Dear Editor,
Eric Phillips wrote: “We need to pay attention to the truths of our history”. No one can disagree with the brother on recorded truths. We need real truths, not pseudo scientific truths of history. Phillips asserts that “Africans have a rightful claim to ancestral land”.
My own studies of history and academics I spoke with, say Phillips misunderstands the concept of “ancestral land” to which only Amerindians, not the other five ethnic groups, can lay a claim, and Amerindians have been enjoying rights to the land.
According to academic scholarship, no immigrant group, certainly not Africans, Indians, Chinese or Portuguese or mixed races can make a claim of ancestral land. The concept of ancestral land applies to an indigenous group that culturally, since time memorial, has a right to the land but never seeks to appropriate it as theirs through title ownership as is the case today in the modern concept of land ownership.
Eric Phillips, himself, claims that Africans were an immigrant group. This fact rules out the Africans as being an indigenous group and as having ancestral rights to the land. The closest to an indigenous group in Guyana, and the rest of the Americas and Caribbean, are the Amerindians. Thus, the Amerindians would be in a rightful position to lay any claim for ancestral land and not the other ethnic groups in Guyana or the Americas.
It is inexplicable why Phillips would restrict his African ancestral land claim only to Guyana. If indeed Africans predate Amerindians, as he and others assert without authentic evidence, and have first claim to the land, why restrict the rightful claim to “relatively valueless” land in Guyana.
The group would be entitled to ancestral land claim in North America and South America where land is far more valuable than little Guyana. I say, Phillips, go for “gold” – ask for land rights in North America and South America and all of the Caribbean. You have my support once you have the evidence of Africans as being an indigenous people in the west.
In Guyana, the recorded, authentic, accurate history (and we are looking for truths, according to Phillips) would reveal that Africans and Portuguese started owning land around the same time –1840s. The Indians and Chinese owned land much later (after 1860s). No group had ancestral land claim and none of them made such a claim prior to Phillips.
Phillips’ argument on ancestral land rights contradicts itself. He said Africans bought land after slavery, and unquestionably, the recorded history supports this fact. But if Africans were entitled to ancestral land claims, why would Africans buy land? They would have simply occupied or “squatted” on the land since it was theirs in much the same way that the Amerindians occupied their own land – that is settle down on what was rightfully theirs.
The Africans bought land and land was also given to them by the plantocracy and by court (state) interventions. That being the case, why did they waste money buying land when they could simply claim it for free as part of their ancestral land claim rights? The Africans never sought land rights and they were not entitled to any ancestral land right claim from the colonists, according to eminent historians since they were not indigenous like the Amerindians.
Some time ago, Phillips and others of his ilk penned that Africans predated Amerindians who, archaeologists believe (based on scientific carbon dating) came some 30,000 years ago from Asia, an Asiatic tribe.
There is no proven recorded evidence that Africans came before Amerindians to the Americas and the Caribbean. The European colonists, as their recordings suggested, met Amerindians when they first landed in the Americas and the Caribbean.
There were no references to meeting Blacks, who were only brought to the colonies as “slaves” (free labour) to work the land after the Amerindians proved unsuitable for the kind of rigorous labour sought by the colonists.
And if indeed Africans predated Amerindians, there would have been no need to go to Africa and bring slaves. The local Africans would have met the needs of the Europeans for Black slaves.
This claim of Africans being the first to settle in the west is not different from those who claim that Indians and Africans were sending astronauts to space thousands of years ago — that is a myth, a legend. Writers should focus on real history and how to solve problems facing Guyana.
Instead of stirring up ethnic controversy over reparations with ancestral land claims, why not focus on equitable sharing of resources and power among the varied ethnic groups so we can live in peace and harmony?
Yours faithfully,
Vishnu Bisram
