Eusi Kwayana: Long journey back into Sydney King

Jul 25, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I write this assessment here with utter confusion in my mind. I honestly don’t know where to start. There are times when people you admire become so foolishly strange that you are trapped in bewilderment.
Here are the words of Eusi Kwayana in defense of the depraved, carcinogenic, Mephistophelean, Faustian, debauched, ghoulish defrauding of the Guyanese people of their right to vote for leaders of their choice in 2020: “Many may wonder at the USA’s high activism in our affairs in the face of a global pandemic of the present scale. However, it is of some relief to some sectors in the US Empire, to find diversion in the affairs of a mini-state when faced at home with a unique uprising of a multi-racial nature in resentment of present day lynching.”
They say in life that respect comes out of self-respect. Its meaning is simple – if you do not respect yourself, why should others respect you. In writing, those words quoted above that came from Kwayana’s pen, he has humiliated himself thus it gives his critics latitude to use trenchant adjectives to describe his distortions and open bias.
It is pathetic nonsense to say that the US has selected Guyana to interfere in its internal affairs so as to deflect the internal, domestic pressure the US government is facing from nation-wide protest. Come on Kwayana, you cannot have degenerated so badly. Why American foreign policy-makers would choose of all countries, a land that most Americans do not know about or care about and could not be bothered with what the US government says about it?
The essential polemical point of this column is that, at 96 years of age, Kwayana has embraced a desire to return to what he was when he was Sydney King. His journey back to being King is completed. He has atavistically returned to the racially charged demagoguery of the sixties in which subliminal violent advocacy was part of his vocabulary before he travelled on the road to Damascus.
Against this analytically judgment, I say with pellucid energy and unambiguous forcefulness, Kwayana’s historical writings must (I emphasize the word, must) be questioned. Kwayana may have passed on to the generations born after the sixties, a mountain of subjective, biased and racially charged pronouncements that we need to cleanse. His legacy is hanging by a thread. Let’s see if we can cite more of his thoughts on the 2020 election rigging to see if in fact, he has deceived these generations. Here is him again; “As is known, I have refrained from making pronouncements on a situation I could know only by hearsay and also through reports of persons with a political bias one way or the other.”
This man truly disrespects himself. He wrote those words more than four months after the election rigging denounced by persons with absolutely no connections to the PPP and PNC, some of whom are international figures. The list includes a former president of Liberia and many members of the Black Caucus of the US House of Representatives. I am accusing Kwayana of being selective. This is a perspective that he has no doubt saturated his writing with the past 70 years. But wait there is more to come.
He asserted; “I have noted that Prime Minister Gonsalves, like many of the persons and agencies he has cited, has been speaking with finality on a process that was at that time before Guyana’s courts of law.” So how is it this gentleman knows what emanated from Gonzales, knows the US is interfering in Guyana’s affairs, but doesn’t know what the past president of Liberia and members of the Black Caucus said about the elections?
How is it that this gentleman doesn’t know that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Professor Hilary Beckles, who heads the Caribbean Reparations Commission, has made a pronouncement on the 2020 elections in Guyana in which he has called on the APNU+AFC to accept the results which showed it lost.
Here is Kwayana once more; “I only wish to warn, as I have done since the 1960s…here in Guyana, in the tissues of every general election are the fibres of communal struggle resulting from conscious designs of the colonial occupation.” Can any revisionist Guyanese historian tell us what Kwayana left out when he made this observation? Here is the answer. The roles he played in picking up from where the colonials left off in preaching race politics thus expanding “the fibres of communal struggle” as he is currently doing. As Kwayana winds down the age, the soul has finally completed its long journey – Sydney King is reborn.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)