By Harry Hergash
The University of Guyana Guild of Graduates, Ontario (UGGGO) has planned a celebration of life and launch of the memoir titled, An Accidental Life, of Professor Harold Drayton who passed away recently in Maryland, USA. This event will be held on May 5, 2018 from 1.30 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. at the Don Mills Library (Auditorium), 888 Lawrence Avenue East, Toronto. Speakers will include Ms Choo Anyin, Guyana's Consul General in Toronto and Professor Alissa Trotz of the University of Toronto. Due to limited seating, those interested in attending should call Noreen Ally: 416-423-2711 or Jeanette Singh: 905-570-6490 or Harry Hergash: 416-626-2897. At the launch, price of the book will be thirty dollars, cash only.
Harold Drayton was born in 1929 and grew up in colonial British Guiana in the 1930s and 1940s. In the mid 1940s, he attended Queen's College, the top secondary school in the country, where he was a Prefect and also served as Recording Secretary of the Literary and Debating Society. His early adulthood years were spent as a science teacher, first in Grenada and later in Jamaica with an intervening short stint as a student at the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, which later evolved into the University of the West Indies.
In 1954, he moved on to the University of Edinburgh as an undergraduate student, and a researcher into the properties of cancer-inducing viruses, graduating with an Honours Degree in the Biological Sciences, and in 1960 with a PhD.
After a year as Lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, he accepted an invitation in 1962 from the Premier of British Guiana, Dr Cheddi Jagan, to return home to help in establishing a national university. He served as the University of Guyana's first Deputy Vice-Chancellor during its foundation year, 1963, and as Professor and Head of the Department of Biology until April 1972.
Over the next three decades, his professional life was devoted to the development of human resources for health – in Barbados with Pan American Health Organisation until December 1989; and from 1990 until his final retirement in 2003, as Director of the PAHO-WHO Collaborating Center for International Health at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
In a commentary on Harold Drayton's memoir, Professor George Lamming, George Lamming Pedagogical Centre, The Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination, University of the West Indies, Barbados, writes: “Harry Drayton’s memoir spans more than half a century of personal and institutional engagement with almost every territory in the Caribbean. His long and distinguished service to the region has been marked through his gifts of teaching and research. Education was for Harry neither the path to personal enrichment, nor the license for a solitary vice of the mind, but rather something to be returned to the community through the practice of daily living.
Whether it was the cut and thrust of university debate, or the more frightening turbulence of Guyana’s political leadership struggles of the 1960s, Drayton features as a critical witness and participant. An Accidental Life is the portrait of an era which defines the modern Caribbean and the long decisive process of decolonisation during the second half of the twentieth century.”
In his review, Professor Linden F. Lewis, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, writes “... This memoir then represents the product of an examined life. It is replete with historical details that would benefit academics in search of rich primary data. It is at times humorous, critical, elucidating, and sometimes polemical.
The memoir is a tour de force of the political landscape not just of Guyana, but of Grenada, Jamaica, and of trade union organization, as well as the experiment of Caribbean federalism... (Harry's) connection to the PPP of the early 1950s also meant that Harry was in contact with Linden Forbes Burnham, the long-serving Premier, Prime Minister and President of Guyana. Many will find the correspondence between Forbes Burnham and Harry, and that between Harry and Cheddi Jagan, to be absolutely fascinating.”