[2] His father Alexander (Alec) Drayton was from a "coloured" or brown family of mixed European/African descent; his mother Agnes Da Camara was Portuguese.
[7] In the late 1950s, he worked as a high-school teacher in Grenada and Jamaica, and in 1962 he became a lecturer in zoology at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.
While there, aged 32, he was contacted by Cheddi Jagan,[8] the Guyanese prime minister at the time, and invited to return to assume major responsibility for establishing the University of Guyana as an autonomous national institution for higher education.
[14] In the words of George Lamming: "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.