisted, before yet another Buxtonian Historian Hugh “Tommy” Payne told me yet another angle.
Then the ’63-’64 country-wide racial/political riots added to my Sidney King Profile. After he had flip-flopped from original PPP to PNC to Independent, his stature, along with his “politics” found him emerging as the Buxton-based Image of Afro-Guyanese protagonist against Cheddi Jagan and his real or perceived Indian constituencies, themselves under deadly attack and counter-attack from the festival of murderous mayhem. Sultan Mohammed’s critique probably dwells on this “Kwayana” role. The Buxton Sage could metamorphose into a Black People’s symbol – more menacing than sage.
By and after then, I discerned King’s principled, even ideological positions causing him to change and charter alliances. He changed his name Sidney King to Eusi Kwayana which I was told, translates roughly to mean “Black Man of Guyana”. He espoused Guyana-Africa connections – spiritual and cultural – through his ASCRIA – and was later to help found the Third Political Force, the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) which was led by a younger intellectual power-house-turned-politician, Walter Rodney. All that was some of Kwayana’s Guyana up to the early eighties.
Cheddi Jagan on Kwayana
The Sultan letter-writer who lambasted the now aged Kwayana – still blessed with reasonable recall and sharp, shrewd mental acuity – would hardly want to “analyse” Kwayana’s activist role against the Burnham-Green-Reid-Hoyte regimes. But that would remain an inconvenient truth for the PPP-friendly correspondent to contemplate.
Rather, I suspect that the Sultan would more appreciate Dr Jagan’s accounts of Kwayana’s roles in the political turbulence of the fifties and the aftermath of that period. I’ll quote briefly a few excerpts from Cheddi’s biography. These are pretty factual and verifiable. Analyses are left to others.
1) “One of my protégés, school-teacher Sydney King of Buxton was of great help to me in the villages.” This was a reference to his first election victory in 1947.
2) “At the Congress (as Burnham had been manoeuvring to wrest the leadership of the 1953 victorious PPP) Sidney King made an impassioned speech: “This is a motion of No Confidence in our Leader… why such a motion at this time”.
3) “King refused to run on the PPP ticket (for the 1957 Elections). After King announced his decision to run as an Independent Balram Singh Rai was substituted…”
4) “Burnham jumped into the breach in support of King. This brought King into open alliance with Burnham, something we did not anticipate, since King had always been an extreme Leftist and an inveterate critic of Burnham. Soon King was making speeches bordering on racism…”
Kwayana later left the PNC, after Burnham declared he would support the colony’s bid for Independence, regardless of the government in office. He was later to rejoin and serve that Party, once heading the Guyana Marketing Corporation.
I realize now that a few paragraphs can do no justice to the life of a man who was one of our first (PPP) ministers; who wrote the Battle Songs for the PPP, the PNC, the WPA; who once called for partition – separate development – of this land; who had supported restrictions on wheat flour even before Burnham and who chose to go live in the United States, for reasons best known to himself.
Today’s political Guyana must pause deliberately before judging Elder Kwayana’s contribution to his country. He wrote that “there is no one guilty race” here. His WPA was shrewd enough to abandon electoral politics. I wonder: what does he think of the AFC?
Big Brothers? Don and Glenn?
By “Don” I mean the Donald Ramotar Administration. The Closed Circuit TV countrywide cameras are acceptable features of modern society. How the technology is utilized is another matter. The government and Dr Luncheon behave like Orwell’s Big Brother, watching but saying nothing. What does the “spy agency” in Castellani Compound do?
Now there are valid fears that the Revenue Authority (GRA) can be used as a weapon against tax-payers unliked by the government. If true, who have been victims? For how long?
But I manage a smile over this scenario: Guilty, corrupt folks aligned to the administration must be very scared and uneasy thinking that Mr Glenn and his Kaieteur News could “invade” the privacy of their e-mails, BBM’s and Whats-Apps. Ho-ho-ho!
Ponder…
*1) Poor Guyanese me! American accents invite me to concerts featuring Jamaicans at the Stadium. And telling me to prepare for Halloween. So I’m planning to take Obeah and Ole Higue to Ohio!
*2) Lennox is willing to bet: that Guyanese are with the murderous ISIS for the dollars. Bound to be?
Til next week!
(Comments? allanafenty@yahoo.com)
