Eusi Kwayana: A Political Biography
By David Hinds
It is difficult to properly analyze modern Guyanese politics without taking into consideration Eusi Kwayana’s wide-ranging contributions. His political career spanned eight decades, mirroring the period generally regarded as the modern era of Guyanese and Caribbean politics. This article pays tribute to Kwayana by offering an overview of his political life and work.
Eusi Kwayana, formerly Sydney King, was born in 1925 and became involved in Guyana’s national politics in 1947. He has been described as the “Sage of Buxton,” “Renaissance Man,” and “Guyana’s Gandhi,” among other distinctions. His public life was multifaceted: political activist, educator, writer, journalist, dramatist, folklorist, and historian. Yet it is as a political activist that he made his most significant contribution and became best known to Guyanese. He emerged as one of Guyana’s most distinguished political leaders, although he was also among its most controversial and misunderstood public figures.
Kwayana began his political life in village politics in Buxton, where he co-founded the Buxton Ratepayers Association. He later served as chairman of the Buxton-Friendship Village Council.
He entered the national political arena in 1947 as a supporter of Cheddi Jagan during Jagan’s successful campaign for a seat in the Legislative Council. He soon joined the Political Affairs Committee (PAC), a small left-wing organization that preceded the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), the country’s first mass-based political party.
Kwayana served as Assistant General Secretary of the PPP. After winning his parliamentary seat, he became Minister of Works in the new government, which lasted just 133 days. By this time, the British regarded him as a staunch communist, a perception based largely on his militant stance in favor of independence. During his brief tenure as Minister of Works, he worked to improve the country’s transportation system.
His militancy was captured in a statement that has since become part of Guyana’s political folklore. When the British suspended the constitution, dismissed the ministers, and landed troops in the country after just 133 days of PPP government, Kwayana was among the leaders identified by the governor as the “ringleaders” of an alleged communist conspiracy. He and other leaders were arrested and detained for nearly three months. During his time as minister, he had famously declared to the governor, “I will not stand for this confounded nonsense.” The statement subsequently entered popular folklore as “This confounded nonsense must stop.”
While Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, the party’s principal leaders, became increasingly identified with the East Indian and African communities, respectively, Kwayana, himself an African Guyanese, was regarded as a more neutral figure. Although he recognized the growing ethnic tensions among party supporters, he believed that the struggle for independence was paramount.
This balancing act became evident during two challenges to Jagan’s leadership. Before the 1953 election, Forbes Burnham, then party chairman, challenged Jagan for the leadership of the PPP. Most African leaders supported Burnham, but Kwayana vigorously defended Jagan’s right to remain leader, arguing that he had done nothing to warrant removal.
When some party members proposed Kwayana as a compromise leader, a suggestion supported by Burnham, he declined because he did not wish to be seen as wresting the position from Jagan. Burnham mounted another leadership challenge following the 1953 electoral victory, but Kwayana again defended Jagan. Burnham eventually withdrew his challenge following a compromise over the composition of the cabinet.
When the PPP split in 1955, largely along ethnic lines, Kwayana was among the African members who remained with Jagan’s faction. However, he left that faction in 1956, primarily over the party’s refusal to support Guyana’s participation in the West Indies Federation.
After unsuccessfully contesting the 1957 election as an independent candidate, Kwayana joined the newly formed People’s National Congress (PNC), led by Forbes Burnham. He served as General Secretary and editor of the party’s newspaper, New Nation, until his expulsion in 1961 for publicly confronting the country’s ethnic problem.
In 1961, he co-founded the African Society for Racial Equality (ASRE), an organization dedicated to raising cultural consciousness among African Guyanese while championing ethnic equality. As ethnic insecurity intensified among the country’s major communities, Kwayana, on behalf of ASRE, proposed a power-sharing arrangement, or “joint premiership,” between the leaders of the two principal ethnic parties. He also proposed, as a last resort, partitioning the country into three zones: African, Indian, and mixed.
Both leaders rejected the proposal. ASRE was disbanded a year later amid concerns about divisions within the African Guyanese community, while the country descended into the ethnic conflict that lasted from 1961 to 1964.
Kwayana’s joint premiership proposal was the first power-sharing initiative placed on Guyana’s national political agenda. In this regard, he stands as a pioneer of power-sharing and shared governance in Guyana and the Anglophone Caribbean.
Amid the ethnic violence engulfing the country, Kwayana co-founded the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA) in 1964. Like ASRE, ASCRIA was committed to promoting African pride, dignity, and culture among African Guyanese. Kwayana served as its Coordinating Elder and adopted the name Eusi Kwayana, which, in Swahili, means “Black Man of Guyana.”
Although he never rejoined the PNC, he supported the party when it came to power in 1964 as part of a coalition with the United Force (UF). He subsequently held several influential government positions, including head of the National Land Settlement Committee, chairman of the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC), chairman of the Cooperative Insurance Committee, and chairman of a committee tasked with transforming the Guyana Cooperative Credit Society into a Cooperative Bank.
Kwayana also played an important role in shaping Guyana’s foreign policy toward Africa. He suggested to Burnham that the country adopt the name “Cooperative Republic of Guyana,” becoming the intellectual author of the official name adopted when Guyana became a republic in 1970.
Decades later, during the constitutional reforms of 2001, Kwayana authored Article 13, which enshrined the principle of inclusive governance in the Constitution.
One of the first acts of the new PNC-led government was to send Kwayana on an official visit to Africa. He traveled to thirteen African countries, meeting heads of government and other senior officials. During these visits, he explained Guyana’s ethnic situation and sought support for the new government.
