Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 12, 2017 Letters
Dear Editor,
The movement for the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania up to 1973 saw Burnham as a sponsor of a Pan African secretariat, led by Bro. Zolili, a science teacher from California. Burnham’s regime was a friend to African American political prisoners. RAM’s Herman Ferguson (underground as Paul Adams) and the African American children’s book author, Tom Feelings, were now employed by the Guyana government. But other RAM members, Mamadou Lumumba and Shango Umoja, became dissidents against Burnham, siding with ASCRIA, and were cast out of the country in 1973. Amiri Baraka and Jitu Weusi for a time did not know whose side to take. Nevertheless, this revealed the conflicting tendencies within the Black Power and Pan African movements. CLR James soon led a boycott of the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania that shortly before James had traveled the world organizing.
During this time, Burnham singled out Tchaiko specifically for her dynamic community organizing with ASCRIA — and smeared her as a meddling outsider. This was recorded in the publications ASCRIA Bulletin and ASCRIA Drums. Burnham’s Pan African façade of his increasingly dictatorial regime was starting to evaporate.
Tchaiko also remembers these times for how she learned more about popular educational methods from observing Eusi who was teacher and principal at County High School in Buxton, Guyana. He taught his young students to be confident reading Shakespeare, participate in theatrical productions, and to take down oral histories from community elders to be aware of the African heritage and survivals in their community.
At the same time he linked a return to the land, the hinterland of Guyana, with respect for Amerindians as they affirmed African culture. The Kwayanas were part of the social revival of African drumming, and showed those that practiced Comfa, and the Jordanites of Guyana, on their own authority had been initiating the search for African survivals before ASCRIA. He embraced all in the Guyana, including Indians and Amerindians, who sincerely searched for their heritage but did not use their self-determination to undermine others.
In 1973 Tchaiko with Eusi Kwayana published Scars of Bondage: a first study of the slave colonial experience of Africans in Guyana. It stood out for its descriptions of the self-emancipating African personality under adversity and for its documentation of African cultural survivals underscoring the enslaved brought with them their own history and identity despite the barbarism of the Middle Passage and the destructive environment Africans found imposed on them by those who strived to master them.
In 1974-1975, Tchaiko Kwayana was part of the merger of ASCRIA with Indian Political Revolutionary Associations, the Ratoon group, and the Working People’s Vanguard Party that became the Walter Rodney led Working People’s Alliance (WPA). The Kwayanas worked with Rupert Roopnarine, CY Thomas, Josh Ramsammy, Bonita Harris, Tacuma Ogunseye, Karen de Souza, Jai Parsam, Omawale, Ohene Koama, and Andaiye (whose Red Thread collective later projected the need to count women’s caring work). In 1979-1980, in the confrontation with Forbes Burnham’s PNC government’s violent repression, the historian Walter Rodney was assassinated. Tchaiko with the Women Against Terror group received a beating in the Bourda Green area of Georgetown in a 1983 protest. She had struck police with her umbrella who were injuring youth. Tchaiko was present in the struggle for “people’s power and no dictator.”
Tchaiko went to live in Atlanta in the mid-1980s to raise the Kwayana children but also to organize Helping Uplift Guyanese (HUG), coordinating global aid and solidarity with the Guyanese working people. With John Henrik Clarke, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Ivan Van Sertima, Jan Carew, Joyce Gleason Carew, and Runoko Rashidi, Tchaiko Kwayana was part of the circle around the Journal of African Civilizations that established contributions of Africans to science and technology, and African women’s contributions, from antiquity to precolonial times. This was a bold endeavor that not only discussed Egypt, Nubia and the Nile Valley but Latin America, Amerindians, and China from an African world perspective. Tchaiko was also among the early scholars who wished to recognize the women’s initiatives of the Marcus Garvey movement before this became a trend in university life.
So how are we to assess Tchaiko Kwayana, “the English Teacher”? Whether instructing in creative writing, crafting autobiographies, teaching how to write open letters to government officials, or interpreting comparative literature, she received awards and recognition from government certification authorities but also met controversy among administrators above her.
Tchaiko with her “identity papers” and “writing our hope” projects tried to get grade school children and their parents to practice their writing as they recorded their own history. She taught also at the college level and in upward bound programs. One of her Atlanta grade school students wrote an open letter to the Atlanta Daily World. Reagan and Gorbachev, it was argued, were mistaken as individuals to discuss nuclear weapons and the potential destruction of the world. They did not best represent the nations for which they spoke and that a selection of ordinary people could resolve matters best. Many years later, a San Diego student, an Asian American, wrote a historical treatment of white supremacy that found its way on to the internet as a polished pamphlet. Tchaiko Kwayana teaching methods equally captivated those of African, Asian, Latin American, Native America, and European descent.
Tchaiko marshaled Wordsworth’s reflections on Tinturn Abbey to remind “that [from] gleams of half extinguished thought… the pictures of the mind revives again” and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, to suggest that one could “find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” These came together with a quotation from Runoko Rashidi: “among the greatest crimes is to teach a people that their history began with invasion, colonization, and enslavement.”
Tchaiko, like Wole Soyinka, could frame the Western canon, as reconcilable with an African cosmology where the dead, the living, and the unborn of the natural world were in conversation and where ideas and images inscribed in stone (whether in Ancient Egypt or Olmec Mexico) could revive a consciousness of history. She could find herself in trouble when she found, especially with American literature, as represented by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, that the treatment of the historical background of the novel in public schools often emphasized Europeans, and left out the intellectual and political experience of the African world and the colonized.
She became heralded for teaching American literature by underscoring antiquity and pre-colonial origins not European settler-colonialism. Tchaiko became a master-teacher of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where both the historical background of pre-colonial and ancient African civilizations, and the colonial experience of Native Americans, could not be ignored.
Matthew Quest
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