By News Americas Now Staff Writer
News Americas Now, NY, NY, Sun. Oct. 11, 2026: Eusi Kwayana, one of Guyana’s most enduring political figures and a founding member of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), has died at age 101.
Kwayana, born Sydney Evanson King on April 4, 1925, died Saturday, October 10, at his home in Atlanta, Georgia, closing out a political and intellectual life that spanned colonial rule, the fight for self-government, and decades of activism in independent Guyana.
Born in Lusignan on Guyana’s East Coast of Demerara, Kwayana moved to Buxton at age seven, a village that would shape his political identity for the rest of his life. He entered politics in the 1940s through village organizing, and around 1947 joined Dr. Cheddi Jagan and others in founding the People’s Progressive Party (PPP). After the PPP’s 1953 election victory, Kwayana served as Minister of Communication and Works — a government the British colonial administration suspended and removed from office months later, amid fears of the party’s direction. Kwayana was detained by British authorities in 1954 as the colonial government moved to suppress unrest.
He later turned toward grassroots, Africa-centered organizing, helping build the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), which merged into the newly formed WPA in 1974. Working alongside historian and activist Dr. Walter Rodney, Kwayana became part of the WPA’s collective leadership during the politically turbulent 1970s and ’80s, and was elected to Guyana’s National Assembly in 1985 as the party’s sole parliamentary representative.
The WPA said that in 1974, Kwayana co-founded the Working People’s Alliance and remained a committed member until his death. Within the WPA, he served as Executive member, Member of Parliament and de facto editor of the party’s organs, Open Word and Dayclean. We remember Eusi as an excellent party organizer and mobilizer. Whenever the party was low on morale, we turned to him for confidence. We also remember him as a loyal party member who never compromised his integrity and independent praxis. For that reason, we label him the modern pioneer of the Independent Radical strand in modern Guyanese politics. “While he gave 52 years of service to the WPA, he also labored in the valley for the original PPP and the PNC, in which he served as Assistant General Secretary and General Secretary, respectively. He served as a Member of Parliament and Cabinet Member in the 1953 PPP government. In addition to being General Secretary, he served as editor of the PNC’s newspaper, New Nation.”
Kwayana was also a lifelong educator, beginning as a primary school teacher at age 15. In 1956 he founded Buxton’s County High School, later renamed Republic Cooperative High School. He authored several books examining race, labor, and Guyana’s political development, including The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics, Scars of Bondage, Guyana: No Guilty Race, and Walter Rodney: His Last Days and Campaigns. His play The Promised Land, staged by a young cast from Buxton, won Best Play in the Youth Category at the 1965 British Guiana Drama Festival. He also wrote party songs for all three of Guyana’s major political parties — the PPP, the People’s National Congress, and the WPA.
In 1968, Kwayana met American Pan-Africanist and civil rights activist Tchaiko Kwayana, formerly known as Ann Cook. The two married in Georgetown in 1971 in a ceremony incorporating Yoruba rites; she died in 2017. Kwayana retired from public life in 2002 and relocated to the United States.
His death marks the passing of a figure whose life tracked Guyana’s full arc from British colonial rule through independence and the decades of political struggle that followed – as party founder, detainee, parliamentarian, educator, playwright, and historian of his country’s own making.
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