He also met with leaders of liberation movements fighting apartheid and colonial rule in South Africa and Rhodesia. He carried with him a donation of twenty pounds sterling collected at an ASCRIA meeting in Buxton.
In 1971, Kwayana broke with the PNC over government corruption and became one of its fiercest critics. During this period, he and ASCRIA developed relationships with other radical anti-government organizations, including Moses Bhagwan’s Indian People’s Revolutionary Associates (IPRA) and Clive Thomas’s RATOON. These organizations came together in 1974 to form the Working People’s Alliance (WPA).
Kwayana became a leading member of the WPA, serving as its presidential candidate in 1985 and as a parliamentarian from 1986 to 1990. Equally important, he directly and indirectly mentored a generation of political activists who continued to contribute to public life in Guyana and beyond.
Five defining characteristics stand out in Kwayana’s political life.
First, he regarded politics not as a pathway to personal power but as a vehicle for service and collective liberation.
Second, although he held strong ideological convictions, he was never dogmatic. He preferred to be guided by fairness rather than political correctness.
Third, despite occupying leadership positions in three major political parties, he never actively sought the highest office. On several occasions, he declined opportunities to assume the top leadership position. Notably, during the PPP leadership impasse in 1953, Kwayana was proposed as party leader. Forbes Burnham indicated his willingness to serve under him, but Cheddi Jagan did not. Kwayana promptly declined, and the rest is history.
Fourth, he distinguished himself among major Caribbean politicians through his willingness to publicly acknowledge mistakes on important political questions.
Fifth, his political practice was consistently grounded in political morality.
An especially important dimension of Kwayana’s political life was his ability to influence national politics beyond formal political office. Two factors contributed to this influence.
First, he consistently addressed questions of fairness and justice, even when doing so was politically unpopular. His guiding concern was whether a position or action was fair and just.
Second, he remained fiercely independent. His primary allegiance was to the people and the country rather than to any particular political party or leader. This independence of thought and action helped establish a distinct political space beyond the dominant divisions of Guyanese politics.
His independence was evident not only in his work outside the major parties but also in his conduct within them. This independent, or third, political space accommodated ASCRIA in the 1960s, the WPA from the 1970s onward, and later organizations such as the Alliance for Change (AFC).
The significance of this space lay in its capacity to offer sustained criticism of dominant political tendencies, contributing to both the radicalization and democratization of Guyana’s political process. Walter Rodney’s direct intervention in Guyanese politics during the 1970s was facilitated by this independent political space.
Although Kwayana served in the executive branch for only 133 days and in the legislature for a little more than five years, his influence extended across virtually every major political episode in modern Guyanese history.
He was a firm believer in political organization and collective movements. From his entry into national politics in the late 1940s, he maintained an active association with at least one major national organization. He occupied a distinctive position as a political leader who played significant roles in three defining movements of modern Guyanese history: the Independence Movement, the Black Power Movement, and the Pro-Democracy Movement.
Another important aspect of Kwayana’s political practice was his engagement with concrete social and political conditions. Although ideologically rooted in the Caribbean left, he avoided the dogmatism that sometimes constrained his political contemporaries. Rather than imposing predetermined ideological conclusions on changing circumstances, he drew lessons from the realities confronting the people.
This approach contributed to the breadth and adaptability of his political practice, qualities that were sometimes mistakenly interpreted as inconsistencies or changes in his fundamental principles.
While many Marxists tended to avoid confronting questions of race and ethnicity directly, Kwayana did not. Few public figures since 1961 have written or spoken as extensively about Guyana’s persistent ethnic divisions. He was among the first political leaders to identify race as a central problem in the political process and to propose a concrete political solution.
Throughout his political life, he functioned simultaneously as a leading advocate of African cultural pride and regeneration and as a committed proponent of multiracial working-class solidarity and unity.
His commitment to working-class liberation was inseparable from his commitment to African progress and freedom. His willingness to confront the complex relationship between ethnicity, race, and class in a deeply divided society earned him admiration from some and condemnation from others.
Ultimately, his political life reflected the persistent dilemmas of race, ethnicity, and class in Guyana. More than perhaps any other political figure of his generation, Kwayana sought to synthesize these three dimensions into a coherent political practice.
Kwayana also leaves an extensive body of writing. His published work began with contributions to the PPP’s Thunder in the early 1950s, including numerous articles and editorials published without his byline.
He subsequently served as editor of the PNC’s New Nation, ASCRIA’s ASCRIA Drums, and the WPA publications Dayclean and Open Word.
In addition to his journalism, Kwayana authored numerous books, academic essays, and policy papers. Much of his writing addressed the immediate political and social questions of his time, while other works examined broader themes of race, ethnicity, governance, history, and culture.
He also composed the party songs of the PPP, PNC, and WPA, a remarkable reflection of his participation in several of Guyana’s major political movements.
His books and other published works include:
- Next Witness
- Guyana: No Guilty Race
- Buxton-Friendship in Print and Memory
- Scars of Bondage (co-authored with his wife, Tchiko Kwayana)
- The Morning After
- Walter Rodney: His Last Days and Campaign
- The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics
- Jonestown
- Dimensions from a Guyanese Perspective
- The Legend: Post-Emancipation Villages in Guyana
- Gang Gang: Thirty-Five Guyanese Proverbs
I conclude this overview of Eusi Kwayana’s life and work with a personal reflection.
I have had the good fortune of working with and learning from some of Guyana’s finest intellectuals and political minds. My experience as a member of the WPA over the past five decades has been the most valuable education in politics and public engagement that I could have received.
Throughout that journey, the enduring example of Eusi Kwayana has been pivotal.
He is the finest human being I have encountered in my life’s journey.
David Hinds