Dear Editor,
Gail Teixeira wants the government to remove me as Chair of the Guyana Reparations Committee because I revealed an inconvenient truth about three Amerindian nations who have already received part of the 13.8 per cent of Guyana through the Guyana government. My revelation that they came to Guyana 100 to 200 years after the first Africans seems to have jolted her from her sweet repose of plausible deniability. Hence she also tried like Anna Benjamin’s editorial (SN, April 27) to obscure the fact that the 13.8% of Guyana granted to Amerindians was through the process of reparatory justice. This is so because Amerindians claimed the British and Dutch took their lands and therefore reparatory justice dictated that they receive lands at Independence.
Why is the truth so painful to Ms Teixeira and her associates? So she purposefully tries to take a historical fact that three Amerindian groups came centuries after the first Africans to make it an ethnic issue. The truth about Guyana’s history cannot be prevented from reaching the public. For instance, why does she not tell us about the 3 papal bulls that were decreed by the Catholic Church in relation to chattel slavery? She should google Dum Diversas (1452, Pope Nicholas V); and Romanus Pontifex (1455, Pope Nicholas V)). This and many more truths will be revealed in the twenty booklets already written to correct Guyana’s history. These booklets will be released in fives and are each about 12 pages long. They will be sent to every village in Guyana across all 10 regions. The truth will prevail.
In closing, I wonder why Ms Teixeira and her associates have not said a single word about the thousands of Africans who died during enslavement in Guyana? Why has she been silent on reparatory justice for the 200 years of free labour to build Guyana while enduring millions of rapes and millions of brandings with hot irons.
Yours faithfully,
Eric Phillips
Editor’s note
Stephen Campbell, who represented the Amerindians at the constitutional conferences in London, did not argue any case for reparatory justice; his concern was that the Indigenous peoples might lose their traditional lands after independence. Hence, the preamble to the Amerindian Lands Commission Act of 1966 says, “…the Government of Guyana has decided that the Amerindians should be granted legal ownership or rights of occupancy over areas and reservations or parts thereof where any tribe or community of Amerindians is now ordinarily resident or settled and other legal rights…”
