The National Toshaos Council (NTC) annual meeting is in full swing and with elections around the corner and them practically holding the swing vote that will determine who will walk away with the big prize and who will sit holding their heads they’ve been getting that full-court press from the Opposition. Why? Sadly, not because they think our indigenous Peoples must be at the center of our national development but because over the last number of electoral cycles – including this one – the PPP has been doing just that!! So, for the Opposition, it’s once again a case of “too little too late!!
The PPP has accepted from the time of Cheddi Jagan that the Indigenous peoples have suffered the LONGEST since they were the first to be colonised!! Suffered more than any of us who were brought here to labour in he Europeans’ plantations! After all, they suffered the ultimate demonisation when Columbus announced he’d DISCOVERED a new world. Meaning that those who were living here has no consciousness of their humanity – but were as the other animals he’d encountered!!
It wasn’t surprising that within a few decades of Columbus’s “discovery”, 99.999% of them had been wiped out across the ENTIRE West Indies!! That’s right – WIPED OUT!! So we owe a great debt – as inheritors of the European conquest – see that suit and tie? to make amends for that initial genocidal holocaust. What can we do?? Well at a minimum – as the PPP unlike the PNC has done – is give the Indigenous Peoples all the land to which they’re entitled. Which was stipulated in the Independence Agreement of 1965 – “Annex C”.
Then there’s this matter of “development”. While we on the coastland bicker about who’s getting what from the oil revenues, it’s “out of sight, out of mind” where the Indigenous Peoples are Concerned. And that’s why some – especially the Opposition – are kvetching that this PPP government’s working overtime to set that matter right!! The kvetchers obviously feel that the Indigenous Peoples should continue living in thatched mud-houses!!
Continuing with ‘development”, the PPP gotta continue with the massive job creation scheme in each interior region that they have launched – so that this embarrassing practice of donating handouts to Indigenous Peoples will cease. That just perpetuate the dependency syndrome that was started by the European colonialists with their beads and baubles!! Take that plywood factory at East Bank Land of Canaan. Why wasn’t that built by the PNC in Indigenous dominated Reg 1 from where the wood gotta be transported?? That’s the only way our Indigenous peoples will finally have equitable development!!
And end this pattern of exotifying them with their grass skirts and feathered headdresses.
…the Royals show
It suddenly dawned on your Eyewitness that the British Royalty was the first Reality Show in the world – beating by hundreds of years,Donald Trump!! They’d launched social media the 18th century – with the pamphlets and press that covered with execution of Marie Antoinette!! The Fourth Estate was as much – if not more – about covering the Royals and the “nobility” than about “the people”!! Ironically, they thought they were cutting back the powers of the former, but overlooked they were given a house of COMMONS!!
Did you realise that Christmas Trees became popular in the British Empire because Queen Victoria’s German husband Albert brought it from his little German principality?? And the way the Royals speak is the ultimate in “posh” – to which everyone strains?? And that as radio was invented the King’s message was eagerly awaited across the empire?? And those grainy newsreels then picked up the tradition -as did TV by the age of Diana??
It’s all a Reality Show. And is probably why Trump wants to meet Charles!!
