Dear Editor
M Maxwell is not a real person. He is not in Gecom’s database. This prominent lawyer/professional is well known to us. His most recent intervention was his argument that the APNU is abusing the Cummingsburg Accord. If newspaper editors continue to print his letters, fully knowing no such person exists, I would recommend they read the proposed cybercrime law about the media “knowing, printing false things”. In any case, I will respond to him the next time using his real name.
History has recorded that enslaved Africans arrived in Guyana in the mid-17th century and were in Guyana for 100 to 200 years before the Wai Wai and Wapishana nations. They also cleared 15,000 square miles or 18% of Guyana and lost 450,000 lives to genocide during this criminal enslavement. The question being asked in my letter was why shouldn’t Africans be given lands in Guyana for reparatory justice for the crimes against humanity against them, as has been the moral and legal precedent in over 20 cases globally. I also stated the Government of Guyana, in the quest for social cohesion (economic justice), should immediately halt all other land leases beyond the current land titling exercise of 13.8% for Amerindians, until African land justice is addressed.
Captured and enslaved Africans built Guyana. They cleared, drained and reclaimed 15,000 square miles of forest and swamps (18% of Guyana). Africans installed 2,580,000 miles of drainage canals, trenches and inter-bed drains; 3,500 miles of dams, roads and footpaths, and 2,176 miles of sea and river defence. The Venn Commission also reported that “to build the coastal plantation alone, a value of 100,000,000 tons of earth had to be moved by the hands of Africans. This is factual. And there needs to be reparatory justice for this.
Chinese and Indian foreign companies have received hundreds of thousands of hectares of land from the last PPP government at the unacceptable price of US$12½ cents per hectare for 50 to 99 years while Africans were being denied lands. Mr Maxwell has hidden from addressing these historical facts and acts as if he is a politician in a law court.
Now to the matters the Mr Maxwell has raised. His first issue is similar to that raised by Paul Chekema in his letter in the Guyana Times entitled ‘Eric Phillips has offended the Guyanese Indigenous People’. Mr Chekema claims, “The Wai Wais like all indigenous peoples have been nomadic peoples before settling in the land which is now known as Guyana. As such, the entire South America belongs to us, and the national boundaries which created Guyana have not stopped us even now from engaging in cross-border activities with our brothers and sisters in Brazil”. Mr Maxwell seems to take the same position that the Indigenous People came first and own all of Guyana (and South America). This assertion and lack of logic make us understand his arguments are not based on scholarship. Most of the criticism from the few in denial seems to result from my exposure of the inconvenient truth hidden from our history books that 3 tribes who live in Guyana have, along with the other nations, already received some 13.8% of Guyana by law, and they came here 100 to 200 years after Africans. No one, including Mr Maxwell has disputed this historical fact. Also, Mr Maxwell says I am against Amerindians having 13.8 % of Guyana. This is not true. I congratulated both the Government of Guyana and the 9 Amerindian nations for this 50th anniversary accomplishment.
Mr Maxwell speaks about Amerindians being the first.
But were he to read Guyanese born Ivan van Sertima’s book They came before Columbus, he would know Europeans were the last to arrive here. Secondly, were he to read the epic story The Journey of Man by renowned American scientist Spencer Wells who proved by genetic analysis Africans were the first people on Earth, and first in India, and first in China, and first in Australia, and first in the Americas., including Brazil and the USA, he would be more balanced. Everyone is genetically African.
Finally, if both Mr Chekema and Mr Maxwell were to google the name Luzia, they may find that this was the name given to the “Negroid” skeleton found in Brazil in 1995 that proved another people were here before the Amerindians.
According to the New York Times, 1995, Dr Walter Neves, an anthropologist at the University of São Paulo said, ‘’We can no longer say that the first colonizers of the Americas came from the north of Asia, as previous models have proposed… This skeleton is nearly 2,000 years older than any skeleton ever found in the Americas, and it does not look like those of Amerindians or North Asians.”
However, with the logic of both Messrs Maxwell and Chekema, Africans should own the entire world, as they were on the Earth first.
Next, Mr Maxwell shows his colonial love of Europeans by stating, “Every ethnic group contributed significantly in their own way in the time they were here. Africans included.
Some provided hard labour, others provided wealth and capital, trade, skills and entrepreneurship. The Europeans designed the waterways, dams, roads, etc, that African labour built. Indentured servants built anew, expanded, rebuilt or maintained for decades”.
Slavery was a criminal enterprise according to international law. The Europeans and their governments became criminally enriched from killing enslaved Africans and plundering land that was not theirs. They implemented the genocide of a large number of the enslaved. They raped enslaved women and girls millions of times. They branded millions of men, women and children with hot irons. Is this the European contribution Mr Maxwell speaks so proudly of? The wealth they took from the Caribbean to build Europe was in today’s jargon blood money.
Next, Mr Maxwell shows his further disdain for Africans in Guyana by asking pseudo-intellectual Darwinism type questions such as “what would Africans do with the land if they received it?” “What about mixed people who are African?” “What about those Africans in the diaspora?” etc, etc. Strangely, he has never asked these questions of Amerindians who already have 13.8% percent of Guyana and especially of the latest additional Wapishana claim for an extension of their land.
Yours faithfully,
Eric M Phillips