Dear Editor,
While we learn from our own and other people’s experience, mankind is gifted by nature with an instinctive sense of self-preservation. Experience, sight, smell, touch, hearing, temperature change, light and darkness, any sense, alone or in combination may be activated to send a warning that triggers an urgent response in word or action if the situation appears to be in any way threatened by physical violence or by verbal insulting provocation.
Some years ago President Burnham in a small group of officials standing on the safe side of our seawall and noticing the wave level and general closeness of our seashore Atlantic water, instinctively uttered the simple statement: “We should move!”
We did not. We have not moved an inch. Rather, we have remained in situ, investing in our beloved Guyana. These three words, addressed to no one, that were really a verbalising of an innermost thought were correctly interpreted by the few who heard them to mean, ‘Take our capital to some higher location, safe from the threat of any possibility of inundation by an over-excited Atlantic Ocean,’ or words to that effect.
While many who have witnessed those high-tide waves overtopping our seawall may have experienced a similar reaction so many years ago, up to the present time in year 2008, nothing or little has been done or attempted to protect the livelihood of more than half of our population and our mainly agricultural development areas on our coast. There was some response to a government appeal in the ’70s to ‘Feed, clothe and house’ the nation (see Guy Marco letter ‘We should have paid attention to “Feed, Clothe and House” in the 1970s’ SN, 10.5.08), but this petered out having achieved little change in our situation.
A reasonable response to that 1970s appeal would have left this country better prepared to handle the many economic pressures facing our young ‘developing’ independent state. We must identify the reason for this appallingly serious lack of attention to what is now a scientifically confirmed threat of the inundation of our entire coastal agricultural, main income-earner, and change it to some more stimulating, profitable, officially sponsored approach which, this time, must include a greater participation of our Amerindian Guyanese citizenry; about whom, the majority of us only seem to know piwarri, cassiri, pepperpot and cassava bread! This is shameful commentary on the treatment given to this large section of our population who were the first people to settle in this territory six thousand years before the British deposited our African slave ancestors on these shores.
Moving even our small capital, population and establishing a new city in a safer, hopefully, well-located area, is an extremely expensive operation involving the abandonment and waste of expensive materials and equipment – an aspect of the operation that calls for careful, thorough inspection and retrieval techniques in an overall operation estimated, it would seem, to be far too costly for our small economy.
While it is important to discuss some relevant aspects of our problem as we have done, it is also necessary to establish and examine the implications of the root cause of our problems to hopefully identify some alleviating course of action.
Faced with the obviously serious delimiting economic problems, we are obliged to investigate other aspects of global warming to identify, if there existed, some means of reducing the economic burden. Food, the first thing that came to mind, should indeed have been investigated years ago. The earliest settlers in South America thousands of years ago, confusedly referred to as Amerindians, eventually were paid for returning escaped African slaves to the slave masters. A master stroke from the imperialist point of view has, however inhibited friendly co-operative relationships between our two sets of early Guyanese, which perhaps may well have been intentional. This situation has to be changed as soon as possible.
There has been to our knowledge, no well-organised , public initiative to present the people of Guyana as a unified combination of citizens of all ethnicities, of equal rights, contributing to an accepted unified, Guyanese culture. Had we arrived at such an understanding some years ago we could have responded to the statement ‘Feed, Clothe and House’ the nation, and been in a far better state of development for the organising of our fast-growing communities as we would have been using what we have learned from our and other people’s experience to guide us to a better future.
Yours faithfully,
Prof R O Westmaas Dip Arch, ARIBA
MSVP
