
Andaiye, born Sandra Williams, was a Guyanese social, political, and gender rights activist. She was an early member of the executive of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in Guyana, alongside Walter Rodney, among others, and served as Coordinator and Editor, International Secretary and Women’s Secretary, until 2000. A founding member of the women’s development organization Red Thread in Guyana in 1986, Andaiye was also an executive member of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA). She worked with the Women and Development Unit of the University of the West Indies (WAND) from 1987 to 1992, and from 1987 to 1996 with CARICOM,where she was a resource person preparatory to the 1995 World Conference on Women held in Beijing. Other groups with which she worked include the Global Women’s Strike (GWS), the Women’s International Network for Wages for Caring Work, and Women Against Violence Everywhere (WAVE).
Karen de Souza and Alissa Trotz have created an incredible website dedicated to Andaiye’s life and work. The Point is to Change the World, an anthology of Andaiye’s selected writing, edited by Trotz, is forthcoming in 2020 from Pluto Press. Below we provide links to a number of tributes to and interviews with Andaiye as well as her editorial “An Open Letter to Young People,” originally published as a Women’s Eye View column in the Stabroek News in 1997, and reprinted in Alyssa Trotz’s In the Diaspora column in the same journal just after Andaiye’s death.
Andaiye, An Open Letter to Young People, Stabroek News (June 2019)
Tributes
Andaiye: An Extraordinary Woman, Stabroek News (June, 2019).
Hundreds bid farewell to women’s activist Andaiye, Guyana Times, (June, 2019).
Andaiye celebrated in moving farewell, Guyana Chronicle (June 2019).
Trinidad and Tobago Tributes to Andaiye, Trinidad and Tobago Newsday (June 2019).
39 years since Walter Rodney fell; Andaiye, Walter Rodney’s colleague has rejoined the ancestors, Pambazuka (June, 2019).
Andaiye, Caribbean Radicalism, and a Black Woman’s Critical Imprint, Association of Black Women Historians (October, 2019)
Interviews
She Who Returned Home: The Narrative of an Afro-Guyanese Activist, Meridians 5 no. 1 (2004). [$$$]
Counting Women’s Caring Work: An Interview with Andaiye, Small Axe, 15 (2004).
Red Thread’s Research: An Interview with Andaiye. Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, no. 7 (2013).
Andaiye: 11 September 1942, Georgetown, British Guiana — 31 May 2019, Georgetown, Guyana.