King, Sydney (Kwayana, Eusi)

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King, Sydney (Kwayana, Eusi)

1925

Sydney King, who changed his name to Eusi Kwayana, was born in Lusignan, in British Guiana, on a sugar estate. From the age of seven he lived in Buxton on the east coast of British Guiana. Buxton was a village that had come into existence after impecunious planters were forced to sell their estates to the ex-slaves, who were known as Creoles and who had deliberately deprived the plantations of their labor power. As a young man Kwayana entered the teaching profession. He later became involved in politics when, in 1949, he and a friend organized the Buxton Ratepayers' Association, which forced village councilors to abandon a plan to grant the planters a ninety-nine-year lease for land to construct a canal that would have competed with the existing railway and thus undermined the village economy. During the late 1940s and 1950s, when teachers were subject to arbitrary dismissal for reasons having nothing to do with competence at the hands of school managers who were mostly religious dignitaries, Kwayana used his reputation as a teacher to spread a clandestine message of political independence, particularly among African Guianese villagers in Buxton.

With these experiences Kwayana's transition to more formal politics, which occurred when he became a member of the Political Affairs Committee (PAC), the immediate precursor of the People's Progressive Party (PPP), the colony's first mass-based political party, was not a problematic one. On becoming a member of the party, which made clear its intention to seek political independence from the British for the colony, Kwayana took an active part in the PPP's efforts, designed to educate and mobilize the masses in furtherance of that aim. However, such was the sociopolitical climate that, being a teacher, much of Kwayana's writing on political issues was done anonymously. Thus, most of the passages from a PAC bulletin that were quoted in the inquiry into the 1948 shooting of five sugar estate workers who were protesting against unpalatable working conditions, and that were attributed to the secretary of the PPP at the time, were in fact written by Kwayana (personal correspondence, October 6, 1989). In addition, in his role as a political independence movement intellectual, and along with Martin Carter, perhaps Guyana's most distinguished poet, who at the time was a civil servant and therefore restricted from participating in political activity, Kwayana addressed political meetings in many parts of the colony far from the gaze of colonial officials and was also responsible for composing the PPP's "battle song."

Kwayana subsequently became assistant secretary of the PPP and was described both by one of his party colleagues as "blindly pro-Moscow" and by the then governor as one of the two "most influential and fanatical members of the PPP" for his purported role in a sugar workers' strike offensive in 1953. He was appointed minister of Communications and Works in the short-lived PPP government of 1953. After the dismissal of the PPP government and the suspension of the constitution in October 1953 by the British, Kwayana was at first restricted to Buxton, and then detained from October 1953 to March 1954 at the U.S. World War II air base at Atkinson Field. Following his release from Atkinson Field, he was restricted to the Buxton-Friendship area and ordered to report to the police station there on a daily basis.

After a split in the leadership of the PPP in 1954 involving East Indian Cheddi Jagan and African Forbes Burnham, Kwayana remained with the Jagan faction. He left the party, though, along with two other influential African Guyanese members, after Jagan reneged on a promise to seek the inclusion of the colony in the West Indian Federation on the grounds that it was not in the interest of the East Indian population. After unsuccessfully contesting a seat during the 1957 general elections as an independent candidate, Kwayana subsequently joined the People's National Congress (PNC), which was headed by Burnham. He also served for a while as the editor of the party's newspaper before incurring the displeasure of top party officials for advocating partition as a way of solving the colony's racial problems.

Apparently convinced that the PPP was abandoning its Marxist/class posture in favor of one based on race, especially as a way of winning elections, Kwayana was instrumental in founding both the African Society for Racial Equality (ASRE) and the African Society for Closer Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), because "Black people needed organizing." After a brief rapprochement with Burnham and the PNC, during which time he worked with the Guyana Marketing Corporation, he severed permanently his ties with the party and later became an important figure in the Working People's Alliance (WPA) and served in the House of Assembly as a representative of that political party. Following the decline of the WPA after the death of one of its leaders, Dr. Walter Rodney, on June 13, 1980, Kwayana, as a public intellectual who articulates the concerns of a specific social grouping, continued to speak out against violence in Buxton, the village in which he grew up, as well as other pressing social ills.