An Untarnished Legacy: Eusi Kwayana at 100
I was hardly surprised to see Freddie Kissoon would use Eusi Kwayana’s 100th birthday as an opportunity to denounce the respected elder. Since the 2020 election, Kissoon has been on a campaign to smear Kwayana and to denounce his legacy. In doing so, Kissoon only diminishes his only legacy while reinforcing Kwayana’s legacy. In an article titled “Kwayana at 100: Tarnished legacy,” Kissoon writes:
It was inconceivable to think that Eusi Kwayana would go down the road of endorsing election rigging. I thought that in his own unique style of writing, Kwayana would have chastised the clumsy and comical conspiracies. But this was not to be. In several replies to me in April 2020, he descended to levels of intellectual vulgarities, including that he cannot pronounce on rigging from outside of Guyana. His comedic defence of his untenable position went on and on to the point where this was not the Kwayana I knew.
This is a blatant lie. At no point did Kwayana ever endorsed a rigged election in 2020. Moreover, what Kissoon would not dare let his readers know is that his own position on the election was that Claudette Singh would declare the election to be improper because “she considers herself an African Guyanese sympathetic to the PNC.” Singh did no such thing, but it was notable to be that Kissoon sought to invoke her race to suggest that because she views herself as an African, she must be sympathetic to the PNC and to election rigging.
Since the 2020 election, Kissoon has consistently attempted to portray Eusi Kwayana as a racist because Kwayana did not rush to condemn Claudette Singh in the same manner that Kissoon himself did. I would argue with Rohit Kanhai who argued that Kissoon’s attacks on Kwayana are rooted in Kissoon’s own arrogance at being proven wrong.
I also think it’s important to bring to the attention of readers that it was Kissoon who once praised Eusi Kwayana for the fact that Kwayana fought for the human rights of all people. There was no political agenda to be advanced then, so Kissoon could speak honestly about his relationship with Kwayana.
Since 2020, Kissoon has firmly aligned himself with the PPP and has fully embraced the racialized approach to politics in Guyana. In denouncing Kwayana, Kissoon is repudiating his prior political views. The trouble with Kissoon’s approach is that it’s fundamentally dishonest, which causes him to contradict many of his own positions. For example, in February, Kissoon wrote:
Kwayana, on the other hand, has always been a devious man who masks his racial mischief with recondite grammar. Kwayana hides behind the status of the village elder and was born into the culture of mild-mannered use of language. So he lacks the capacity to generate instability because his innate deviousness leads to subtle references rather that open advocacy like [David] Hinds. But this is where the difference between Kwayana and Hinds ends. They are both racialised inciters.
The quote above not only contradicted Kissoon’s remarks in the abovementioned tribute program to Kwayana in which he praised Kwayan’s dedication to human rights, but it even contradicts what he wrote in 2021 when he argued that Kwayana “preached the sermons of race, perpetuated race narratives, advocated racial galvanization and participated in behavioural manifestation that had violent, racial overtones.” Now in 2025, we are informed by Kissoon that Kwayana has always been a devious man who masks his racial mischief because he lacks the capacity to generate instability. Which is it?
Over the past few years, Kissoon has struggled with any sort of consistency in the narrative he has tried to push about Kwayana, and all of this contradicts everything that he stated and wrote about Kwayana prior to 2020. It was not simply the remarks he made in the tribute video above. In 2018, Kissoon pointed out that Kwayana had publicly condemned Tacuma Ogunseye’s position on what Kissoon described as the “racist mayhem” which began in Buxton. That was in 2018. In 2021, Kissoon stated that Kwayana was someone who wanted to turn Guyana into Rwanda.
Kwayana’s legacy remains that of the legacy of a man who has committed his life to the cause of humanity. This is how we will be remembered. Kissoon’s attempts to attack Kwayana have done little to tarnish Kwayana’s legacy, but what it has done is enhance Kwayana’s legacy by reminding us that men whose legacies are built on integrity have built legacies which cannot be torn down by the lies of others.
