In March of this year, President David Granger established a Commission of Inquiry (CoI): “To examine and make recommendations to resolve all issues and uncertainties surrounding the claims of Amerindian land titling; the individual, joint, or communal ownership of lands acquired by freed Africans; and on any other matters relating to land titling in Guyana.”
The Indigenous peoples, through their National Toshaos Council (NTC), have taken severe umbrage at this move, and declared: “The National Toshaos Council, a body comprising all Toshaos of Guyana and a representative body of the Indigenous Peoples of Guyana, having never been consulted in the formation of such a body, cannot, with any degree of sanity or confidence, respect such a body, and will refuse to cooperate with such a body.”
The Government agreed to take this off the agenda of the CoI, which began taking submissions this month.
What was therefore left on the CoI’s agenda was, “To resolve all issues and uncertainties surrounding the individual, joint or communal ownership of lands acquired by freed Africans in Guyana.” This was necessary because, as stated in the terms of reference of the CoI, “…the status of lands that were purchased by the freed Africans around and after 1839, and formed the first villages in Guyana, (but) have not been accessible to their descendants for various reasons. Lands which were acquired by freed Africans and were the subject of joint or communal ownership, or of individual ownership, are now subject to much uncertainty.”
However, the CoI has allowed to be made presentations which, as Opposition Leader Bharat Jagdeo pointed out, have only served to widen divisions in Guyana between Amerindians and African Guyanese, and thereby exacerbate racial tensions in Guyana. Notable among these presentations was the one by Eric Phillips, an Executive member of the African Cultural & Developmental Association (ACDA), Chair of the Guyana Reparations Commission, and, most pertinently, an Advisor to the President and to the State Assets Recovery Agency.
Phillips asserted, “Our Amerindian leaders, if they’re honest, know that the Amerindian Act of 2006 was an act that gave them reparations. Africans were here in Guyana before three of the Amerindian tribes who were given lands in the Amerindian Act of 2006. That is unjust.”
Comparisons, it is said, are odious, but this one is particularly so, because the basis of the comparison are so fatally flawed. First of all, the Indigenous peoples were not given lands on any “reparatory” basis.
Land for the Indigenous peoples was part and parcel of the Articles of our Independence from Britain. And they cannot be abrogated or conflated with any other claim, which ineluctable cannot have the same standing. Indigenous Peoples’ MP Stephen Campbell attended the 1965 Independence Conference in London and ensured the official Agreement for the Independence of Guyana (Annex C) required the independent government provide legal ownership or rights of occupancy for Amerindians over: “areas and reservations, or parts thereof, where any tribe or community of Amerindians is now ordinarily resident or settled, and other legal rights, such as the rights of passage, in respect of any other lands they now by tradition or custom de facto enjoy freedoms and permissions corresponding to rights of that nature. In this context, it is intended that legal ownership shall comprise all rights normally attaching to such ownership.”
The British were merely formalising what the Dutch, while claiming “sovereignty” over Guyana, acknowledged: the Indigenous peoples’ “full and free ownership” of land they occupied. The British had agreed to keep Dutch land law at cession and acknowledged the right of the Indigenous peoples to their land.
In reference to Phillips’s vehement rejection (“unjust, unfair and pernicious “) of the Indigenous peoples’ demand that the full 24% of land agreed to in 1969 be transferred, Guyana should note that modern norms of justice – led by the judiciary in Australia and South Africa – are evolving to amend the inequities imposed by the bootstrapping, positivistic stance of European jurisprudence.
