Dear Editor,
I refer to the report: “ACDA calls on government for statement on African Guyanese land rights”. (SN 4/06/08).
In the report ACDA contends “Since October 1997 ACDA had called for the setting up of an African Guyanese land commission to make recommendations on actions that should be taken to rectify and regularize, as appropriate the ownership of village lands on the examination of historical and legal tenure of land in the villages which were purchased by the ancestors of Africans”.
ACDA seems to be under a serious misapprehension. The real story is as follows: after Emancipation, the freedmen moved off the plantations and bought a number of abandoned estates in the 1840’s. These estates were bought in joint ownership and the total acreage bought was no more than 10,000, acres. These lands were bought within the Land Laws of Guyana and were acquired or later alienated within those Land Laws. It should be mentioned that in the 1840’s Portuguese immigrants were also acquiring land but they bought in individual free-hold ownership as contrasted with the freedmen who brought in joint-ownership.
The ownership deeds have been in the hands of the freedmen and their descendants and in the Deeds Registry. This matter of transferring these village lands to individuals is the work of the Courts and not of political directorates or governmental commissions.
Scores of individuals have already secured their own free-hold titles to their village lands and others are doing the same. Justice Donald Trotman has done a great deal of free work for those people and I believe other lawyers have done the same.
The question of securing and confirming individual free-hold titles of the village lands bought by the ex-slaves to their descendants is a legal matter which the Courts have been solving for those who have invoked the Courts. This is not the work of President Jagdeo or any other PPP or PNC politician.
ACDA should organize, if it has the trust and influence to do so, a group of lawyers who would do pro bono publico work for those who would wish to secure individual land ownership and stop trying to turn a purely legal problem into a political one.
Yours faithfully,
R. Edmonds
