The Sage of Buxton and the PNC’s Apology

Jun 24, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

Mr Eusi Kwayana is a remarkable Guyanese. I used to refer to him as “Elder Kwayana” out of respect – until he took offence.
He first came to my consciousness in the early sixties in the newspapers.
As a country boy on a sugar estate, we didn’t buy newspapers.
I would hang around the ‘barber tent’ that was set up on Sundays in front of the village and sneak a read when the adults were finished.
The enduring image I have from that era is of him sitting on a chair (or stool?) in front of a government building fasting or protesting for ‘his’ people.
He had a shawl or cover over his legs. As one gets older there is the tendency to reify and even embellish old images: one of these days I have to hit the archives to find out if the image is real.
But what is real for me is his reputation during the ethnic riots of the sixties as the ‘warlord of Buxton”, who was more ‘hardline’ than Burnham. More recently, he explained he was actually the ‘defender’ of Buxton.
I met Mr Kwayana in the flesh finally in the early eighties in New York when he addressed a Guyanese political pressure group of which I was a member.
I remember being taken aback by his soft voice along with his modest and almost self-effacing demeanour. This clashed with the mental picture I had of him from childhood.
On my return to Guyana from 1988, I became a frequent visitor to Rodney House and Mr Kwayana was unfailingly accessible and helpful.
Even though during the 1992 elections I took what Dr Clive Thomas called a “PPP line” which clashed with the WPA’s, when we were both selected to be on the Race Relations Board during 1994-95, Mr Kwayana retained his characteristic equanimity towards me.
In fact during that time, I found we had a great deal in common on the approach towards better ‘race relations’ in Guyana.
The Board fell apart because the PNC objected to the appointment of Bishop Randolph George as Chairman.
Mr Kwayana was of the view that Dr. Jagan and the PPP should allow the Board to function even in the face of PNC’s disapproval.
On a personal note, I recollect that Mr Kwayana suggested that I should take the six-month qualification exam at Hugh Wooding to extend my New York attorney status so that I could hand my shingle in Guyana. He was, and remains, the only politician to make a suggestion that would ‘improve my access” to the local movers and shakers – as he put it.
He was that kind of person, always personally kind and considerate.
In the public sphere, I have had occasion to differ with Mr Kwayana – strenuously on occasions – but this has never dimmed my respect for what I once called “his fidelity to his cause.” Recently Mr Kwayana raised quite a few eyebrows – including mine – when, in the penumbra of the anniversary of the assassination of Dr Walter Rodney he responded to the PNC’s call for ‘a more inclusive political culture”.
He dourly predicted that PM Sam Hinds would be responding with a call for the PNC to ‘apologise”.
Mr Kwayana then made a statement – which he vouched was his and his alone: “I would only state that the PNC in 1992 conceded a fair election and a fair count and paid the political price. That was more than a verbal apology.” I have spent the past few weeks intermittently reflecting on Mr Kwayana’s amazing absolution to the PNC. What troubled me was the rationale that was transmuted into an ‘apology’: specifically the notion of the ‘political price’.
The PNC paid a ‘political price’ when it observed the democratic norms of ‘one-man, one vote’?
What is the currency by which this price was paid?
To forego remaining illegally in office as advised at the time by Hamilton Green?
But that counterfeit political currency had been rejected by the US – the PNC’s sponsor for the previous (in) famous 28 years.
The Russian Bear had been defanged and Jagan was not such a bugbear any longer. Carter had told Hoyte in no uncertain terms the PNC cheque had bounced.
I am interested in Mr Kwayana’s reasoning in granting absolution to the PNC. Over the past five years or so, I had been pushing the notion that for Guyana’s politics to regain an even keel, the PNC had to be treated as a ‘normal’ party and not as some sort of pariah.
For this reason I argued against it going along the ‘street protest path’ and welcomed the formation of APNU. I had encouraged the AFC to join in APNU in furtherance of that process of ‘normalisation”.
But, like Raphael Trotman, I’d always assumed the PNC had to first apologise to the Guyanese people. Do we really have to count the ways as to why?

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The Sage of Buxton and the PNC’s Apology

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