Scars of Bondage
By Tchaiko Kwayana and Eusi Kwayana
Published by On Our Own Authority! Publishing, 2023
180 pages, paperback
Banned and confiscated upon its initial publication in Guyana in 1973, this groundbreaking study of slavery by Tchaiko and Eusi Kwayana was eventually republished there twenty-five years later, but, until now, it has never been published in North America. In this remarkable work, the authors explore the social and economic violence visited upon Africans in Guyana from the period of enslavement to emancipation and the self-organized establishment of collectivized villages by Africans after emancipation—fourteen years before the Communist Manifesto was written!
This newly expanded 50th anniversary edition includes the complete original text, Eusi Kwayana’s afterword to the 1998 Guyana edition, a new foreword by Modibo Kadalie, and several appendices of insightful supplemental material, including an essay on the 1763 Berbice Revolution, two recent speeches by Eusi Kwayana, and a fascinating transcribed conversation between Eusi Kwayana and William C. Anderson.
Praise for Scars of Bondage
"Scars of Bondage combines a long view of the brutality of chattel slavery with an analysis of the tensions, hierarchies, antagonisms, and divisions produced by indentureship, immigration, and global capitalism. The Kwayanas tell this complex story with spectacular breadth, touching on everything from gender, reproduction, violence, and the family to education, language, myth, and the psyche. This rich inquiry into the myriad forces affecting the formation of the Afro-Guyanese is just as important today as it was when it was first written. [...] I was transformed especially by the book's explication of the village movements, renewed by Eusi and Tchaiko Kwayana's attention to the impossible possibility of collective organization." -Tiana Reid, Assistant Professor of English, York University
