The contributions of Kwayana

Nov 07, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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A friend asked me why I spend so much time responding to Mr Eusi Kwayana. I told him I was disheartened that the question could even be asked. Mr. Kwayana is pretty much the inaugural figure that confronted our racial/ethnic conundrum in the cusp of our modern era, apart from the anthropologists who debated the question in academic tomes.
Because he was intimately involved on the ground as our polyglot society was conscripted into the post-WWII politics of decolonisation, he played a decisive role in shaping the contours of what was to be dubbed our “ethnic” politics. Any effort to transcend those politics cannot avoid Mr Kwayana. It is to our good fortune that he is still with us and willing to engage in dialogue.
Mr. Kwayana (then Mr Sidney King) campaigned on behalf of Dr Cheddi Jagan in 1947 even though there was an African candidate in the four-man race for the Central Demerara Constituency. A founding member of the PPP, after its victory in 1953, he was a Minister in the ensuing short-lived government. In Mr Burnham’s manoeuvres to capture the leadership of the PPP – up to and including the split in 1955 – Mr Kwayana consistently, and pivotally, backed Dr Jagan. He left the PPP by 1957 only after he concluded that Dr Jagan was pandering to Indians on a number of issues, to the detriment of the security of Africans.
He was a founding member of the PNC in 1958, soon becoming its General Secretary and (as crucially) the editor of its organ, New Nation. He played a leading role in defining the 1957-1964 PPP government as a “Coolie-Rice” government, dedicated to furthering the interest of only Indians thus strategically solidifying the rural African with Burnham’s urban base. He was expelled from the PNC after he excoriated Mr Burnham as betraying Africans when he (Burnham) declared that he would support Independence for Guyana under a PPP government if the latter won the 1961 elections.
He launched the African Society for Racial Equality (ASRE) in 1961, promoting a dual premiership between Burnham and Jagan or as a last resort, partition. A man of impeccable probity, he was the envoy of PM Burnham to Africa (9 nations) between 1964-65, to orient them on the political situation in Guyana.
In 1964 he launched African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA). Made Chairman of the Guyana Marketing Corporation 1967-1971, he worked with the government to give the Co-operative concept an institutional form. He broke with the PNC once again in 1973, declaring that Burnham had sold out to Indian and Portuguese bourgeoisie elements. Finally, he was a co-founder of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in 1974 and represented them in Parliament between 1985-1990. During the next twenty years he has been a most prolific commentator on our political affairs.
Of recent I have been commenting on Mr Kwayana’s activities – especially his speech acts –from 1958-68, a period in which I believe the form of the ethnic politics, which is so debilitating in the present, was established. I am not particularly interested at this time as to whether he was “right” or “wrong” during that period; rather I believe his re-release of one text from 1962 (“Next Witness”) in 1999 to buttress the case he makes in “No Guilty Race” to be quite infelicitous in the context of our present politics.
What was the move that Mr Kwayana was making in 1999? He claimed that aspects of the Gift Report on the Jan 12, 1998 Ethnic Riots in Georgetown, particularly my “Aetiology”, to be “a blatant public attempt to invent a ‘guilty race’ in Guyana” – namely Africans. He was willing to wage “jihad” against this effort, he declared. But in 1999 he was unleashing a 1962 text written, as he admitted, “when I had lost confidence in the Indian leadership. I blamed the supporters (Indians) for supporting injustice on racial grounds.”
It was not surprising that the “Next Witness” of 1962 only enumerated a litany of sins Indians had purportedly committed against Africans before and after the 1961 elections – including the first “political murder”. Mr Kwayana had most stridently denounced Jagan – and now even Mr Burnham – of selling out Africans down the river. His vindicationist text had to (selectively) reflect his extant fears. Perfidious Albion was still ruling and a people that had been enslaved and never tasted true freedom could be sacrificed at the altar of expediency.
But by 1999, the problem space had changed from the early sixties. By defining the conditions that had (and have in the present) to be overcome as one of degradation and dehumanization of Africans, the stimulated longing once again had to be one of overcoming and redemption, and of revolution. Remember the rhetoric of the “talk show hosts” after 1999? (To be continued)

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