Guyanese, on Tuesday August 1, celebrated another Emancipation Day. One only hopes that the celebrations this year reinforce in us all the lessons of the post-1838 history – that, in unity, strength is most sustained.
History has recorded that the final “full freedom” of Emancipation was won after decades of death, suffering, slavery and exploitation — from 1763 through 1823, to 1834 and finally 1838.
The spirit of yearning for freedom – that liberty of mind, body and soul from ownership by others — never deserted the African slaves, and the indentured contracted workers who followed them after full Emancipation in 1838. Numerous were the uprisings, rebellions, protests, riots and strikes. Emancipation never came willingly or cheaply from the colonialists.
Today, sugar workers are at a very low ebb, facing the disaster of unemployment, as Government is seemingly caught in a whirlwind of bad judgments and questionable decisions while it flounders to fashion a valid, structured and lasting plan to rescue an historic industry. As elaborated by this country’s largest trade union, the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU), in its Emancipation Day message to the Guyanese nation, closure of the sugar estates threatens thousands – both sugar workers and other members of the working class. As with the forced apprentices in 1838, GAWU made it poignantly clear that today’s sugar workers face a bleak, hopeless future unless economic sense prevails and the workers’ representatives are listened to with serious intent.
A point that has been lamented year after year, especially around this time, is that the descendants of emancipation must all share in equal opportunities as our natural and human resources become available to development for all.
And as GAWU pointed out in its Emancipation Day message, no group should be favoured or discriminated against because of political expediency. It is such approaches that will help preserve and give enduring meaning to achievements like emancipation and independence.
There is no questioning the fact that sugar is the historical reason for today’s diverse demography we know as Guyanese society. It is perhaps a curious, but certainly an understandable, fact of Guyana’s socio-economic history that sugar brought us together, often forged bonds of collective struggle against the plantocracy, and for independence.
However, we are today faced with a dire situation, wherein the leaders in the coalition APNU/AFC Government, who swore to keep the sugar industry alive, averring to the PPP/C mantra: “Sugar is too big to fail”, have now revealed their Machiavellian plot to dismantle this vital industry, which is the mainstay of entire communities.
Indubitably, it is felt that this plot was hatched prior to elections. Today, along with entire estates, the livelihoods of sugar workers and the survival of thousands of families are on the coalition’s auction block.
There are, and always will be, detractors who pessimistically prognosticate doom-and-gloom scenarios and advocate relinquishing the sector, because they envisage the problems and challenges in the sugar industry as being insurmountable.
However, if stakeholders of the industry – Government, workers, management, union — can work together, then the myopic, destructive and visionless prognostication that sugar is doomed can be replaced with bright ideas and workable strategies to conceptualise the magnitude of success that a sustained and committed effort can engender in the sector.
As Guyanese, let’s emancipate ourselves from mental slavery; let’s do what’s right without prejudice based on race or politics. Let’s work together to save the sugar industry. Let’s give it another try!
