Elder, sister, mother, aunty, teacher, cultural ambassador: Three tributes for Tchaiko Kwayana, 24 June 1937 – 6 May 2017
Saluting Tchaiko Kwayana By Nigel Westmaas
Tchaiko Ruramai Kwayana was an educator, panAfricanist, and civil rights activist. Born and raised in segregated Georgia in the 1930s, she began her teaching career in segregated southern schools, eventually moving to Oakland, California. As an internationalist she taught in Nigeria and acquired elements of Yoruba culture, also travelling to Mexico and Panama before returning to the USA. In New York, seeking places where she could find “African survivals” in diaspora, she eventually ended up in the New York Guyana mission.
Her journeys were augmented by her first published work “Black Pride? Some Contradictions” in the Black Woman (1968) which advocated “international travel for increased enlightenment”. Tchaiko eventually travelled to Bahia, Brazil and on her return stopped in Guyana in 1968 where she met Eusi Kwayana (then Sydney King). Tchaiko was a key organizer of the seminar of “Pan-Africanists and Black Revolutionists” held in Guyana in 1970.
The Kwayanas married in 1971 in Georgetown after both had changed their names (Tchaiko Kwayana from Ann Cook). They were married with Yoruba rites and there was a libation ceremony at Buxton for the new couple.
In Guyana, Tchaiko was a member of ASCRIA and eventually the Women Against Terror organisation fighting the Guyana dictatorship at the time.
In 1973 Tchaiko and Eusi Kwayana published Scars of Bondage, an assessment of slavery in Guyana and the Americas. In the prologue the Kwayanas stated:
“Readers will notice that we stand very strongly for African value systems and seek to make this point as often as we can for several reasons. The world generally agrees that Africa has ‘nice’ dances and music, but not that Africa has civilisation, a mind, a morality that is supremely its own. We are not speaking here of some present day corrupt African cities in most of which confusion reigns under European political systems. We are speaking of the collectivist Africa of the past and present which has many lessons of principle for a world based on national and international class exploitation.”
Tchaiko remained in Guyana until 1982 when she returned to the USA mainly for economic reasons.
In the USA Tchaiko resumed her role as an educator while involving herself in organisations such as LAD (a leadership training organization in San Diego). In Atlanta she co-founded Helping Uplift Guyanese (HUG) and co-founded the Sankofa Bird project, a “communities based Humanities program” that also assisted AIDS patients.
She was awarded the title of “Queen Mother” by the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations. Both Tchaiko and Eusi Kwayana were members of the Langston Hughes Poetry circle (Tchaiko knew Langston Hughes personally).
Eusi Kwayana eventually left Guyana to be with his family in 2002.On reflecting on his move to the United States Kwayana states, “I was away from them for so many years and they were the ones sustaining me….I was never really the breadwinner. My wife has a lot of courage and strength and I am just happy to be with her now.”