IN KEEPING with UNESCO’s proclamation designating 2011 as ‘International Year of People of African Descent’, we now embark on a series of articles highlighting Guyanese Writers of African Descent who have made significant contribution to our literature. There are many pitfalls and shortcomings associated with listing, grouping and categorising; straightway, I apologise for omissions or any other deficiencies.  Of course, I may stumble here, and, of course, I would depend on your support in supplying necessary information so we are all the wiser in the end.
So far, we have looked at Ivan Van Sertima, N. E. Cameron, Eric Walrond, and ER Braithwaite, getting a feel from whence we came, how we have evolved within new constraints, and how we have had to struggle, and are still struggling, to enjoy inherent human rights.
This continuous battle was, and still is, fought on many fronts, with various instruments of engagement, chief amongst them the pen.
We now take a look at a writer who’s lived and worked in many countries (Guyana, Trinidad, London, Spain, Ghana, Canada, Mexico, USA, Czechoslovakia, and France); a thinker who made his mark wherever he went.

Jan Carew
‘The Gentle Revolutionary: Essays in Honour of Jan Carew’, edited by Joy Gleason Carew and Hazel Waters, is the book paying tribute to a man who lived and worked in many places, with the singular fixation being to right wrongs of discrimination, marginalisation and even gender inequity, fighting the “same cause” by rewriting and righting history.
Whether supporting the People’s Progressive Party or the People’s National Congress in Guyana; whether living in Ghana or Canada, Spain or Mexico, or the USA, he cherished his independence, emphasising equity and relative truth.
And why not! He is an educator, diplomat, philosopher and advisor to many nation states, engaging mighty men and women of the world like Cheddi Jagan, Maurice Bishop, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Maya Angelo, and Claudia Jones among others.
Jan Carew was educated at Berbice High School under exceptional tutors like J. A. Rodway and Ben Yesu Das, continuing his education at universities in North America, Czechoslovakia and France.
He was born on September 24, 1920, in a ward called Rome in the village of Agricola, on the East Bank of Demerara, not far from where Roy Heath grew up.
Carew grew up in New Amsterdam, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittelhozer,  and A. J. Seymour among other local scholars from the ‘Ancient County’.
His Demerara days (in the 1940s) were influenced by Cheddi Jagan, Martin Carter, Wilson Harris, Sydney King and others; days of resistance and literature.
Carew was born at a time when the Empire was at its height, and according to Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Director of the Institute of Race Relations in London, when “the pus of racism was seeping out from the sores” of imperialism, breeding hatred and silent remonstration, giving birth to a liberator and philosopher that eventually took his ideas wherever he went.
As an ‘inveterate wanderer’, Carew was a painter and later actor under the management of Sir Laurence Olivier. He worked as a broadcaster, writer and editor for the BBC while in the UK. He also lectured on race relations at London University’s Extra-mural Department. He taught at many universities, namely Princeton, Rutgers, and Lincoln, and is Emeritus Professor of African-American Studies at Northwestern University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.
Carew is best known for his novel, ‘Black Midas’, first published 1958, where the author, according to Al Creighton, “exhibits the way history may become legend or folklore, and both may become myth.”
His other novels include ‘The Wild Coast’, ‘The Last Barbarian’ and ‘Green Winter’.
Jan Carew has written extensively for children, as teacher to student, opening their eyes to facts of life and myths, sometimes a fusion of Amerindian and African lore, giving life to history. Such gems are ‘Children of the Sun’, ‘Amalivaca’, and ‘The Sisters and Manco’s Stories’.
For his writing, Carew won, in 1964, the London Daily Mirror’s award for Best Play, ‘The Day of the Fox’; the Pushcart Prize (USA) for his essay, ‘The Caribbean Writer and Exile’; and the Casa de Las Americas Prize for poetry.
He is also the recipient of the Caribbean-Canadian Literary Expo 2003 award, under the auspices of CARICOM Consular (Corps).
His plays include ‘University of Hunger’, first performed at the Theatre Guild, Guyana, in 1966; ‘Black Horse, Pale Rider’; ‘Street of Eternity’; ‘Sea Drums in my Blood’; and ‘The Day of the Fox’, in which Sammy Davis junior played the lead.
As a cultural historian, he wrote ‘Rape of Paradise’, ‘Moscow is not my Mecca’,  ‘Ghosts in my Blood’, ‘Grenada, the Hour will Strike Again’ and ‘Fulcrums of Change’, setting history right, that is, contrary to Eurocentric bias designs previously forced upon us.
Carew has a lot more to tell, some of which will come out in his memoirs.

WHAT’S HAPPENING:
•    In 2011, my two television programmes on literature will be produced,  with assistance from UNESCO. Both programmes, Oral Tradition and Between the Lines, are aired on the National Communications Network, Channel 11.
•    A UNESCO-sponsored, five-day creative writing workshop is set for August 2011. Limited places available; apply early. Please contact me for more information.
(To respond to this author, either call him on (592) 226-0065 or send him an email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com)