0:19BSay that again?
0:21CMy fault.
0:22BIt is your fault. It’s all your fault. So I want to talk about, you know, we celebrating the, you know, love stories. And we say all the time that love is an action verb. So, you know, this is not just a story about a nice beautiful feeling, but how that feeling was transformed into action that has affected the lives of so many people. That’s Mama Tchaiko and Baba Eusi Kwayana. I have them a little bit out of their element because it’s a little cold right now. We’re out here in California.
0:59AIn the tropical.
1:01BRight.
1:01CSo we’re at the beach, but we’re not in the tropics.
1:03BIf that makes sense. But I wanted to ask y’all about how you met. I’ve heard Mama’s version of it several times, and I’m gonna ask her to repeat it. But at first I want to hear -- well, yeah, let me first -- let me hear from Baba, because I know that the ambassador and the diplomat in you will try to complement Mama’s story if you hear hers first. So I’m gonna ask I want you to give me your best inclination, or indication, or whatever the word is, your testimony of how you all met. Baba.
1:41AWell, that’s a problem. I never thought of it. I never had to think of it.
1:47BWhat does that mean exactly?
1:50AWell, we met. We just met. It was a fortunate meeting.
1:57BYou say it was an unfortunate meeting?
2:04AMight have been unfortunate for some people, not for me. Right, right.
2:10BOkay, I mean, give me -- give us details. Where, where was the place?
2:12AIt was in Guyana.
2:14BA little bit more specific than it was in Guyana.
2:18AIt was in Guyana. Can I be specific?
2:21BAny village, any occasion?
2:23AWe first met in Georgetown, was it? No, because she came to Guyana.
2:29BOkay.
2:29ASo it had to be her trying to find somebody she probably heard about, I don’t know. But it was quite a meeting. I didn’t know how it would end, to tell you the truth. I was a bachelor, I was busy, reactive. So, but I don’t go too much for faces, you know, and physical appearance.
3:07BRight.
3:08AThis was an attractive person.
3:10BRight.
3:11AAnd, but I have a philosophy that I live by. I look on a woman and the first thing that I tell myself is, It has nothing to do with you. This is just another person, you and me. Don’t get concerned. And I approached Mama with that same attitude.
3:37BOK.
3:42ABecause I’m doing a certain kind of work, and I’m not on the lookout. But that began to change when we began to talk, because I’m hearing, quite apart from this physical attraction, beauty and all of the attributes that she had, I’m hearing A mind, you know. I’m hearing a mind talking. And although my head didn’t go to marriage, I knew that this is a harmonious mind, a kind of mind that I had a lot in sympathy with. That is my recollection.
4:42BWhat, do you remember the time of year it was?
4:46AI know it was 1968.
4:50B1968?
4:51AYes, I don’t know what time of year it was.
4:54BOkay.
4:55AI didn’t have a passport. What time did you say?
5:00CIt was July.
5:02BJuly.
5:03AJuly 1968.
5:05BOkay, we’ll get back to Mr. Kwayana and try to jar his memory a little bit. So Mama, give me your version. How did you meet the Talaman?
5:15CUm, it all started at a party in New York, a going-away party in New York, for me to go on this trip and for Kerepes Kosicili and his then-wife Melba, the late Melba.
5:33BReally? Kosicili?
5:36CYes.
5:37BOkay.
5:37CWe were, we were at the home of, uh, the cousin of Mary Lewis, Dolores, who lived on 113th, I guess, and I lived on 112th. But I had already sublet my apartment because of this trip, and I was, uh, I came down for this going-away party. Um, Melba was not Wells. They were expecting their first child, their child, and I had to come in from Spring Valley because I had -- I was living there while my house, my apartment was being sublet. And they asked me about my itinerary. I had the good fortune of getting my itinerary done to a chap named Randy, the infamous Randy at the Columbia Travel Service, because he was very good at having people decide where they want to go, and he got the miles, the miles for the final leg of that, and then he could tell us all the intermediate stops that we were to take.
