By A.A. Fenty
So what’s this about today? It is because my offering about Afro-Guyanese attitudes to land and agriculture vis-a-vis the Indo seeming love of the land, presented here two/three weeks ago, attracted a few quiet but interesting comments. Then ACDA let me have their position on an issue they deem to be “African land rights”. To the point of calling for an enquiry through an “African-Guyanese land commission”.
Now I am no fan of the African Cultural and Development Association (ACDA) – when it is in its (usual?) Acrimonious Mode. They might say that ACDA has to be “assertive”, “aggressive” in its dedication to achieving justice for the descendants of Africans who slaved their lives away in pre-colonial and colonial Guyana. I can’t have any problems too with what their Elder Stanley Cooke calls “An ethnic–specific organization”. Other groups have theirs too, after all.
But I prefer ACDA when it is promoting positive, uplifting programmes. It is doing so these days. In a variety of ways. One-time White House fellow and black activist, Eric Phillips is a driving force. And yes, I appreciate that there needs to be intellectual dynamism in prosecuting the case for “African” rights – whether in terms of land, employment or culture legacies.
So a few weeks ago I did my part in these columns, to divest my own misconception about African Guyanese not favouring land or agriculture after Emancipation.
I explained their development of a vibrant peasantry and village-movement before colonial sabotage put paid to their land–based enterprises. I never-the-less, still hold the view that whilst the early Afro-Guyanese turned to the professions and largely left the land (out of justified frustration), the rapidly-multiplying Indians embraced the soil – sugar, rice, provisions, even as they “intruded” into the professions also.
Another factor I now share, where the comparative developmental progress of our two major groups are concerned, is that, to me, the more acquisitive Indo-Guyanese combined to develop and exploit commercial skills. They knew they were already feeding the “others”. So they then developed the acumen of opening stores, manufacturing concerns and import-export/trading agencies. The rest is stark, visible social-economic history. Just walk down Water, Lombard, Regent and Robb streets in the capital or in New Amsterdam, Rose Hall or Anna Regina and read the names of the commercial enterprises beckoning to you.
Yes, I have read the reasons, causes, explanations preferred by my good friends for Afro-Guyanese’s relative failure in agriculture and commerce. I can even believe that active Discrimination is practised against those non-“Indian” citizens who want loans, mortgages, licences and such like. However, my prejudice and gut feelings tell me that too many Afro-Guyanese neglected the land and commerce then. And now, is it too late? ACDA with its programmes, does not think so. Perhaps that’s why it supports any movement for land or history’s compensation.
Manumission – Land
or money?
Now, sometime ago an ACDA-related activist preached compensation or reparation for the “descendants of all manumitted Africans.”
I rushed to find out that to “manumit” is to set free from slavery”. I didn’t bother to research further to flesh out the difference between “manumitted” and “Emancipated”. However the act for the Abolition of Slavery in the British Parliament (1833) uses the term “manumitted”.
This activist Noah, once Ulric, is calling for some twenty billion pounds sterling as “reparations for the enslavement of our ancestors in Guyana”. (The British planters did get compensation upon Emancipation!).
Or he wants our Parliament to grant 100,000 acres of land “to the descendants of manumitted Africans in LIEU of the Plantations which were made into villages” – forcibly by the post Emancipation colonial BG government.
Since, at my present age and stage, I am “mellow” enough not to scoff at the most innovative or strange situations, I find the demands intriguing, fascinating. After all I’ve seen apologies for historical wrongs and money for historical extortions being given – in Canada and elsewhere. My position is that there should be, at least, a hearing on the issue. However outrageous or ridiculous it might seem to some. An attempted debate in Parliament barely skimmed only the surface of this issue.
ACDA loves to quote the 1948 Venn Commission which concluded that “to build these coastal plantations alone, “a volume of 100,000,000 tons of earth had to be moved by the hands of African slaves…They had driven back the sea, and cleared, drained and reclaimed 15,000 square miles of forest and swamp. This is equivalent to 9,000,000 acres of land. In short, all the fields on which the sugar estates are now based were cleared drained and irrigated by African labour forces. All the plantations now turned into villages, land settlements, towns and cities were built by unpaid African labour. In the process of the building of these plantations, careful research has shown that African installed the following infrastructure: 2,580,000 miles of drainage canals, trenches and interbed drains, 31,500 miles of dams, roads and footpaths and 2,176 miles of sea and river defences.”
So now that Amerindians are gaining legal rights and documentation to lands larger than some Caribbean Islands, now that the President wants the country to make some money off our forests and is inviting the Caribbean to come farm here, ACDA is worried about so much land leaving the Afro-Guyanese domain. Were Afro-Guyanese really using productively the lands of West Berbice? What’s the government’s position on the rejected EU loans for small farmers?
Surely, these issues must not be allowed to disappear – like guns, or gangs. If only because there is enough Guyana Land to go around!
Those wretched “B’s”
All the letters of our alphabet have to be important. Even though “X” and “Z” seem somewhat diminished.
When my heart cries out for Guyana these days B’s come to mind. At the risk of seeming facetious or flippant over unfortunate, grotesque goings-on, let me explain.
“B” now is for Bulls that bite and ravage, for Bees that sting to death, for Buses that speed and kill, for bullets of course, for the battering and Butchering our females endure in these times, bombs as in Channa and all else that is wrong in our Beautiful, Blighted land. (Note that I avoided “Black” – and “Buxton”).
Until…
Child “soldiers”? Not Child Bandits? Or Child killers?
I was so needy as a child, I could have become one? Not with my type of grandmother!
President abroad. So why an acting President at home. The PM merely performs the functions at home. We can’t have two Presidents!
How is the GRA Polar probe coming along?
Held over –“ insure-an-bun”.
‘Til Next Week!
Comments?
Allanfenty@yahoo.com
