[Editor’s note: This obituary was adapted from a Facebook post by Richard Drayton.]
Eusi Kwayana, who died on 10 October 2026 at the age of 101, was one of the most extraordinary figures in the post-1945 politics of the Caribbean. I had the privilege to speak at length with him in his Alanta home in August 2023, and wrote about that conversation soon after.
Originally known as Sydney King, Eusi Kwayana was born in Lusignan on the Demerara River in then-British Guiana on 4th April 1925, a month before the birth of Franz Fanon, and a year before Fidel’s. I can think of no Caribbean political figure with such a long and consistent record of ethical leadership or a purer example of an “organic intellectual”, produced within and persistently engaged in the life of the working class.
His father was a “pan boiler”, the aristocracy of skilled labour in sugar factories, the artisan who presided over the key moment of crystalization in the vacuum pan. He was recruited to go to Angola in the 1920s, and died in Mozambique when Sydney/Eusi was just a boy. His mother was a domestic servant. When Eusi was seven years old, they moved to Buxton village, which was one of the “free villages” established by former enslaved Africans after 1838, and which preserves to this day strong structures of collective decision making and collective property. Eusi is synonymous with Buxton, where he lived and worked as a school teacher from the age of 15, and where he came first to politics in its village council.
In the mid to late 1940s he became swept up in the politics of labour and nationalism. He joined the Political Affairs Committee, the new party founded by Cheddi Jagan, within which he was first exposed to Marxism, and became a founder member of the People’s Progressive Party in 1950 (writing its party song). Even though he was racialised as an Afro-Guyanese, he was also a member of the Guyana branch of the Indian National Congress. It has been commented before, I think by Paul Tennessee, of the impact on him of Indian non-cooperation, and in particular the example of Gandhi, in his attraction to the politics of asceticism and the tactic of the hunger strike, to which he would return in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. (Of his asceticism, I note he took his last drink of rum on VE Day in 1945, and has eaten only raw food, mostly nuts and fruit, when he is not fasting, since the late 1940s). He was also a trade unionist, In the wake of the 1948 Enmore massacre organising sugar workers, such that he ended up being banned from 11 plantations by their management.
In 1953, in the first general election under universal suffrage, the PPP was swept to power, and at the age of 28, Eusi became Minister of Communication and Works. That government was removed by British troops in October 1953, and shortly afterwards, Eusi was detained as a political prisoner by the British. In prison he led a hunger strike in solidarity with the Mau Mau who were being detained by the British across the world in Kenya.
Eusi broke with the PPP in 1956 on two issues: along with Martin Carter and Rory Westmass, he disagreed with the party’s refusal to participate in the politics of the West Indian federalism, and he opposed its support for the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising of that year. He would briefly join with Forbes Burnham’s PNC – again writing its party song! – but resigned by 1961 because he felt it insensitive to the Indian-African racial cleavage.
When the PNC came to power in 1964, however, he agreed to travel in Africa as Burnham’s envoy, and to chair the Agricultural Marketing Board. He ultimately resigned because of his intolerance of ministerial corruption which he saw tolerated by Burnham. He formed and led the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA) which, together with its Indo-Guyanese counterpart, Moses Bhagwan’s Indian Political Revolutionary Associates, in 1974 became part of the new Working People’s Alliance (another party, another song!). Eusi led the WPA, together with Walter Rodney, Andaiye, Rupert Roopnaraine and others. After Rodney’s murder in 1980, Eusi was in many ways the most significant figure in the party. Even after he moved to the United States at the end of the last century, has continued to offer his guidance to Guyana, publishing statements on its public life.
I learned many new things in the hours we spoke. I suppose the most striking one was his account of the 1973 Land campaign. For his own devious reasons, Forbes Burnham at this time had declared Guyana a “cooperative socialist republic”. Kwayana called his bluff, calling on working people in their communities to occupy land on the sugar plantations which had been left idle and put it to use (an old tactic of the sugar magnates to drive down wages was to lease large amounts of public land cheaply and keep it out of the hands of peasants). The response of the “socialist” government was to send out the riot squad to put down these occupations.
Eusi Kwayana was a living archive.