It was the Hon Hubert Jack, then Minister without Portfolio, who, in an address titled “The Thrust into the Hinterland” in June 1970, said and I quote: “With our coastlands already crowded, with the need to develop the enormous resources of the Interior so as to maintain and improve the standard of living of our people, faced with the urgent need to establish communities in the Interior, if only to thwart the designs of those who cast envious eyes on our land, the people and Government of Guyana are now embarked on the challenging task of making the Hinterland truly their own”.
He went on to say that: “The Bartica-Mazaruni-Potaro Region, is an area in excess of 2000 sq miles and possesses great possibilities for the development of a complex of complementary activities-cattle ranching and dairy farming, mixed agricultural farming, mining (gold, diamonds, tungsten and molybdenum) and timber extraction. The reactivation of a small hydroelectric power plant near the junction of the Potaro and Essequibo Rivers at Tumatumari will provide power to meet the growing needs of the Region. Airstrips and fair weather landing strips are already at hand, and a forest road capable of taking heavy vehicles provides a communications link with the Coast.
There are three areas of settlement which offer prospects for immediate expansion. These are: Tumatumari, Mahdia and Konawaruk. Mahdia is to be developed as a focal point for the region’s activities”.
That was 38 years ago!
Even before 1970 the wealth and strategic importance of this area had been assessed, proven, and exploited during colonial times. In 1934, Vincent Roth, then Mines Officer, recorded that in this area we had the Headquarters of Minnehaha Development Company with E H Humphrey as Manager, with his two sons being responsible for workings at Prosperity Hill and Congo Heart Burn.
Here also was The Eagle Mountain Holding Company; and, the Guiana Gold Company, operating gold dredges in the Konawaruk area. A little later came BG Consolidated Goldfields with its HQ at 100 miles Potaro. It established a railway constructed to run on greenheart rails built by Cyril Shotton, with a locomotive engine titled ‘King George VI’. It operated huge gold dredges, one titled ‘E.J. Waddington’, powered by electricity generated by the two 2 MW turbines at the Tumatumari Hydro Station. One of these two turbines functioned under my watch as Director General Guyana National Service up to 1987 and, operated by the resourceful Mr Cornette and his GNS staff, provided power for Tumatumari and Konawaruk.
Vincent Roth wrote of the rich history and culture of this region in the 1930s and 40s with the Oriental Circus Company, a local African Vaudeville Group of which the lead dancers were Madam Sally and Dinah May; of Grey the Shotton, with a locomotive engine titled ‘King George VI’. It operated huge gold dredges, one titled ‘E.J. Waddington’, powered by electricity generated by the two 2 MW turbines at the Tumatumari Hydro Station. One of these two turbines functioned under my watch as Director General Guyana National Service up to 1987 and, operated by the resourceful Mr Cornette and his GNS staff, provided power for Tumatumari and Konawaruk.
Vincent Roth wrote of the rich history and culture of this region in the 1930s and 40s with the Oriental Circus Company, a local African Vaudeville Group of which the lead dancers were Madam Sally and Dinah May; of Grey the saxophonist, whose stage act including eating glass tumblers and light bulbs. Of the St Lucian community that lived in the French Quarter and who celebrated their National Day ‘La Rose’ on 27 August. He wrote of Look and Weep Mountain and Kettledrum Creek. Of bush trucks called The Pork Knocker and Puffing Billy.
Later in the 1970s another pioneer, the Scotsman Matthew French Young, who worked on the roads here and elsewhere, and who was the manager of Camp Young in the 1970/1971 Mahdia to Lethem Road Project, tells us in his memoirs, which I edited and published in 2002, of the Eagle Mountain helipad built on the summit of the mountain by the Americans during the war; of them using long range spotlights to measure the distances to other peaks around-Ebini, Konawaruk and Glendor Mountains; of the old spring behind the school, in a gully at the foot of 112 miles Compound Hill, which supplied 2500 gallons of freshwater every 3 hours for the Compound; and of Mahdianna or Waterdog Creek, a tributary flowing off Eagle Mountain which had the potential to supply Mahdia’s fresh water requirements; of Rafferty’s Gas Plant which, burning ordinary bushwood, and extracting the tar and producing cooking gas, prompted the then PM, after visiting same in 1977, to state that it had the potential to produce cooking gas for the whole of the country if funding could be mobilized. Matthew Young wrote of persons from other parts of Guyana, who came to work on the road project, who were interested in acquiring land for large scale farming and wanted to return and settle in this area.
