…at Imperial genocide
Today is October 12; the day Columbus “discovered” the “New World” back in 1492. Never mind there were millions of human beings living there for as long as Europeans had been in Europe!! That act, of course, set off a series of genocides such as the world had never seen. Literally, countless millions of the inhabitants in the New World of the Americas were wiped out through a combination of what one researcher called “guns, germs and steel”.
Following up with that horror, the Europeans then turned their attention to Africa – which they defined as “uncivilised” and “heathen” – and so could plunder, rape and pillage as they saw fit. It was the “plunder” in people that was their most horrific act: between 1524 and 1866 according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived to live their lives in slavery.
That means 1.8 million Africans perished in what is called “the Middle Passage” and were thrown into the Atlantic. This genocidal act is being commemorated in Guyana at the Georgetown Seawall, to remind the world of the horrors that was visited upon the ancestors of People of African Origin who have survived in the “New World”. It’s called the “African Holocaust” or “Maafa”. Truly, all across Europe THEY should be doing penance for this unimaginable horror inflicted on another people!
But instead, the reparations that Caricom nations are demanding as an act of “reparative justice” has been coldly rebuffed by the major nations that participated in the Slave Trade – Britain, The Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, etc. It is more than ironic that October 2 has been dubbed “International Day of Non-Violence” – the month in which the most extensive acts of violence were inflicted on so many across the world.
For the Europeans didn’t stop at shipping African slaves to the New World in their quest for “God, gold and glory”. They divvied the globe into “Empires” which they expropriated through hook or crook. Mostly the latter, to extend and institutionalise their plunder. India, for instance, was plundered so thoroughly that the Hindi word “loot” entered the English language, intact!! More than 50 million Indians perished in famines during which millions of tons of wheat and rice were exported to Britain!
But the killings weren’t always so obvious. We can extend Walter Rodney’s thesis illustrated in “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” to all the European colonies that were peopled by non-Europeans. And it is this systemic “underdevelopment” that keeps these ex-colonies at the bottom of the economic barrel and suffering from the high mortality, malnutrition and low life expectancy that characterise their “profile”.
All Guyana must move from mourning to action!!
…at Green’s legacy
Imagine Hamilton Green saw it fit to lecture the PPP on “racial politics” and the need for peace!! Was he looking at “the man in the mirror”?? Hamilton Green cut his teeth on racial politics from the time Burnham birthed the PNC upon the instigation of the western forces that wanted Cheddi Jagan and the PPP out. Burnham knew he was taking the African Guyanese along with him – as Jagan pointed out as early as 1956 in his speech to Congress – leaving the Indians with Jagan. But he didn’t care.
He teamed up with the League of Coloured People racists who’d accused him of selling out to the “Indian” Jagan, even though the latter had disassociated himself from JB Singh, the then dominant Indian leader. During the 1960 riots, Green earned his “spurs” as one of the most violent thugs in the PNC, such that even Burnham kept him out of the succession plan.
And it’s more than funny for Green to be talking about “peace”. Was he thinking about “Greenpeace”??
…at the teachers’ fight
What’s going on with the teachers?? Hadn’t they activated the Labour Act dispute Settlement Mechanism and decided on voluntary arbitration for a living wage?? So why are they falling for Granger’s “soft talk”??
Don’t they know he carries a big stick?
