The matter of reparations has raised questions of history, yet again because there is a suggestion that indentureship should be included in the claims, and not just slavery. The point to be made here is not about reparations for any group, since that is an altogether different debate; the point here is about history per se. Whatever reasoning is put forward to argue a reparations case it should not rely on fallacious analogies applicable to an entirely different set of historical circumstances. Each of the peoples who came here has their own story that is unique in key respects, and as several writers have observed in our letter columns we should in any case not be in a competition for suffering.
The recent round of exchanges on the subject which have sent some of our letter writers rushing to their laptops has related to suggestions on the part of those seemingly unfamiliar with our past that indentureship in some sense corresponds to slavery, and that how people were treated and brought here under the two systems were comparable. Considering that this is not the first time this conversation, if such it can be called, has arisen, it might be thought that it would not have been brought up again, but it seems that memories are short.
So it is probably worth repeating that not only was there no full equivalence in treatment between indentureship and slavery – anyone even superficially acquainted with the 18th and 19th century records would know that – but there was no equivalence either in the way people were brought here. This is not the same thing as to say that Indians were not kidnapped or deceived into leaving their homeland, or that their treatment and that of other groups who were indentured was not inhumane, it is merely to observe that slavery and indentureship cannot be conflated.
The fundamental difference between the two, as some writers have pointed out, is that enslaved people were ‘property’; their humanity at the most basic level was denied. But it was worse than that. An enslaved person born here derived his or her status from the mother; it didn’t matter who the father was and whether he was white or someone who had been freed, the offspring was also enslaved unless ‘given’ freedom – something which was not all that common. In other words, the status of enslavement was passed down the generations.
Horrendous as all of this was, it has no political consequences for us here and now. That is to say, however our forebears arrived we are all entitled to be here, and entitled to the same rights as every other citizen in the country. We have to resolve our political dilemmas in the here and now with the contemporary tools we have to hand in order to come to a modus vivendi; invoking history real or imagined in our disputations adds plenty of heat and animosity, but no enlightenment.
This is not to say that we should not be more familiar with at least the general aspects of our history than we seem to be.
Dr Vishnu Bisram has written in a letter published in this newspaper, “the Indian narrative … should be told except that it has not been given space and has been neglected in all aspects of studies (history, literature, languages, etc.) at universities and even lower levels of schooling throughout Guyana and the Caribbean region as well as by Caricom.” Leaving Caricom aside, it might be mentioned that no group’s history has been given proper space in Guyana’s schools, and where the Caribbean is concerned, nineteenth-century indentureship used to be one of the themes on the CXC history syllabus, and presumably it has not been removed. In the earlier days of the UG History Department, the MA students in particular researched indentureship, and one or two went on to write books about it.
It might be noted that there are two levels of historical work: one is the research undertaken in the first instance which results in articles and books being written not necessarily directed at the general public, and the second is the distilling of those findings for the purposes of popular consumption and for school texts and the like. In the case of the first far more research has been done on indentureship here than on slavery for the simple reason that the documents are in English. In the case of slavery, Dutch occupation accounted for maybe around one hundred and seventy years of the period, and British for less than forty years, so the majority of the relevant documents are in Dutch, a language which has always presented something of an impenetrable barrier to Guyanese researchers. As a consequence, those who speak on slavery here tend to fall back on the huge amount of research which has been done on British Caribbean territories such as Jamaica and Barbados.
While people here will tend to know that the Dutch were the first colonial occupiers, it was not the Dutch state which came, it was private companies, namely the Dutch West India Company and in due course, the Berbice Society. The Dutch state eventually did take over the colonies which went to make up Guyana, but only held them for about five years before the British arrived for the second time. All slavocracies were brutal, but there were structural variations between them, and our history is not the same as that of Barbados or Jamaica, for instance. As such we need to develop an account of the past which has local relevance.
Where indentureship is concerned, it was Mr Ravi Dev in a letter to this newspaper who wrote about African indentureds, albeit to make a larger point about our current relations. In a purely historical sense this is not a topic familiar to the wider population, despite the fact that it has to some degree been explored by historians here. And it was Mr Eusi Kwayana who made reference to Indigenous slavery, again a subject which a few researchers have written about, and abbreviated information on which has even been accommodated in this newspaper. Yet this has never percolated down to the public at large, let alone to our schoolchildren. But then nobody takes history very seriously in our schools, and the history component in the Grade Six Assessment Social Studies used to be a disgrace. Whether it has improved with the new energy for revising curricula is simply not known.
We have a complicated history – and archaeology too – and we need to be more familiar with it both to gain an understanding of other groups and a feel for our shared experience of survival and exploitation. In short, it will impart a sense of who we are as a nation and how we have got this far. It is history which helps confer a social identity, so we should not be manipulating it for employment in unconnected contexts, or using it as a battering ram against different groups for political ends.
