Dear Editor.
The State of Guyana is acting justly in righting the wrong done to seven thousand Guyanese sugar workers some five years ago. Each of those sugar workers is being offered a quarter of a million Guyana dollars out of the public purse of the State of Guyana for the loss of paid service.
We are asking the present managers of the State of Guyana who are making this payout in the cause of justice to look farther back at another case. It is about hundreds of thousands of sugar workers. With blood, sweat, toil and tears, they used manual tools and draught animals to lay the nation-wide foundations of today’s sugar industry for many long bitter years during the seventeenth (17th) eighteenth (18th) and nineteenth (19th) centuries. They were not paid at all for their service to the sugar industry. When they were set free, not one of them got as much as a quarter of a cent out of the public purse of the State of Guyana.
In righting the wrong suffered by seven thousand sugar workers, the current administrators of the State pf Guyana now stand on high moral ground. They are, in reality, accepting the principle that the existing State of Guyana is in itself a thing both inherited and received. Accordingly, they are discharging their national responsibility for the welfare of the people. For the same reason, we, the surviving generations of the families of the early All-African body of sugar workers in Guyana, now have our confidence renewed that, through us, their progeny and inheritors, the mode of justice done to the seven thousand will also be done even-handedly to the hundreds of thousands. Let not our hopes be dashed.
Further, we honestly believe that in settling its indebtedness to our early All-African ancestors, the State of Guyana will certainly enhance its moral profile. Such a noble measure will serve as a token of the State of Guyana’s firm intention to have a fitting resting place for the wide spread affliction of the pain, the shame and the ruin troubling the lives of the offspring of the early All- African sugar workers in Guyana. Let Justice roll down like a running stream.
Sincerely,
Anthony M.H Williams
(Victorian born)
