This woman has made a great contribution to African consciousness

Jun 09, 2017 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Tchaiko Kwayana had a subtle chiding of Kenya’s Tom Mboya for referring to African Americans as “cousins.” Mboya in his “Challenges of Nationhood,” a collection of essays and speeches, approached African American cultural nationalism with some reasonable critiques but also a tone of smug contempt. Tchaiko reminded that African Americans were “brothers” not “cousins,” and anticipated the contemporary concern that some Africans, more recently from the continent, don’t like the descendants of the enslaved or find them inauthentic. She contested nobody could disinherit Black people from the African heritage if they searched for it, and worked hard to claim and affirm it. It was not a given, as Tchaiko showed, that Africans on the continent had overcome their own internalized racism and colonialism.
“Black Pride” was published in Toni Cade Bambara’s edited volume The Black Woman (1970) that included contributions from Patricia Robinson, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, and Grace Lee Boggs. What did Tchaiko have to say that made this a classic of Black political thought?
“Black Pride” explored how in the period of 1968-1970, where “Black revolution” was widely discussed, the search for African identities became a fashion, co-opted by corporate media and consumer culture. “African” fashion shows were adapted to Western conceptions of gender and sexuality. It wasn’t simply “black” culture was being appropriated by white chauvinists. African Americans were carelessly engaging African symbolism and substance as well. Deeper color complexes within the community, as represented by blow out Afros and skin bleaching, Tchaiko explained, was covering up an inability to deal with the presence within the black community of anti-black racism.
Tchaiko critiqued what we now know as Afrocentric interpretations of history for its monumentalism and high modernism, its search for Egyptian pyramids to approximate Western skyscrapers in technology and architecture, and Mali’s Timbuktu to prove that Africans could write. Affirming Blacks were “the first” or “equal to” Western civilization’s standards and achievements sometimes fell short of unveiling the autonomous thought of the African heritage.
African American Islam, while encouraging a culture of modesty and discipline Tchaiko could support, was obscuring deeper questions about Islam’s role in facilitating racism and slavery on the African continent. While African American’s anti-racist initiative to switch from unquestioned loyalty to Christianity (as a result of its silences on slavery) to openness to Islam was a sign of critical thinking, not enough questions about “monotheism” as Westerners had assimilated it was happening.
Tchaiko argued that besides the study of an African language, blacks would better relate to Africa if they did not visit as tourists in air conditional hotels, and related not to the African urban but rural agrarian life found also in the American South. Farming, herding chickens and cattle, shucking peanuts; being aware of Yoruba cosmologies, keeping in mind that most Africans were peasants who lived by oral history (though pre-colonial writing systems were present and she would disseminate information about these) would bring Blacks closer to the African heritage.
She also explained that traveling in Latin America with the proper mindset could illuminate African cultural retentions just as well as visiting West Africa. Her discussions of her visit with the Djuka of Suriname, a Maroon community hostile to the ways of assimilated middle classes, revealed to Tchaiko their collective memory of African cosmologies and how this informed their sense of independence, defending their own family forms, but also their own sense they were part of an African world.
In her 1968 sojourn to South America she also met Abdas Do Nascimento in Brazil. His T.E.N., the black experimental theatre group, was teaching against anti-black racism within Brazil’s national culture, revealing how colonial legacies, in this case the Portuguese, could promote genocidal thoughts as internalized racism.
Tchaiko brought her independent initiative, in search of African survivals and rejecting white supremacist epistemic burdens to Guyana in 1968, where she met her future husband of 46 years, the Pan African and independent socialist Eusi Kwayana, now 92 years old.
Tchaiko Kwayana with her essay on black pride in many ways wrote her husband into African Diaspora History and African World History. Eusi, then Sidney King, had been a minister in the government and co-leader of the Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was a political prisoner when Anglo-American imperialism overthrew their democratically elected government in 1953-1954. Had this not occurred the Cuban Revolution would not have been the first socialist government in the region.
In the late 1950s to the early 1960s, King transitioned from a critical supporter of Jagan, to a critical supporter of Forbes Burnham’s People’s National Congress (PNC). King advised Burnham’s PNC in various ways through official independence for Guyana in 1966. King gave Burnham the idea of a cooperative republic or cooperative socialism as the philosophical foundation for the post-independence government. From 1968-1971, when Ann Cook first met Sidney King, he had built an organization called ASCRIA (African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa). In between her travels, in this same period as Ann F. Cook, she was the director of SEEK at City College in Harlem, a program for those who were said to be disadvantaged or underprivileged. Out of these students came the rebellions for Black Studies and open admissions. It was a time when City College, though a campus in Harlem, was still overwhelmingly white.
ASCRIA was first a cultural front around the PNC government, teaching a cultural revolution, very similar to Tchaiko’s thoughts on “black pride.” The contradictions of Black Nationalism and pseudo-socialism of Burnham’s regime unfolded from 1971-1975. Wildcat strikes of landless sugar workers, bauxite workers, and independent cooperatives were coordinated by or supported by ASCRIA in a manner that presented African (and Indian) labor’s self-emancipation as the embodiment of national liberation against Burnham’s increasing populist authoritarian regime. ASCRIA struggled, and was successful, to discard the idea that black power was people of color holding the same elite posts and coveted positions as whites.
Great international controversy was fomented as to the split between Eusi Kwayana and Forbes Burnham in 1973-1974. This was a result of Tchaiko Kwayana being instrumental in linking up Guyana with the Black Power movement that was increasingly turning toward Pan Africanism in the early 1970s and critiques of post-civil rights, post-colonial independence regimes.
Matthew Quest

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