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Protest action over 1823 monument’s relocation
Protest action was held yesterday to have the 1823 monument relocated and erected at the Militia Parade Ground, Middle Street, Cummingsburg.
Government is erecting a monument in honour of the 1823 Demerara Slave Rebellion at a location at Carifesta Avenue, opposite the Guyana Defence Force ground.
Participants did cultural dances during the protest action.
In mid-November, the contract documents for the design of the 1823 monument were handed over to the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport by Nabi construction. The cost of the project is 26 million dollars.
Project Manager of NABI construction Sean Cox had said that works will be completed within four months time.
Some of the placards at yesterday’sprotest read: “Stop de eye-pass,” “We claim the Parade Ground in the name of our Martyrs,” “1823 Martyrs paid for the Parade ground,” “Remove the politics from our History.”
Present at the protest were Mayor Hamilton Green, Social Activist Freddie Kissoon and Guyana Trades Union Congress Norris Witter among other supporters of the Parade Ground initiative.
The Manumitted African Descendants Organization, Pan African Movement, and some religious bodies complained that the monument (to honour the slaves who were killed and had their heads chopped off, and stuck on poles in the area known as Parade Ground, but renamed Independence Park) will be built somewhere else, and without appropriate consultation.
According to Mayor Green, the disregard, disdain and disrespect for the Guyanese People and Afro-Guyanese, in particular, is unacceptable.
“We call on the opposition, religious bodies, and civic minded citizens to lift their voices and speak up…The Ministry of Culture should be ashamed of themselves, they were not satisfied to dissertate the 1763 monument site, but now without seeking the prior approval of the municipal authority without consultation, is to build the 1823 monument at a site unrelated to the 1823 incident, and without seeking the approval again of the municipal authority.”
Underscoring that during the PNC administration the Enmore Martyrs Monument was built, contiguous to where the shooting took place, Mayor Green noted that what makes this assault on Guyanese and the People of African Descent heinous and bitter is that on the 1st of August, 2000, former President Bharrat Jagdeo, in the presence of Minister Gail Teixeira, Members of the Diplomatic Corps, and citizens, buried coins at the Parade Ground and announced that a Monument would be erected there to honour the slaves who were slaughtered in 1823.
He further reiterated that the Parade Ground or Independence Park is “the only place to erect this monument”t.
Freddie Kissoon said his main contention is that the situation is another example of government’s philistinism.
“To show how depraved these people are culturally is when they put the national intelligence centre on Castellani ground, and this is a designated arts ambience. This country is so large and the space is so limitless that they could have taken that national intelligence centre and located it anywhere in Georgetown…Any historian will dismiss the government as anthropologically uncivilized.”
Emphasizing the atrocity that occurred at the Parade Ground, Kissoon said it makes no cultural and historic sense to construct the monument at Carifesta Avenue, and government has given no explanation in respect to their present choice.
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