Freedom or Death, the Cry of the Ages

Feb 13, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
In a previous letter, I revisited words from my father about walking in the shoes of Mr. Kwayana and others before hastily judging them. Outlined below is a composite of several occasions and conversations I had with my dad.
My father took me for several walks, which was something his own grandfather had done with him. We often walked towards Providence Sugar Estate (East Bank, Berbice).
He said the miles of canals running from the cane fields and back dams to this mill were dug by manual labour. Slaves from Africa under heavy whip under the hot sun toiled from sunrise to sunset.
They drained snake-infested swamp lands to create what we see before us, now a means of livelihood and something of marvel. How many died in this back-breaking process, no one knows.
One of the places we visited often was the abandoned cane fields then being used by sugar workers for rice cultivation in their allotted half-acre plots.
He pointed out the outlines of numerous fields and connecting waterways. These fields stretched as far as the eye could see and the waterways are still here.
One could just sense and picture the enormous human slave labour with accompanied brutality and misery that eventually produced these once productive cane fields. (I had already seen the functional cane fields and similar handiworks further away.)
He stated these were literally all built by immeasurable amounts of blood, sweat, pain, tears, wounds, suffering and death of slaves. Thousands of slaves went through these tortures before eventually succumbing.
They wished for freedom, but were given a slow and painful death, and no choice of freedom or death was ever given to them. These African slaves were forcibly brought from their homes and families, going through inhumane and perilous journeys into unknown places, with no knowledge of the real hell that was ahead of them.
Thoughts of loved ones with no hope of ever seeing wife, husband, children and friends added tortuous and burdensome pains to their despair.
The loneliness in such nightmares broke many and death brought welcome relief. The cracking of the whips that were the daily reality also echoed in dreams and nightmares of these tortured souls. Freedom was always a dream, but death the only escape.
The human degradation that befell African slaves on the plantations continued day after day, year after year, for centuries.
Slave women provided entertainment at the whims for their masters and their guests. Slaves were forced to fight in boxing bouts as bets were made.
Often the only choice was to beat a fellow enslaved friend and brother or be beaten instead. Which does one choose? Freedom was just a dream, pain and death the only realities.
During slavery, wives, husbands, children and friends were plucked and taken elsewhere. Mothers never knew what happened to their children. Fathers never saw or knew what happened to their offspring.
The helplessness of parents to come to the aid of children broke many. Such pain and anguish are beyond imagination and cannot be expressed in words, and can only be barely felt by those alive today.
When life is such hell, to live another day takes greater courage and strength. Their fates were enduring the unendurable, and that no one alive could even begin to understand the horrors of slavery.
In retrospect, I deduced that the clear understanding of the horrors of slavery that my father’s grandfather had must have come from his associations with freed slave acquaintances and friends in the nearby villages and from stories passed on verbally.
Yet somehow these African slaves survived slavery, and today their children show understanding and empathy towards the plight of our own ‘Indian’ people.
The Portuguese who came to replace African slaves fled the fields of death. The Chinese fled the same conditions. The Indians with no place to go fulfilled their contracts. These sets of different peoples had choices and left or remained in the country in some capacity.
It must be remembered that Amerindians lived on the coast before anyone else.
They chose death rather than slavery. They lost everything. We have no idea of the people who once lived on the coastal lands before us. They were erased and even memories of them extinguished.
The Indian young males rebelled often against brutal working conditions and one answer to their rebelliousness was to bring women to calm them, since men with families are easier to pacify. The Indian indentured servants reported the abrogation of their own contracts etc. to their recruiting agents.
Life was cruel. The sufferings of our own ‘Indian’ peoples, however harsh, bitter and exploitive, cannot be compared with that of slavery. The African slaves had no choice, we Indians had a choice and saw an end in sight.
My father said that his grandparents never went back to India and that others did return to mother India, but soon came back to British Guiana. The earliest sets of Indians who came to this area joined the Africans in their adjacent villages, as my father’s grandparents did.
In all the above circumstances, the dreams of the African slaves were always of freedom. They wanted freedom to move, laugh, live and love.
The only way out of this nightmare was death. An attempt for freedom brought more harshness and only death brought freedom from misery and toil.
Death brought both a welcoming peace with hope to wake up in another place where the nightmares end. Slavery defies the imagination to describe, with each slave having his own tale of misery.
In each generation, a child is born who intuitively senses the pain and suffering of his peoples and is able to articulate these subconscious thoughts: freedom or death. Probably, Mr. Eusi Kwayana was one who best articulated the voices of countless people from several generations who are without names, forever unremembered and silenced. The children of ex-slaves understood where he was coming from.
This same cry was likely the driving force behind young Dr. C. Jagan and children of ex-indentured servants responded favourably to his call. There was some common ground of shared misery. This dream of freedom provided common cause. Dr. Walter Rodney, from his experiences and work (Slavery and Indentureship), understood this deep urge of all peoples longing to be free. He and his WPA members re-ignited this shared drive of wanting to live freely again. Unfortunately, like his forbears, Dr. Rodney found death was the price for the pursuit of freedom.
The difference was the new masters mimicked their old slave masters and likewise tolerated no dissent and aspirations. But this was the most unkind cut of all.
Now, why is it those of us of Indian heritage are not able to understand the pains of those of African heritage who have suffered even more than we can ever imagine? Our forebears certainly did.
Our Indian roots run deep, our religious and philosophical teachings show compassion. We understand the meaning of ‘freedom or death.’ This too has been a cry of our forefathers for centuries before they even got here, that is why many came here.
This same driving force explains why many after finding solace in British Guiana ran from the ‘new road’ and now are running again from Guyana, forever searching for freedom and to escape tyranny.
It is a common ancient call that unites us all; give us ‘freedom or death.’
Seelochan Beharry

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