Eusi Kwayana

Eusi Kwayana was born Sydney Evanson King on April 4, 1925, in Lusignan, a village on the East Coast of Demerara in British Guiana. When he was seven years old his family moved to Buxton, the historic village that he would later write about at length and that gave him his nickname, the Sage of Buxton.

In a 2025 tribute in Stabroek News, Moses Bhagwan and Nigel Westmaas recorded one of his earliest politically conscious memories. Around 1929, an elderly woman sitting in a range yard doorway in Lusignan told him, "Pickney, Congo ah high nation, Congo ah high nation." He took it as an affirmation that slavery could not erase African dignity, and he never forgot it.

Kwayana became a primary school teacher at the age of 15. Teaching was the thread that ran through his whole life. In 1956 he founded County High School in Buxton and became its principal. The school was later renamed Republic Cooperative High School. He also saw political organising as a form of education, and his later writing on villages and history was intended to preserve knowledge for ordinary people as well as scholars.

As Sydney King he became politically active at village level in the 1940s. Around 1947 he joined the small group around Cheddi Jagan that formed the People's Progressive Party. In the April 27, 1953 general election, the first held under universal adult suffrage, he won the Central Demerara constituency and became Minister of Communications and Works. The government lasted 133 days before Britain suspended the constitution in October 1953. He was detained by the colonial authorities in 1954.

After the PPP divided in 1955, he moved toward the People's National Congress, where he served as general secretary and edited the party newspaper New Nation. From 1964 to 1971 he headed the National Land Settlement Committee and chaired the Guyana Marketing Corporation and the Cooperative Insurance Committee.

He co-founded the African Society for Racial Equality in 1961 and the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA) in 1964. In 1974 ASCRIA became part of the Working People's Alliance, which he helped found and served for 52 years, as an executive member and de facto editor of its organs Open Word and Dayclean. He worked closely with Walter Rodney. In 1985 he was elected the WPA's sole member of the National Assembly, where he revived citizen petitions and treated village visits and the party office as centres of representation.

In 1968 Kwayana met Ann Cook, an American Pan-Africanist and civil rights activist from Georgia, as she was travelling from Brazil back to the United States. She became Tchaiko Kwayana. They married in Georgetown in 1971 with Yoruba rites, and she was closely involved in his organisational work until her death on May 6, 2017. He had two sons, Alaf and Kofi, and a daughter, Iyabo.

He was known for an austere, disciplined life. Friends recalled that he ate raw food and that he gave up alcohol after Victory in Europe Day in 1945. In 2002 he retired from active public life and moved to California, and he later lived in Atlanta, Georgia.

Kwayana was a Pan-Africanist who also argued throughout his life for equality and cooperation between Guyana's African and Indian communities. His 1961 proposal for joint and equal prime ministerships, with partition only as a last resort, dogged his reputation for decades, but he presented it as a way to end racial antagonism. His 1978 speech Racial Insecurity and the Political System became central to the Working People's Alliance's philosophy of multiracial politics, and he expanded the argument at the 1988 Genesis of a Nation conference. He was also known for publicly criticising his own past decisions, and for using fasting as a form of political protest.

By the time of his death Kwayana was the last surviving elected member of British Guiana's 1953 legislature, and he was widely described as the last of the original independence generation. The Working People's Alliance called him a Founder-Pioneer of the post-colonial order and "one of Guyana's priceless gifts to itself." The PNCR/APNU described him as a patriot, historian, elder statesman and "a conscience for our nation." His writing on Buxton and on Guyana's villages, his political songs and his long record of grassroots representation remain part of the country's historical record.

His play The Promised Land, performed by a young cast from Buxton, won the Best Play prize in the youth category at the British Guiana Drama Festival in 1965. In 2007 he was recognised as a poet and political lyricist at Guyana's Folk Festival in New York. His 100th birthday in April 2025 and his 101st in April 2026 drew tributes from across Guyana, the Caribbean and the diaspora.

A writer of hundreds of works, Kwayana produced poems, plays, essays, letters, editorials and political statements. His first play, The Prodigal Daughter, was written in the early 1940s. Other plays included The Promised Land, Christus the Messiah, Proclamation (about the 1823 Demerara revolt) and The King and I. He wrote theatre reviews under the alias Kiskadee Cloud.

His books include Next Witness, Scars of Bondage, Guyana: No Guilty Race, Buxton-Friendship in Print and Memory (Red Thread Women's Press, 1999), Morning After, Genesis of a Nation: The Indo-Guyanese Contribution to Social Change in Guyana, Walter Rodney: His Last Days and Campaigns (2009), The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics (2014), A New Look at Jonestown (2016) and The Legend: Post-Emancipation Villages in Guyana, Making World History (2016, with David Hinds). He wrote the party songs of the PPP ("O Fighting Men"), the PNC ("Battle Song") and the WPA ("People's Power").

Eusi Kwayana died on Saturday, October 10, 2026, at his home in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, according to Demerara Waves. He was 101 years old. The Working People's Alliance announced his death together with his family, saying, "Our elder, teacher, mentor, leader and inspiration has left us to go back to his ancestors." The PNCR/APNU also issued a statement of mourning. No cause of death has been made public.