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Andaiye: A class analysis
In my September 26, 2017 column, I penned these lines on Andaiye; “I have profound respect and admiration for this iconic woman. She is one of the WPA fighters who had an early influence on my politics. I think Guyana has lost a precious activist now that she has taken a quiet life due to illness.”
Freddie Kissoon
Of all the people I met in my radical youth in the WPA, one mind stood out for me in its ability to critically examine issues and personalities – Andaiye. I found her to be an inviting enigma. In the WPA, there was a tight group of elite activists at the top of the hierarchy.
In that hierarchy, two personalities didn’t come from the middle class and therefore they tended to be more people-oriented than the rest at the top – Eusi Kwayana and Moses Bhagwan.
Kwayana remains and will always remain a mystery for me. He was not a person given to warm friendly interactions. He was genuine in what he did and said he would do, and he was inflexible in his embrace of moral values but he lacked the natural capacity to engage in Rodneyite groundings.
He was certainly not a person willing to share information. Bhagwan, on the other hand, was just naturally a working class personality.
Andaiye was the only one from the upper crust of the elite hierarchy of the WPA that could genuinely relate to ordinary folks. I would say that of all the middle class radicals politics has produced in Guyana, Andaiye moved with emotional ease between classes and accepted that she belonged to no class structure.
I didn’t understand this aspect of her character before I left for studies abroad at the height of Rodney’s attempt to change the government in 1979. And I don’t think at that time, I was intellectually equipped to find the answers. It is when I returned in 1984, and we began to relate to each other on more equal footing, that I came to understand the enigma in her class make up.
Andaiye came from a quintessential urban, urbane African middle class background. Her father was one of the leading medical practitioners in the sixties and seventies. His prominence was enhanced by his status of personal physician to the Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham.
Like most of her peers at the time, she was sent abroad for a university education. She came home and fitted into the middle class milieu. At the time the slogan of black is beautiful was dominating London, New York, the Caribbean. She donned an Afro-hair style and took up a long term relation with a white, radical, lovable Marxist professor, Englishman, Bill Carr.
But there was a difference with the character of Andaiye and I know she was conscious of it and it diluted her middle class saturation, a pathway that no other urban elitist in that type of class structure ever went into.
Andaiye is dead and if I am to write her legacy I would say it was an unusual one – she never practised a personal life of middle class values. There were none like her in urban British Guiana. There has been none like her since then, right up to the time of her death in 2019.
What led Andaiye to that different nuance? It was her dark complexion. Andaiye was dark-skinned and she knew that if it were not for her middle class status, she would not have found the acceptance and embrace that came her way. She was learned enough to know what bias and prejudice dark-skin engendered in urban middle class Georgetown.
One day I was brutally frank with her on the middle class shamelessness of the WPA leadership. I could have asked her any sensitive question. I looked at her with a thin smile and I said why those “sweet boy” radicals in the struggle against Burnham never tried to hustle her as they did with the other women in the WPA.
I remember her reaction very well. With a cynical smile, she bent her head downwards and simply showed me her two hands. Nothing else was said. She was pointing to her dark skin.
I was always comfortable in the company of Andaiye. She made you feel comfortable. She wanted to reach out to ordinary people and she did. The last time I set eyes on Andaiye was December 23, 2010 when Mark Benschop and I emerged into the courtyard of the Georgetown Magistrate court after release from three days of detention for a mere traffic offence.
She was there in the crowd to greet me. But we kept in touch by email correspondence. I guess this is goodbye.
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