6:47CAnd I was going as far as Brazil. I was stopped -- I was going first to the Yucatan. Yucatan. Peninsula because I wanted to see the Olmec structures and all of that. Then I was going to go to Mexico City because I had met stewardesses when I was in Luxor coming back from Nigeria in ’64. One lived in -- Elsie Moliere, who lived as a KLM stewardess, lived in Mexico City. And then my next stop was going to be be, um, the, um, Panama area, cuz I want to see that whole Panama Canal and the -- and, and understand more about the, the, uh, the tragic of -- to the people who built it.
7:37CAnd from there, I was going to skip all of the Caribbean islands because I just assumed that you could always go to those islands. My next stop was going to be, um, Venezuela, but Bluefields, in that area where you had an African population on the coast. And from there, the next stop would be Guyana, and from Guyana to Suriname, and from Suriname to go in the interior of Suriname, and then to 4 stops.
8:07ASuriname was a major place. Yes, yes.
8:10CAnd to 4 stops in Brazil, Belém, Recife, Recife, Rio, Bahia, Rio, and then São Paulo. I was -- I didn’t have time to go to São Paulo in the end. And so I was telling Cô Cecília of my itinerary, and everywhere I was to go, I had gone to the missions for those places in New York. Fortunate to be in New York where I could get the contacts. I was looking for contacts of people who could give me information on African survivors in those various places, and also suggestions of housing for females, inexpensive but cheap housing, but safe housing for a female traveling alone, hostels and that kind of thing.
8:57CSo when I told him about Guyana, I had gone through this whole litany of places, and I told him that I was probably going to have to forget Guyana because I’d gone to the Guyana Mission and had been told by a woman, when I told her what I wanted, and I wanted some idea of African survivals in Guyana, she looked at me squarely and said, there are no African survivors in Guyana, and she turned on her heels and walked away. So I told Sister Cecily that I, I thought I would bypass Guyana and spend those extra days in Suriname where I had no doubt that there were in fact African survivors.
9:42CAnd then he told me to go to the Guyana consulate and he gave me the name of one Sidney Saul who was the consul general for Guyana there. And Sidney had told him about -- this is 1978 -- 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Oh yeah, that was quite recent. Yes, that April. And so he told me about a man that the council Sidney Saul had told him about who had had a rally and at a rally had put the West on notice about what retribution there should be that I won’t mention deliberately now unless he wants to himself.
10:26AWas a rally held by Mr. Burnham?
10:28CYeah, there was a rally and he put the West on notice that for every one of our people killed, there would be some retribution. And so I said, I want to meet this man. So I went to the Guyana Mission and met with Sidney Sow. And he gave me the name of one Sidney King. He gave me several other names of possible contacts, a chap at Booker who was at Booker then, I don’t remember his name, and a few others that I could, Smith or something, who I could, who could give me some information. I wrote off to them as I did to everybody else saying the same thing, I’ll be coming into your country at X time and I would like to be able to see you.
11:14CI’d like to of advice about housing, but I also would like to be able to talk with you about the African presence. So that was how I got to meet this Sidney King. He wrote back to say that he would be out of town, he would be out of Georgetown at that time, but he would be coming in later. I was booked at the Tower Hotel, I think. I think it was, but he would be coming in later on, and he did come, and we met and talked, you know. So what did she tell him? That, so that black lady -- Circus? No, no, Heather’s not the circus, no.
11:57CNo, no, no. Heather said that lady wasn’t a child. It was, I can’t remember. Stafford?
12:06ASarah Stafford.
12:06CI mean, what’s the name of the place? It was a kind of bed and breakfast around to the side.
12:15BOh, I see.
12:16CSarah Stafford.
12:17AYes.
12:18CWe stayed at Stafford once. Yes. So that was --
12:21AShe had a recording place in there.
12:23CSo that was how we met. He came in and we talked and he was a teacher. and I got a sense of his commitment to teaching. And I was at that point -- what my travels were for, I decided that in Panama, that after I saw the horrendous death and destruction of the West Indians in building that Panama Canal, the --
12:55APanama Canal.
12:57CI had decided in Panama that what I was going to do was to go to Africa and do research, and my book would have to do with the African contribution to the building of the Western Hemisphere. That was what I was going to be doing.
