Argument for African land reparation is flawed

Dear Editor,

The Guyana Reparations Commit-tee’s claim for land for Africans as reparation payment is flawed (‘The government should immediately freeze the granting of land leases to anyone until the reparatory land issue is addressed’, SN, March 12). The writer, Eric Phillips, claims there are three historical reasons why their claim has legal validity. He says that Africans were here before the Wai Wais and Wapishanas and because those two groups got land, Africans should get land. He quoted two sources for his information that these tribes arrived after Africans (Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology and the Guyana Repara-tions Committee), of which one is his own group! Further, his simplistic chronological argument does not contemplate the contention that these tribes were in Guyana before Africans arrived and then migrated. The Amerindian land claim is not based on reparation, it is rooted in a legal ownership claim based on occupation and possession that predated everyone for thousands of years, including the Europeans.

The numbers Mr Phillips provides undermines his argument. He said Amerindians will get 13.8% of Guyana’s territory of 214,970 square miles. That converts to 7,330,594 acres. He claims 300 Wai Wais (out of 68,675 Amerindians in the 2002 census) will get 1 million acres or 13.6% of the entire area titled to Amerindians. This is what happens in these occupation/possession claims. Some will get more than others because of the peculiarity and specificity of their claims. This is not the one size fits all reparation claim where every ancestor is somehow equally entitled to any land obtained. It is twisted logic and to argue that because you came ‘first’ compared to two Amerindian tribes you are entitled to land, when it is glaringly obvious that you came ‘second’ to the majority (seven other tribes). Again, the temporal argument is moot when one considers the basis for the Amerindian claim is not based on reparation but on occupation/possession. In fact, when Phillips disparagingly claimed Africans built Guyana while Amerindians were nomadic, those Amerindians were exercising through that nomadism, their occupation and possession of the land at issue. Even if they arrived after Africans and did that for over a hundred years, the basis for their claim is very different from the African claim, which is not rooted in possession/occupation but in reparation in providing free labour on the land that was owned by others.

Mr Phillips’ second position is this: “…enslaved Africans built Guyana.” This is misleading. The building of Guyana is a continuous exercise, even if this country still appears as if stuck in the mid-20th century. Amerindians were ‘building’ for thousands of years before everyone else. Every ethnic group contributed significantly in their own way in the time they were here, Africans included. Some provided hard labour, others provided wealth and capital, trade, skills and entrepreneurship. The Europeans designed the waterways, dams, roads, etc, that African labour built. Indentured servants built anew, expanded, rebuilt or maintained for decades that which Africans and Europeans initially built. The reparation argument is destructive because every single group will claim reparation land including probably 20% of the population (Mixed) which will claim from all sides or even make multiple claims. Why should reparation be sought in land from a country that is built on all manner of enslaved, indentured, colonized and mistreated labour and peoples? Why should the oppressed peoples who are now living on the land demarcate and allocate these lands based on the past pain of one group when all of those ethnic groups who have suffered in some fashion or another will cry entitlement to this same land?

Mr Phillips said land is wealth, but Africans (and African leadership) throughout this country’s history have largely failed to recognize this. If Africans are now less than 5% of the economy as Mr Phillips claims, can the majority of the blame really be directed at someone or something else? Africans (and their leaders) had opportunities to shape their destinies in a very different path but failed to do so. Africans had 26 years of largesse immediately after Independence, including access to massive land distribution, under an African-dominated government. Then there was the PNC which pushed and pulled Africans who were heavily involved in productive entrepreneurship on land into state employment to serve the failed ends of that government. In a country riveted on ethnic retaliatory politics, it was inevitable that when the African-dominated government fell, Africans economically hobbled from the mistakes of the PNC and impoverished under the public service would be dealt an even more terrible hand. And they were under the PPP.

Mr Phillips said: “Third, the last 25 years have seen foreign firms receive huge swaths of lands at giveaway prices while Africans have received none.” Does he forget the land given to Africans under the PNC mentioned above? So, does the giveaway of land to various groups and companies (foreign and local) justify the further giveaway of land exclusively to Africans? What of the Afro-Mixed, are they excluded under Mr Phillips’ plan of land for Africans? Who gave Mr Phillips and his organization the right to negotiate for every African in this country and to negotiate on the basis of equality? Are older or poorer Africans entitled to more of the land obtained compared to younger and richer Africans? What of those Africans who see this exercise as destructive to the territorial integrity of the country and refuse to accept land – will their land be left to revert to the state or be given to other Africans? Where is this land going to come from when there are many existing parcels of legal ownership by various races to the lands of this country? Isn’t this exercise, by its very nature, going to fragment this country and further weaken its ability to withstand territorial claims made by its neighbours? What of those Africans who were born in Guyana and live abroad – are they included or excluded? What of their children and their children’s children? What of those Africans who migrated hundreds of years ago to other Caribbean nations – are they included, do they have a legal right under Mr Phillips’ scheme? What of the fact that African-dominated governments and Africans previously and presently recognized Amerindian land rights since Independence without raising a corresponding entitlement to land through the reparation route? Does this weaken this new claim of land reparation?

Even the 1980 constitution written and forced down the throat of this country by an African-dominated government says land is for the tiller and gives those who are tilling the land or have the ability to do so the greater right to that land. Since emancipation, Africans have largely demonstrated an unwillingness to engage in large scale ‘tilling’ of the land, even when there were significant opportunities to do so, particularly under PNC rule in a socialist setting with hefty state funding for ‘tilling’. While there is strong psychological reason for this, it raises the question of whether land given through reparation to those who have long exhibited limited desire to ‘till’ is the way to go in a poor country where the economy desperately needs massive ‘tilling’ of the land to generate economic wealth for the entire nation?

Yours faithfully,

M Maxwell