Dear Editor,
I simply felt insulted when I read in the press of April 21st (Kaieteur News), that the Guyanese community in New York had invited Baroness Amos to be a guest of honour of the New York celebrations. The Baroness and I are both born of parents identified by their birth certificates, as “Negro Natives” of British Guiana. In today’s terminology that would mean sons and daughters of descendants of formerly enslaved Africans, who lived on the land mass now known as Guyana. We are also contemporaries of sorts, born in a pre-independent Guyana, when personalities like Martin Carter, Sydney King and Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow felt it necessary to challenge the colonials’ right to perpetual domination of our lives.
In the early ʼ60s the Baroness migrated to Britain, where she had an introduction to Britishness. I on the other hand lived in the BV/Triumph neighbourhood where I saw British youths patrolling our streets with guns by day, and heard tales of subjugation at night before falling asleep. In fact what took place in the early to mid-ʼ60s was Ms Amos was learning acceptance of the British ways, while I was inducted into understanding the contradictions of race and power in the colony of British Guiana. My every fibre was consumed in our quest for independence.
I lived and breathed the words of sages like Burnham, Gaskin, Kendall and John, as they championed the cause for independence. Now 50 years later joined in the battle for reparations, a struggle to free ourselves of the impact of the years of colonial/racial domination, I am confronted with the fact of Ms Amos’ existence.
From newspapers reports since the mid-ʼ60s it appeared that Ms Amos was sucked into a being British syndrome. She gained acceptance to the point where her name is linked with many firsts: first Black British peer, first Black woman to head a British university, etc. Over the years among the things associated with her name is that she led the British team to the United Nations Anti-racism Conference in Durban, South Africa in 2001. At that conference her most significant contribution was to denounce an attempt to declare the enslavement of Africans by European nations “a crime against humanity”. Fifteen years later I am reading that this person who has an issue with declaring what happened to her great-great-great grandparents a crime is now being honoured by persons whose great-great-great and great-great-great-great grandparents like mine were robbed of their freedom to make persons like the Baroness comfortable today. Do I do like the trees in the forest when they saw the axe? I shall not. The trees recognised the handle of the axe as one of them; I say ‘de Baroness barn yah, but shi na wan awe’.
In my view it is an insult to honour her as part of our independence anniversary. This is primarily because that independence struggle is in part due to my great-great-great grandparents and others who were sacrificed along the way, and whose efforts the Baroness dismissed when she argued that African enslavement is not deserving of an apology from the British, nor is it worth of being considered “a crime against humanity”.
Thus, Editor, I am hoping that this letter would be seen by those organising the New York celebrations of our Independence Anniversary. It is my hope that they take wise council and find a way to inform the Baroness that she would no longer be a guest of honour. I would also like to alert them that from information on the ground in NY, many are considering boycotting the event while others are planning to denounce the Baroness, which may bring a level of embarrassment to our country’s leadership.
Yours faithfully,
Elton McRae