13:12BSo did you end up making it to Suriname?
13:16COh yes, oh yes, by all means.
13:18AThe joke is that I had been in Suriname by accident.
13:22BOkay.
13:22AHaving met Lana Covina in Ketse and Dan, he came to Suriname in 1965 and sent for me, sent a ticket or something and asked me to come and spend. I spent two days with him here. He was doing some research on the Juka, the Maroons, and there was a place called Brocopondo. where he stayed because they were building a lake, uh, what do you call it?
13:54CA dam there.
13:55AThey were building a dam, a hydroelectric dam, and they had to transfer these persons, these indigenous people, to this made-up place called Brokopondo. And that’s where we stayed, and I stayed with him.
14:17BSo you met in 1968. That’s news to me. I thought you all met a little later than that.
14:21CI was 68 on that trip to as far as Brazil.
14:26BSo July ’68.
14:27CThe end of July ’68. He had that meeting there at Asker. I have that tape of the meeting, not just not at Asker but at County where I was welcomed. And there’s a chap called --
14:42AOkonmi Komberare in Gun.
14:45CYes.
14:46AA Congolese, a fellow who said he was Congolese and he’s Okonmi Komberare in Gun. And he said it meant he who touched the world and it shook. So I translated it to he who touched the world and shook it.
15:02CWhat I -- you see, when I got in 1970, ’68, I had come from my early time in Berkeley with the Afro-American Association where we did so much work on the African presence and we read Herskovits’ The Myth of the Negro Past and I knew about the Jukkas and all from that. And then having I left the country in ’62 from the Oakland Public Schools, having seen the extraordinary waste of it all, and then going from there to Nigeria and teaching there for 2 years, and coming back to New York. So I was living in New York when I finally had a summer off where I didn’t have to be teaching. And that’s when I decided to use my Eastern Airlines credit card and, and, uh, and take this.
16:04BEastern Airlines, there’s a blast from the past.
16:06CYes, that’s that. Well, Pan Am will be a later blast as well.
16:10BBut, uh, so after that trip you ended up coming back to the States?
16:14COh yeah, yeah, yeah. I had to leave.
16:16AI was also on that quest to Africans, African descendants in the Western Hemisphere.
16:22BOh wow.
16:22CSo we had a lot in common. And he taught, and I had all these concerns about education, as did he, and I was happy to find that they had picketed in front of the U.S. Embassy about this Ahmed Evans in Columbus, Ohio.
16:43AYeah, he was sentenced to death by an all-white jury.
16:45BYeah.
16:45AAnd Austria picketed over there.
16:48CSo it was With all of those similar affinities and similar philosophies, and with education also being very high, he was called Teach, you know, and the whole question of a teacher being so important in the community is something that --
17:10AAll teachers were called Teach.
17:11CYeah, yeah, yeah, but something that I was happy to see. And I was happy to see exhibited, because he still was teaching. He’d leave GMC, Guyana Marketing Corporation, and go up for lessons, and had all of those things that were going on in his life at the same time.
17:30AHmm.
17:31CAll of which were areas of support and building, building community. building African community. And I had come out of that tradition as well, especially out of that richness of it at the Afro-American Association. That Afro-American Association would start off in mine and Mary Lewis’s apartment there in Berkeley, Dwight and Dana. And later on, even after I left the country, it would continue and became the spawn for both the Black Panther Party as well as Karenga’s US. It all started with the Afro-American Association in our apartment.
18:21AAnd it’s not her opinion, you know, it’s Jimmy Garrett’s opinion.
18:25CYeah, and it’s written.
18:26AJimmy Garrett was a Black Panther. He is of that opinion.
18:30BSo really, you’re at the foundation of the Black Panther Party as well.
18:34CWell, I guess you could say that. Although when they really became -- when Newton and all those people came, I had left the country. I left the country because I could not see any future for African American people in education. When I got -- I had to -- it took a man who was a city council member from the Caribbean, from the West Indies, I don’t know, remember where he was from, to be able to get me into the public schools of --
19:02ARon Dellums?
