Stop misleading this ethnic group

Oct 14, 2008 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
On Friday (10-10-08), I saw a large advertisement from the group known as ACDA on the MAAFA commemoration. That advertisement is, unfortunately, skewed with a great deal of inaccuracies.

ACDA must realise that progress and development of any ethnic group must be based on truth and realism, and not emotionalism.

All ethnic groups have suffered in this country and over the world: The Jews, for example, have suffered enslavement from the days of the Pharoahs and Babylonians.

And in living memory, that ethnic group suffered the Holocaust, where half of the Jewish people were murdered.

Neither Africans nor Indians have ever had half their race wiped out. But the Jewish people, though they remember, use their experience to move forward and to build an even better life.

Can’t other ethnic groups learn from the Jewish example? I will give an excerpt from the advertisement, which shows lack of truth and realism in the ACDA presentation:-

“The Indian-dominated government” writes ACDA “deny the descendants of the enslaved Africans right to their ancestral lands and to further deny them the right of an African Lands Commission.”

What are the facts? After Emancipation in 1838, the freedmen bought several abandoned sugar estates over the coastland, set up villages and created a new and independent life of their own. The total land bought countrywide was between 10,000 to 15,000 acres.

The lands were bought within the Land Laws of Guyana and, as such, were owned or delineated within those land laws. Those lands bought by our ancestors were the ancestral lands.

These “ancestral lands” were bought in joint-ownership, and the descendants continued to live on these village lands from generation to generation.

Those village lands are still occupied by the villagers, but the only problem is that they don’t have individual transports or titles for their portions.

The call for an African Lands Commission was to divide up these ancestral lands among the joint-owners in individual titles.

Such division of lands is the job and responsibility of the Judiciary; that is, the Land Court, and not the Executive government. And I hope ACDA will cease advocating an Executive non-judicial body to impinge on the rights and duties of the Judiciary.

In any case, many of the descendants of the original ancestral land joint-holders have been able to secure individual titles in the Courts, and ACDA is quite capable of doing so, instead of sitting on its backside and calling upon the rest of the world to do it.

On the other hand, if, in ACDA’S imagination, the African Lands Commission is to share out the territory of Guyana to the African ethnic group, then all other groups who were brought here by the Europeans to do their plantation work will soon be having their own land commissions.

May I suggest that the leaders of ACDA internalize Professor Nkofi’s “Rebirth of the Blackman” and capture its realism?
R. Edmonds