NO Guyanese academic should be forgiven if they do not situate the life of Eusi Kwayana in the context of his oceanic capacity to pursue right over wrong. I have one, only one criticism of Eusi which follows below. For now, the paragraphs below will be a positive reflection of this CARICOM phenomenon whose journey to free Caribbean people from mental slavery makes him stand out as a global giant.
I first met Eusi in 1974 when I entered the University of Guyana (UG) and got involved in student politics on campus, which brought me into the presence of people like Clive Thomas, Josh Ramsammy, etc, who knew Eusi very closely. I never really got close to him because I found that he did not have the capacity to lime with people the way West Indian politicians do.
Eusi was a strange man, who eschewed everyday “gyaff” with his comrades and eschew everyday groundings. He liked to be alone. He was one of the most intelligent humans I met. I hardly spent time with Eusi during my youthful WPA days. There would be bits and pieces of conversations, but once those conversations kept going, you were right in the middle of the University of Eusi
Kwayana and you drank deeply from the thoughts that flowed.
Over the decades, I have been politically associated with Eusi, the one motif that shone exceedingly brightly was his divine pursuit of right over wrong. He taught you that as humans you must seek the freedoms of the peoples of this world. You did not have to be his constant companion to learn from him; just an association would do it.
I will come to the complex part of his personality that has tantalised most people my age who knew him. Was Eusi Kwayana a racist? The answer is no. Kwayana was an African-rights advocate and a psychic believer in the wholesomeness and richness of the African people, their culture, and their continent.
Such a philosophy does not make a person a racist. Contrast the words that have come out of the mouth of David Hinds with Kwayana, and you will see what a good man Kwayana was. Eusi Kwayana never uttered a word of disrespect against Indian people. You cannot find such words in any of his writings or television interviews or podcasts interviews.
What are the rights and wrongs of Eusi? The rights were in the billions. There was only one wrong, and he broke my heart over that wrong path he chose. Prior to April 2020, my admiration for Eusi was literally unlimited. If there was no elections disaster of 2020, I would have rated Kwayana as one of the best souls the 20th century produced.
I fell out with Eusi over his position on the 2020 elections tragedy. He told me in email exchanges he did not know what was going on with the elections, and he simply said that he could not condemn what he does not know. Even if I wanted to overlook that huge human mistake, I could never have seen him the same way because from 2020 to 2026, even two weeks before he died last Saturday, he wrote about occurrences in Guyana in detailed ways. How did he know about them?
Kwayana finally saw the WPA in power in 2015 and he felt that he preferred what Guyana had in the form of the APNU+AFC government over the PPP. For him therefore, it was too great a risk allowing the PPP to re-enter the kingdom of power, so he felt that to denounce the five months of fraud was not in his political interest. My revulsion of that was driven by the consequences of permanent power.
Eusi was one of the most intelligent and level-headed humans in the world. He had to know that the greatest danger that faces the existence of a country is permanent power. The question was not the PPP versus the PNC. The question was not your preference. We did not have the luxury of having a preference in March 2020; the battle was for Guyana, not a political party.
My expectation was that he would have accepted that the PPP won the elections, called on the PNC and AFC to accept the results, then demand urgent talks about the future of Guyana. What he did was completely unacceptable. Instead, he called for power sharing. The PPP lost the 2015 elections by 4,400 votes and there was no power sharing. Why should the PPP share power in 2020? I thought Eusi was too intelligent to have made that mistake.
Outside of that one episode of stumbling, Eusi Kwayana has served modern civilisation with selflessness. He will always be a giant that should never be forgotten by this nation.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those
