In observance of Brother Eusi Kwayana’s 99th birthday, I penned an overview of his political contributions which some sections of the media graciously published. The intention was to introduce newer generations to one of Guyana’s consequential public personage and to reintroduce him to older generations in whose memories he may have faded. I also set out to highlight aspects of his contributions that have either been lost in or smothered by the binary political consciousness of our bifurcated society. Further, I wanted to put in one place the outline of the breath of an eight-decade sojourn with all its twists, turns, divergences and convergences to hopefully encourage a holistic analysis of his politics, praxis and interventions.
It is against that background that my attention was drawn to a missive by Bro Ravi Dev ostensibly on a slice of Kwayana’s activism (KN ” Kwayana and the PPP” and SN “It was Kwayana’s writings that helped shape the definition of the post 1957 PPP government as an Indian government” ). That is the object of my missive today. As a disclaimer, if one is needed, I am a supporter of Kwayana’s who has spent a lot of time trying to understand his politics and to locate them in the larger Guyanese political trajectory. I am also a keen student of Guyana’s political history.
Dev correctly pointed out that Kwayana supported Dr. Cheddi Jagan’s candidacy at the 1947 election, defended Jagan’s right to lead the early PPP, then broke with him after the two splits of the PPP on stated issues. But rather than conclude that Kwayana’s attitude represented a rare independence of thought and action, Dev proceeded to locate him as an anti-Jagan fanatic. In the process he did not mention that Kwayana declined nomination as PPP leader in deference to Jagan and that at the time of the first split in 1955, he stayed with the Jagan faction when many Africans left.
But Dev did not stop there. He morphed his anti-Jagan construction with an anti-Indian construction to present Kwayana as the architect of the anti-Jagan/Indian stream in Guyanese politics. He presents as his evidence articles written by Kwayana in the PNC’s New Nation and Kwayana’s location of the beginnings of the ethnic conflicts of the 1980s in 1961 rather than in 1962.
What is Dev’s objective? Dev sets out to spoil Kwayana’s “birthday party.” As he hinted, he has reservations about Kwayana’s thesis that in Guyana’s ethnic ferment, there is no guilty race. Whether Dev believes there is a guilty race is not my concern here. He is suggesting that the No Guilty thesis may not be genuine since the author (Kwayana) through his writings and activism constructs Indians and their leader (Jagan) as the guilty ones.
I respectfully reject Ravi Dev’s suggestions. Kwayana, the concretist, has given Jagan credit when he thought it was right to do so and criticizes Jagan when he thought it was right to do so. He adopts the same attitude to Burnham. If Kwayana spoke out against the ethnic turn of the post-1957 Jagan PPP, does that make him the author of that strain? If Kwayana warned against the prospect of ethno-racial hegemony of one group over the others, does that make him the definer and shaper of that tendency? In a politically divided environment, to which group could Dr Jagan turn? Which group voted in much larger numbers for Dr. Jagan’s PPP? Which areas of the economy did the post-1957 PPP governments direct its policy emphasis?
The perception and reality of the Indianist nature of the post-1957 PPP is not Kwayana creation or definition. Like others Kwayana reacted to it. His voice may have been louder than others, but he was not lying on Jagan and the PPP.
Dev’s suggestion that because Kwayana places the beginning of the violence in 1961 when an African was killed by Indians is at best mischievous. He accuses Kwayana of only chronicling Indian violence against Africans and avoiding violence in the other direction. There is some cherry-picking there. He does not say that while Kwayana concludes that Indians were the aggressors in 1961 and 1964, Africans were the aggressors in 1962 and 1963. Does Dev have a reason for wanting to start the violence in 1962?
It is simply a blatant lie that Kwayana ignores racial violence emanating among Africans. As he points out:
“I know also that the present public image of violence is an African one. Few people regret more than I do the degeneration of sections of Africans in Guyana but, to say that it is natural or that it was always so, or that all are downhill must be due to ignorance or mischief. My present mission includes waging jihad against the doctrine, not the person, of anyone who claims that there is a guilty race in Guyana” (No Guilty Race. P. 37).
It is regrettable that Ravi Dev insists on the suggestion that there might be a guilty race in Guyana. Kwayana himself puts that suggestion in perspective.
“My challenge to writers of history, or of the story of the peoples is this. An African writer or Indian writer should not try to pretend that his or her race is always right and the others always wrong. This cry–“My race (Indian or African) is always right, my race suffered the most, my race is the most wronged in the country, all the violence done in history was against my race”–is a false alarm. This kind of history, so far as Guyana is concerned, can be seen as war propaganda. It has no basis in the facts of our experience and will condemn later generations to endless conflict. We can arrive at a conclusion of a guilty race, only by twisting facts, missing facts and treating readers or listeners with disrespect. This does not mean that in every department of wrong the scores are equal. It means that there has been to date no ground at all for the idea of a guilty race of Guyanese” (No Guilty Race, p.2)
