Dear Editor,
I read with great concern and anguish that during a ceremony to commemorate the life and death of the Great Mahatma Gandhi, that His Excellency, High Commissioner of India proposed in the presence of the President that the Parade Ground and Middle Street be renamed after Mahatma Gandhi.
I expect the President of Guyana and the Government who know our history would reject this proposal as being out of place, as it would further drive a wedge between the Indo and the Afro Guyanese community, an unnecessary adventure at this time.
And certainly would not advance the idea of One Guyana.
Such a proposal would be an insult of monumental proportions to the descendants of African slaves in Guyana.
Out of respect and regard and the need for cohesion, earlier administrations agreed to the Gandhi Monument being placed in the Promenade Gardens and later the Georgetown Municipality accepted a proposal for a monument representing a Hindu religious group being erected to the southern portion of the Promenade Gardens.
However, it appears that the Indian High Commissioner knows nothing of the history of the Promenade Gardens.
The Promenade Gardens, the Parade Ground and that part of Middle Street were all one plot of land. Later, a middle dam, now known as Middle Street was prepared as part of the improvement of Georgetown.
An earlier administration renamed Parade Ground Independence Park. Independence Park, Middle Street and Promenade Gardens constitute an area, where in 1823 dozens of slaves were massacred, their bleeding heads severed from their bodies and placed on poles, on this very ground, as a deterrent to the Africans who rose up against the barbarity and cruelty of the white colonial administrators.
For the descendants of slaves, this is therefore sacred ground, and to rename it after anyone other than one who fought for Emancipation is totally unacceptable and I hope this matter is not pursued because already groups have contacted myself and others, expressing dismay with a promise to resist such a proposal.
We all honour and respect the great soul, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, but Africans everywhere recall that while in South Africa, Gandhi fought for the Indians and the coloured; there is no evidence that Gandhi found the time to extend his trouble to the black South African population.
The records are clear and because of this, some countries after Independence have removed Gandhi’s statue, such as Ghana in 2019.
I am sending this letter to the President and the Indian High Commissioner.
Those Africans whose heads were cut off, the only crime was the pursuit of their God-given right to freedom and to be treated as human beings.
We will make every effort to treat this proposal as coming from someone who is unaware of our history or has been misguided by some set of persons.
Yours faithfully,
Hamilton Green
Descendant of an African Slave woman, who dug a hole in the ground to deliver her child, whose blood, sweat and tears civilized the entire coastal belt.
