Other Arrivals

May 06, 2011 Editorial

Now that the brouhaha has died down seven years after “Arrival Day” became a national holiday, optimistically, we may be in a more composed frame of mind to reflect on its wider import. After all, we have all arrived here from one place or another. Even though our Amerindians may think of themselves as “indigenous”; they actually came from central Asia, thousands of years ago.
Following their herds of caribou as they foraged for food, they would have crossed the Bering Straits (that were then frozen over) into Alaska and then down through North and Central Americas and into the South American mountains and plains. The journey of thousands of miles is astounding and of course was undertaken over generations. We have to celebrate and commemorate the arrival of the Amerindians, even as we acknowledge that for all intents and purposes, that event goes so far back in time they may be considered “indigenous”. Everything is relative.
But the coastland, on which most of us live today, was never very hospitable to human settlement. Constituted chiefly of mud deposited from the mighty Amazon in its swirl around the shoulder of our continent, it was below the level of the Atlantic. The thick mangrove cover that prevented it from being washed away also harboured mosquitoes of such ubiquity and ferocity that it earned it the sobriquet “The Mosquito Coast”.
While it may not be the politically correct thing to do, we have to acknowledge that if the Dutch had not been driven out of Brazil, forcing them to set up their trading and farming enterprises here, our settlement patterns would certainly have been very different. We note that their first settlements (from 1616 or thereabouts) were all upriver and only when the fertility of the riverine soils ran out they ventured to the coastland. And they could only do so because of all the peoples on earth, they had the most advanced techniques and technology of reclaiming a low and flooded coastline. They had earned that knowledge through centuries of dogged effort to reclaim and protect their lowlands from the North Sea.
We are suggesting that we must commemorate the arrival of the Dutch to Guyana. There may be some that may protest that these Dutch were the ones that introduced slavery to Guyana – both of Amerindians (which did not last too long) and of Africans (which did continue for over two hundred years). And so they did. But their contribution to this land is beyond dispute and calculation. We must acknowledge (as we do without pause in economics), that production is not just a consequence of land, labour and capital. There must be the managerial and coordinating skills: that is a technology in itself. And this is what the Dutch provided for our rich coastland, which still feeds and houses most of us.
Then, of course, there are the English. Taking over from the Dutch after their tussles with Napoleon in the early nineteenth century – 1814 to be exact, the English actually brought in most of the new arrivals – Portuguese, Indians, Chinese, and a smattering of poor Europeans. We should note that the English did not actually bring in any slaves to Guyana during their period of rule since they had abolished their trade in slaves in 1807 – seven years before they took over for good. They did, however, import Africans directly from Africa and from the West Indies after the abolition of slavery.
In a sense, we commemorate the arrival of the English every day in our speech and most of our overarching “high” culture: most recently in our Musical Arts Festival. But on Arrival Day, there ought to be some more direct consideration of the role of the English in formation of our nation. Last, but certainly not least, there are the descendants of Africans – brought here both enslaved and free. They and all of us should use the occasion to reflect on the nature and the consequences of their arrival in Guyana.
Arrival Day is for us all.

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