When the road project commenced in 1970 Matthew Young was a key coordinator and like Vincent Roth 40 years before him, was a keen observer of the traditions and culture of this area. He participated in the St Lucians’ national day parade through the village of Mahdia. The parade always ended with a cook-up and all night dance at Nickson’s Hall. He wrote of the Amerindian community at Campbelltown; of the enthusiasm, aches and pains, fun and laughter, of the students who came from as far as the UWI to work voluntarily alongside Guyanese on the Mahdia – Lethem road. He regaled us with the descriptions given to some of the hill and mountain landscapes that we had to traverse along the alignment of the trail leading south from Mahdia via North Fork, Konawaruk, Muruwa, Siparuni and Burro Burro. These names reflected the shape and or relative steepness of the hill features as you trudged on foot or struggled to ascend in heavily laden vehicles, and these are embedded in our memory-names of hills such as the trio-‘O ME GAWD!’; ‘O ME LAWD!’ and ‘WHAT IS DIS!’, and with apologies to the fairer sex, the classic description of the shape of one particular hill feature: ‘OOMAN SIDDUNG BAD AN MAN AH PEEP AM’.
What is the relevance of all that I have said? It gives context to the strategic vision of Mahdia as a pole of development for this region. Alongside theminerals extracted from the earth and, bearing inmind these arenot renewable resources, and alongside the timber extraction which needsrethinking, in the contextof the role of forests as a global resource in arresting the negatives of Climate Change, this area has a rich legacy of hard work, pioneering initiatives, resourcefulness, innovativeness and technical competence, which, in many cases and for a variety of reasons we have failed to really capitalize on, incharting a course for sustainable development. We have the land, the rivers, the forest and the biodiversity and beautiful
landscapes, we have the logistic lines of communication- trails which are used but need to be improved, connecting to Bartica and viaLinden to the coast, and via Mabura to Lethem.
We have the potential for 4MW or more of hydroelectrity if we rehabilitate Tumatumari. We have institutional memory handed down from successive generations; the wonderfully rich culture contributed to by our Amerindians, by coastlanders who became pork knockers, foresters, road construction and maintenance workers, foreign workers involved in mineral extraction and supervising the construction of the Tumatumari Hydro and the Denham Suspension Bridge over Garraway Stream in the Potaro River, our islanders rom St Lucia, and services providers-commerce and entertainment-hardy, pioneering fun-loving men, women and youths. We have the lessons learnt from our experiments with the National Youth Corps and the Guyana National Service; And now, we have the very real threats to food security, the real threat of flooding as a consequence of erratic weather patterns and rising sea levels, and
the negative consequences of high unemployment among some sections of our population, leading to dysfunctional attitudes and behaviour patterns. We have, in my opinion, the conditions which can allow for the strategic vision of previous generations, as reflected in the words of the Hon Hubert Jack, to be realized if we consult, plan in an integrated manner, and with creative, out of the box thinking, see Mahdia, in the same way as Brazil saw Brasilia, Belize saw Belize City – a potential inland township, which can be a focal point for rapid development.
It is in this context and with such a vision that we must see the commissioning of this GSM facility as another facilitating step in developing the connectivity that will create opportunities for enterprise development, investments in a diversification programme outside of natural resources extraction-in agriculture crops and livestock, agro processing, tourism, and of expanding settlements equipped with the facilities and services, that can be catalysts for demographic shifts in our population towards the hinterland.
