Posted August 29th. 2005
KWAYANA'S `MORNING AFTER’ Controversial, timely examination of a "criminal political movement" and the challenges facing Guyana

By Rickey Singh

AFTER reading his recently-released `The Morning After’, my long held admiration for Eusi Kwayana has deepened, despite our occasional, healthy disagreements.

It has been his habit over the years of making others, including friends, political colleagues and opponents, uncomfortable by what he writes or positions he adopts.

Not that he deliberately sets out to cause personal or even group discomfort or anger. It is simply consistent with his character, telling it as he believes it to be, in his examinations of sensitive social and political issues. His commitment to "the politics of truth" does not easily win him applause.

Yet, those really familiar with Kwayana, now 80, and his ideas, should also know that, along with Cheddi and Janet Jagan, and Forbes Burnham - all former "comrades" at different periods - this once heralded "sage of Buxton" commands a special place in the turbulent social and political history of Guyana.

It is in pursuit of recording "the truth", as he understands it, about an unprecedented post-independence explosion of criminality with a political agenda, that rocked Georgetown and East Coast villages in 2002, and with his native Buxton at the epicentre of it all, that largely inspired his writing of `The Morning After’.

Kwayana's "small book", as he has described the 128-page publication, released in Guyana in June to coincide with the 25th commemoration anniversary of the life and times of the murdered Walter Rodney, offers much more than a searing analysis of a "criminal political movement".

He goes beyond details of the horrors unleashed by well-armed non-Buxtonian "masterminds" - two of whom are identified, one currently in prison. He tells with unconcealed bitterness, how the "criminal masterminds" had contributed to reducing his home village Buxton to "a cemetery".

The "war propaganda" of that dark period, the roles of self-styled "Talibans" and "freedom fighters", an infamous counter phantom death squad; the persistent exploitation of race politics, naked political opportunism and corruption, as well as initiatives for solutions, across ethnic and political boundaries, to herald the dawn of a new political culture in governance, are all sketched in what is a valuable contribution to politics and governance in Guyana.

It is a contribution that is quite controversial in some sections, and would hardly be comfortable reading for frontline leaders and activists of either the governing People's Progressive Party or the main opposition People's National Congress. Or, for that matter, what remains of the Working People's Alliance of which the author, was a founder and co-leader.

His incisive observations on what Kean Gibson offers as, controversially, a `Cycle of Racial Oppression in Guyana’ - one of three appendices - plus a summary of major political events in PPP/PNC relationship'; political and economic aspects of the country's "ethnic problem"; public corruption, and a note on his very challenging 1961 proposals for "Joint Premiership with partition as a last resort", are other reasons why his opponents and supporters should find time to read `The Morning After’.

Exemplary Two

Whether or not it sits well with their supporters or detractors, the two Guyanese politicians whose integrity and honesty, whose patriotism, honesty and commitment to people for which I had come to develop great respect over my long years in journalism, remain Cheddi Jagan and Kwayana.

They knew how and when to cooperate - in the national interest - while revealing different ideological and cultural perspectives and approaches.

Like Jagan, Kwayana is one of the more misunderstood and misrepresented politicians of Guyana. Jagan is no longer with us. But it is quite intriguing to find Kwayana, in the course of rejecting some of Gibson's theories in appendix two of his `The Morning After’, signalling this public message:

"Old as I am, I am willing to pool my efforts with people who want to reform the political economy of our 800,000 population in such a way that no race, or generation, or gender suffers, This refers specially to Africans who complain of being at the bottom of the social scale, but do not like a Jagan to say it...

"Is it not strange", the author adds, "that, knowing that I am not in search of government employment, with all the racial problems, mainly economic, no one in authority has asked me what measures I think are workable? At least we used to be able to 'pick sense from nonsense'..."

One of the very sad things, tragic in some ways, about political hustlings, cultural slander and rumour-mongering in Guyana was the forced uprooting of Kwayana from the village where he grew up and lived until the gunmen and their mentors came to destroy Buxton as a village of "civilisation and heritage". Today he lives with his family in the USA, his heart in Guyana.

In an eloquent foreward to `The Morning After’, the Jamaica-born scholar, disciple of Walter Rodney and author of `Reclaiming Zimbabwe’, Horace Campbell, makes his own observation why Buxton was chosen "as the site of racialised and militarised politics".

The choice of that East Coast Demerara village, said Campbell, "is not accidental since this was the space from which Eusi Kwayana had laboured for over half a century to provide an alternative vision of a society based on respect, love and human dignity....

"The anguish of Kwayana over the violation of the society, the violation of the space and the political retrogression, is evident from the pages of this pamphlet..."

In his penetrating examination of the "criminal political movement" that was linked with the infamous five armed escaped prisoners, and the numerous acts of kidnapping, murder and rape, Kwayana also points to the unfinished task of understanding "the causes and effects of the violence" of that period.

Kissoon and Hinds

Before Kwayana's very focused approach to the origin and implication of the "criminal political movement", the grim, bizarre developments in Buxton and other East Coast villages, had led the political scientist and social commentator, Frederick Kissoon, to write a series of articles, first in the Guyana Chronicle.

Kwayana acknowledged what Dr. David Hinds, his fellow Buxtonian, who teaches African Diasporan Studies at Arizona State University, had noted in a letter to the Stabroek News, that only Kissoon "had attempted an analysis of the weird events which beset Guyana and in particular Buxton-Friendship, between May 2001 and into 2003".

Kwayana noted that "many have expressed in private opinions about Mr. Kissoon's series of articles; but it speaks volumes that no other individual on the scene has thought it fit to interpret the events. He (Kissoon) takes liberties with individuals, but I have found the essence of his findings on the East Coast disturbances, with few exceptions, well-founded and based on information too detailed in particulars to be discounted. His knowledge of the personalities in and around the Taliban (group) exceeds mine..."

Perhaps a pamphlet on that collection of articles by Kissoon should also be printed.

`The Morning After’ was launched at the same time of Hinds' collection of news articles and essays in `Race and Political Discourse in Guyana (A Conversation with African Guyanese in the presence and hearing of Indian Guyanese)’.

His interventions in the local media have often been controversial, but there is no questioning of the yearning Hinds also shares with his mentor, Kwayana, for racial unity and mutual respect.

Kwayana tells us in his introduction to Hinds' "small book", that the author "is in the forefront of the movement for ethnic reconciliation on the basis of justice and access to economic development open to all ethnic sections. His focus is not removal of a government, but of the political system."

Let Kwayana have the last word on his offered "small book". In the preface to `The Morning After’, he explains it as "an essential record aimed at setting down as much of the truth as can be established with reasonable certainty; at setting down the sequence of events and the logic of that sequence and the other circumstances as understood by this author...The Morning After is a theme which is intended to show that actions have consequences; that results do follow on the proverbial morning after..."

I assume that those with sufficient interest would know where to obtain copies of `The Morning After’ and David Hinds' `Race and Political Discourse in Guy