The patrimony that was inherited by the descendants of enterprising former slaves, who evolved from an ethos of dehumanization unparalleled in the history of humankind, who had saved guilder by guilder to purchase lands in order to create villages and communities and family structures that had been denied them by the slave-owners, to whom slaves paralleled cattle in the resource graphs of their plantations, have become terrorist-infested jungles from which warfare is waged on children.

Within the context of owned chattels, slaves were allowed to ‘breed’ so as to produce more income generating resources. Fathers could not claim their offspring because they were not allowed to own ‘property’, and mothers were only allowed to suckle their babies until they were weaned, then they were placed into ‘holding-pens’ until they were auctioned off or old enough to work – and that meant from childhood.

So, from the safe havens of all the freedoms of modern social dynamics, we can only imagine what these communities meant to these foreparents.

History tells us that runaway slaves first planted rice from paddy brought into then British Guiana from the Carolinas by the plantation owners, and Dr. Cheddi Jagan, writing in Forbidden Freedom, tells us that the plantation owners drove cattle into the provision fields of the freed slaves in efforts to drive them back to work the plantations in order to survive; so industry and a love for tilling the land was inbred in African foreparents.

Purchase and acquisition of these lands enabled African ancestors, for the first time in generations since they were kidnapped and forcibly transported away from their homelands, leaving behind families and friends, to experience bonding instead of bondage – so family ties, community ties, ties to the land were embraced and celebrated with a passion and a commitment that nurtured and empowered offspring to endeavour to be the best that they can. Hence these villages were the cradles of some of Guyana’s most brilliant sons and daughters.

Over and above it all was a fierce belief in a god that had delivered them into the promised land – because the homes and farms and communities they had created out of the lands that they had bought were, for these formerly dispossessed foreparents, truly God’s gift.

Their moral and ethical standards were high and their pride and dignity superseded even that of the plantocracy, because the notorious lifestyles of the latter oftimes bordered on depravity.

However time and laxity diffused the passion for the land in succeeding generations. Homes decayed in tandem with morals and lifestyles; and the cherished farmlands became forested ‘backlands’ in which thieves and killers hid and from which they intermittently emerge to plunder the fruits of other men’s labour and kill the innocent in the process.

And their leaders use the parliamentary machinery to justify this plunder and pillage – and their justification? That by right of their foreparents suffering as slaves, they are entitled to inherit large chunks of Guyana, even after they had dispossessed themselves of these lands for profit and laid waste the bounty endowed them by the freed slaves.

Those foreparents whose fierce pride and dignity drove them to work and achieve, begging nothing from man, and certainly stealing nothing from anyone. But their leaders are telling the descendants of these proud and industrious people that they are justified in grabbing the fruits of the labour of their neighbours, while the lands that their ancestors bequeathed go to waste, all in the name of the blood and sweat of their ancestors. They themselves are not prepared to sweat and earn.

Political leaders were, not so long ago, talking about marginalization of African villages that cannot be farmed because of lack of infrastructural facilities. Today, when the forested backlands are being cleared, so that youths could pick up farming implements instead of guns, the same political leaders are conveniently, opportunistically claiming destruction of produce to the value of millions of dollars from the very lands that they had only just recently claimed could not be farmed because of lack of infrastructure.

Successive leaders in the PNC have themselves marginalized many of their own supporters because they have eradicated from their value systems the values of industry, thrift and honest toil – and honesty in general, and inculcated in them attitudes of slothfulness, covetousness, greed, indolence, violence, bullyism, and a lack of pride so all-pervasive that they do to care that they are currently impacting on the world’s consciousness as parasites content to live off the endeavours and industry of others.

The PNC has lost credibility even within its own ranks and supporters, who comprise, in the main, very upright citizens of this land, and who abhor the image that is being painted of black Guyanese as a result of the misguided actions of a few who allow themselves to be influenced by their leaders into acting like beasts.

Our African ancestors must be turning in their graves in shame.
Simon Paul