Dear Editor,
I would like to add my voice of protest to the letter by Vishnu Bisram (The Indian and African experience has been similar,’ May 11) when he tries to equate the Indian indenture system to that of African slavery. I once wrote a letter to SN in which I admonished Mr Bisram to stick to polling and now he has gone and done something which will seriously question his credibility as a pollster in Guyana.
Mr Bisram’s letter shows his incredible ignorance of history (or, just as bad, a serious revisionist manipulation of history).
First of all, all the land which the East Indians came to work was mostly sugar estate land, and had been cleared many years earlier by the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves who worked under the most cruel conditions. To create these sugar estates, the white masters beat, killed, raped, bought and sold the Africans while they were forced to move gigantic amounts of earth in order to create the estates for King Sugar. Indians were exploited and treated badly in more ways than one, but to compare their situation with that of African slaves is to insult and denigrate those ancestors of slavery. Mr Bisram should hide his face in shame!
Secondly, for Mr Bisram to compare the passage of Indians from India to that of the African slave trade is ludicrous. Any student of history knows that the African slave trade was the greatest genocide ever committed in humankind’s history and should never be compared with any other injustice. It is estimated that the Middle Passage (African slaves transported from Africa to the West Indies) alone decimated millions upon millions.
In closing, I would like to let Mr Bisram know that the world we live in is a real world and we are not living in the dark ages. Knowledge is universal; truth is powerful; feelings are sacred; God is love and everything is everything.
Yours faithfully,
Cheddi (Joey) Jagan (Jr)