19:03CNo, no, no. Of Oakland. Although I had taught for 2 years at an exit school in Augusta, I had -- I was in recreation and Ron Dellums was up the street from me at the infirmary center as a director and I was Down at the place that had one of the 2 pool tables, his being the other, in the recreation department. I wanted to get back into education. It took political muscle to get me into a school. And when I got to that school, Roosevelt Middle School, just east of the lake, when I got there, I found a white grandmother who had been allowed to be hired there. Gordon McAndrew was the personnel person at the city’s -- for the Oakland City Schools there. His name became very big in things later on. And also a woman from the -- who graduated from Oregon State who had no, not even any student teaching experience.
20:19Aexperience.
20:20CThey had been hired. The grandmother was bored, and they had been hired at this school, although I had to take muscle to get there, although I had taught at an extraordinary school under L.K. Reese in Atlanta, in Augusta, Georgia. Then when I got there and found what was going on, that across the street from me, that you had a Mr. Smith who taught important subject of science. And all the youngsters had to do was ask him, can we have a free day? And he’d get the record player, and this is when Chubby Checker was the rage with the pony, The Twist. And they’d do -- they’d dance. And he said --
21:02AApplied science.
21:03CI guess so. Using the instrument. Phonograph. And he was saying, well, you have to have them do things they like. And he took his time to organize a fashion show for them. Meantime, I was pulling all my friends from Berkeley to come into the class and talk. Al Young had come in, Henry Ramsey. And before I left that day, because we pulled people out of the hallways into our class, we started a summer school. Malaika taught calculus at that summer school. Set theory to youngsters who were elementary.
21:38BHmm.
21:38CAnd Ramsey was a part of it, and all these people came to summer school. But that was my final, that was my swan song for the area, because I found that although we could do all of this, and although we could start a summer school and have parents and their youngsters come voluntarily, that there was no hope when you had a 40% dropout of black males at 12th grade. 10th grade in 1962, ’61, ’62.
22:06BWow.
22:06CAnd that’s why I left the country and went to Nigeria.
22:08BOkay, I know, um, because of time we’re gonna have to stop this right now, but, um, yeah, yeah, pause. There’s a lot that I want to get to. I’m gonna ask, um, one question and then we’re gonna get to the juicy, um, details in the middle. But just for -- yeah, just something to put out there, um, Now, looking back after almost 39 years of marriage, what other than me, Ras Kofi, what’s your proudest accomplishment in terms of as a collective? I know you all both can boast about so many things that you’ve been able to do. What’s your proudest accomplishment of something that you’ve done together?
23:00CYou want to go first on that? I, I, I don’t boast.
23:04BOkay, well, don’t boast. What’s your proudest accomplishment, sir? Lord have mercy, I used the wrong thing.
23:09ANone whatever. Together, yes, we had some beautiful children. That is very together.
23:17CJust one of 4.
23:19BThere it is.
23:21CWithout any exceptions and without any One superior to the other.
23:26BExcept for Kofi.
23:28CEven Kofi. All equal.
23:30BOkay, well, the tape is running out, so --
23:33CAll equal.
23:33BPeople are not interested in the equality right now. They look -- other than that, Mama?
23:39CWe have, um, I think because we, we have so many of the same interests and, uh, we’ve been able to complement each other in whatever we do. And even now, and even as late as this week, this man is the one who reads my papers for grammar errors as I go on to live for everything else. But I think it’s just what we -- how we live. He’s your grandmother in that sense, and so he’s the one who will spoil and tolerate things. that I don’t tolerate for a second. He can always find a reason why that I can’t understand. So that’s the, that’s the two sides of it there. He can always find the good in whatever there is. I could do that too for many years before children, I guess.
24:35ARight.
24:36CBut I think it’s just that we’ve had a lot of We have a lot of the same interests and a lot of the same philosophy, and that’s very, very important. We have the same drive.
24:49BOkay, Miss Auntie Sanna, we’re going to continue because you all are very much, uh, you’re intriguing me, uh, or the, the information you’re giving is very intriguing, I should say. Um, and I want to definitely continue, and I know the world wants to know about this love story. So we’ll pause for now.
