Dear Editor,
In SN on October 9, 2008 I saw a large advertisement from the group known as ACDA on the MAAFA commemoration. That advertisement is unfortunately skewed with a great deal of falsehood. ACDA must realize that progress and development of any ethnic group must be based on Truth and Realism and not emotionalism.
I will give an excerpt from the advertisement which shows lack of truth and realism in the ACDA presentation:
“The Indian-dominated government” writes ACDA “deny the descendants of the enslaved Africans right to their ancestral lands and to further deny them the right of an African Lands Commission.”
What are the facts? After Emancipation in 1838, the freedmen bought several abandoned sugar estates over the Coastland and set up villages and created a new and independent life of their own. The total land bought countrywide was between 10,000 to 15,000 acres.
The lands were bought within the Land Laws of Guyana and as such were owned or alienated within those Land Laws. These lands bought by our ancestors were the ancestral lands.
These “ancestral lands” were bought in joint-ownership and the descendants continued to live on these village lands from generation to generation. These village lands are still occupied by the villagers but the only problem is that they don’t have individual transports or titles for their portions.
The call for an African Lands Commission was to divide up these ancestral lands among the joint-owners in individual titles. Such division of lands is the job and responsibility of the Judiciary, that is the Land Court, and not the Executive government. And I hope ACDA will cease advocating for an Executive non-judicial body to impinge on the rights and duties of the Judiciary.
In any case, many of the descendants of the original ancestral land joint-holders have been able to secure individual titles in the Courts and ACDA is quite capable of doing so instead of calling upon the rest of the world to do it.
On the other hand, if in ACDA’s imagination the African Land Commission is to share out the territory of Guyana to the African ethnic group, then all other groups who were brought here by the Europeans to do their plantation work will soon be having their own Land Commissions.
May I suggest that the leaders of ACDA internalize Prof. Nkofi’s “Rebirth of the Blackman” and capture its realism?
Yours faithfully,
R. Edmonds
