Dear Editor,
This is perhaps the most important Emancipation Day commemoration in Guyana. Because not only the Guyanese Blacks want their share, but also all of us, all the races, all the Guyanese people. For today we all stand on the precipice of a new era. We all now stand and behold the land of Canaan flowing with milk and honey, but we can only reach it as a unified people, and never disjointedly as some of our politicians are preaching. Today’s politicians have their own agendas. The ruling half of them is in tandem with the white beetles who have their guns pointed at our dreams; the unruly other half has already sold out our birthrights. The altruistic, nationalistic politicians are all gone. Today’s politicians (and corrupted, far-off academics) speak with forked tongues. From one side of their mouths, they talk unity, but from the other they speak of disjointed unity — a divide and rule modus operandi they learned from their erstwhile slave and indentureship masters, the intrinsic ingredient of which is violence.
But historically, the masses of poor people have never obtained anything from politicians; bread, freedom and liberties have had to be wrested from them, paying blood and bitter prices for such. Unity starts with individual conscience and consciousness.
Introspectively from within each of us, it is not a diktat from an external source. We each must wake up. Unity starts with getting to know each other. Not just with familiarity, acquaintanceship, or friendship, but with an empathetical knowledge of each other’s history and pain. The injustices of history and the inhumanities of Euro-American imperialism should not be dismissed and forgotten easily by descendants of their victims. For, in so doing, the descendants pay twice and often, many times more. We must not forget the Atlantic slave triangle, the Amritsar massacre, the sadism of slavery and indentureship because the tactics used in these historical ignominies are still in active use today by superpowers and their conglomerates to divide us or incite/ indoctrinate us to divide ourselves in order to rule and rob us.
For those who don’t know their history, or wish to know and perhaps pursue historical justice, here is a brief on slavery and indentureship, circa the time of the same Demerara Rebellion. This brief is extracted from Chapter Nine of the novel, The Silver Lining, written by a Guyanese. Note: the ringleader slaves, Quamina Gladstone and Jack Gladstone, (mentioned in this extract) were not related, as all slaves were properties of plantation owners and, as per practice of slave ownership, were branded with the surnames of their plantation owners. The extract: “…This is Belle Vue where the diabolic plot was hatched to subtly introduce a new kind of slavery, but under a different name; one that was more vicious and more organizationally exploitative so that it can save the failing sugar industry and return it to the glorious sweetness it once was. For, even under the slavery mode of production, sugar had become uneconomical to produce. Slavery had to be replaced.
“Belle Vue, where the new slavery system, called Indian Indentureship, was first introduced, resulting in throwing the world back, back into the Dark Ages. Thus, the plantation system of sugar production was salvaged, and sugar was to become once more economical to produce – at least for another hundred and fifty years. That Plantation owner was Sir John Gladstone who, with his four sons, for many years controlled the people, politics, parliament, and prime ministership of the British Empire. (Yes, the vicious owner of five plantations was John Gladstone, and his son later became the Prime Minister of the British Empire.) Thus, John Gladstone, with such enormous political influence, was able to successfully lobby legislation through British Parliament for planters to be compensated for freeing their slaves, and for himself to receive the hog’s share of the compensation, not only for owning the most slaves in the West Indies, but he somehow got himself paid more than twice the sum for each freed slave than the other West Indian planters received. That compensation cost the British people so much money that some calculated that it would take two hundred years to pay it back. But even though compensation was promptly made, the slaves were not immediately freed.
Gladstone bamboozled the British government to enslave them for an additional seven years (in most plantations it was five) as apprentices to train them to become freed people. And even then, freedom from apprenticeship had to be fought for all over again, just like freedom from slavery, both in the British Parliament, and in bloody rebellions on the Gladstone Demerara plantations.
At one of Gladstone’s plantations, slaves sought to complain to the Governor of Demerara that they were being denied freedom long granted them by the British government. When the Governor refused to hear them, they revolted. The revolution was brutally quelled. The two ring leaders, Quamina Gladstone and Jack Gladstone were massacred, and their bodies placed on display. Forty-seven others were hanged, and hundreds were whipped, some as much as a thousand lashes. On the Gladstone plantations, this cruelty and sadism meted out to former slaves was deliberately amplified in the treatment of the indentured Indians to ensure sugar production in the British Empire once again became viable. The most sadistic cruelty ever meted out to both slaves and indentured servants in the whole British Empire was without any doubt practiced on the Gladstone plantations in Demerara.
At his Vreed-en-Hoop plantation, for instance, nineteen of his seventy-five Indians were beaten to death in the first eighteen months of their indentureship. Other Indians on his four other plantations, whom they took sadistic delight in calling, “Coolies”, would so frequently be given hundreds of lashes, and salt packed into their wounds, for such petty offences as not completing daily tasks, many of which were impossible to complete in a day. “This was the former Plantation Belle Vue (later Wales Estate) where Billy’s great grandfather was indentured, being one of the first to arrive from India, on the SS Hesperus…” And for those who wish to learn a little more history at this time, here is another interesting tit bit of information also extracted from the same book, The Silver Lining, chapter seven… “The Number One and Number Two Canals were one of these historical landmarks with a history that the planters would prefer to remain untold. Totaling about twenty-three miles, the Canals were dug to impolder a vast swampland between the two and stretching from the Demerara River on the east to an inland water conservancy almost twelve miles directly west. The impoldered area soon became one of the largest and most productive sugarcane and fruit producing area in the Caribbean.
“What the wandering traveler might not know was that that civil engineering masterpiece and world wonder of an excavation and impoldering work was all done by manual slave labour, and the digging of those twenty-three mile canals, fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep, together, with the shoring up of twenty miles of Conservancy Dam, was the largest manual excavation work done by slave labour in the world, a feat that so impressed George Washington, the President of the United States that he initiated a similar project, the Dismal Swamp Canal, in Virginia, using, of course, slave labour.” Editor, I hope you publish this rather long letter, for I feel it is relevant at this time as it is important for our people to know about and empathize with each other’s history. We struggle a lot to accept so much fiction and quarter truths being peddled for facts by fundamentalist, two-tongued politicians and divisive academics who so insist that they alone have a monopoly on ethnic history, but whose hidden objective is to maintain ignorance and disharmony and incite violence like the practice of our erstwhile slave masters. They would prefer us to celebrate our history with carnival, food and fete, not knowledge and empathy. That way we are destined to remain happily ignorant and suffer twice. True emancipation comes with economic independence. Behold, economic independence is standing at our door, knocking. Wake up and answer.
Sincerely,
Gokarran Sukhdeo
