ETHNIC ISSUES SHOULD BE HANDLED WITH SENSITIVITY

Jan 04, 2013 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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There is a dispute about the monument which the government is constructing to commemorate a past slave uprising. The dispute has nothing to do with location but everything to do with who is undertaking the project…namely the government, and how they went about this matter.
At the heart of this dispute is not whether the monument should be located at the Parade Ground. The Parade Ground, in fact, is gravely unsuitable for such a monument, because the Parade Ground is a site of grief for Africans. Slaves were hanged at this location. It is a place of great pain for the rebelling slaves and therefore is ill-suited for a monument commemorating a slave rebellion.
At the core of the controversy over the location of the monument is the issue of what gives the government the right to decide where to locate a monument for African ancestors. This is the central issue that no one wants to publicly admit.
How dare a government which is perceived by some as an Indian government, take a decision to build a monument without the consent of those groups who believe they have the right to be part of that decision?
This was the same undercurrent that surfaced a few years ago when a special programme was being developed to commemorate a year dedicated to persons of African descent. There were similar sentiments expressed then that the government should not go ahead and plan anything, unless it gained the approval of those who hold themselves out to be representative of Africans in Guyana.
It was same undercurrent that caused a leader of the Working People’s Alliance to argue that an elected President of Guyana had no right to be welcomed in Buxton.
This is the issue. How dare the democratically and constitutionally elected government arrogate to itself the right to decide an issue that should rightly be the prerogative of the representative organizations of Africans? Is this not what is at the heart of the present dispute? Is it not?
It matters not that the government had invited consultations on this matter and no one responded. What gave the government the right to invite consultations? Did they not know that they had to approach the organizations – rather than invite them – and seek their consent?
What matters is not where the monument is located? What matters is that there are those who will not accept that the present government has any right to go ahead with a project of this nature, without the blessing of those who feel that they have a right to decide on matters concerning the interests of Africans.
This, of course, raises another wider concern as to how a plural society can be developed along these lines. If before anything is done on behalf of any of the numerous ethnic groups that comprise our country, direct consent of the “representatives” of these groups has to be had, we are in fact questioning the political model of democratic government that we have adopted and laying claim to the fact that it may be unsuited to our realities and thus necessitates the need to organize our country along different lines.
Even if at this stage a compromise is reached and a new and suitable location is agreed upon, there remains the issue of the monument itself. Has the design of the monument been accepted by the representative organizations of Africans in Guyana? If it has not, there is again going to be another uproar as to who commissioned the sculptor to design such a monument.
The issue of ethnicity is a sensitive one in our bifurcated society and it has to be handled sensitively. It matters not that there was an agreement to build the monument at the Parade Ground. What matters is that there was no consent given by those who feel that their stamp of approval should have been had for all stages of the project.
This is at the heart of the dispute, because even if tomorrow the government allows the monument to be built at the Parade Ground, a new round of controversy is going to erupt on some issue on which there was no agreement.
The government should therefore place the present works on hold. It should find an alternative use for the location near the seawall where it has planned to erect the monument. Surely, there must be some other use which can be put to that site, given the monies that have already been expended.
The government should decommission the monument project and start afresh by consulting with the representative organizations on the design, location, cost, timing and maintenance of the proposed monument.
This is obviously going to delay the project a few years, but given the sensitivity that is necessary when honouring our ancestors, it is best that the project be restarted from scratch, rather than become another source of dispute which will discredit the purposes for which the monument is being erected.

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