One thing we’ve got to get out of the way is when we speak in Guyana – or the Caribbean – about “African” culture, we have a greater legitimacy to do so because our African citizens were brought from all parts of West Africa – from Angola in the south to Senegal in the north. This includes the Congo, Ghana, and Nigeria just to mention some of the more popular names. So we can immediately appreciate that while in Africa – even withing what we call Ghana today – there are dozens of ethnic groups or tribes, during the hundreds of years of enslavement those cultural differences were homogenized as the Whites tried to ground their culture out of them in totality.
But what’s not appreciated enough is that after the abolition of slavery in 1838, there were over 13,000 Africans brought directly from Africa and transported to Guyana to work as Indentured Immigrants!! That’s right – not as slaves but indentured servants – to drive down the wage aspirations of the freedmen and women – just like the other indentured!! So how were they brought?? Well, after the Brits abolished the slave trade in 1807, and then emancipation in 1838, other countries such as Brazil and Cuba – which continued with slavery – kept on shipping their African “cargo”. The British navy was assigned to patrol the coast of West Africa and intercept these slave ships.
The “liberated” Africans were sent generally to Liberia or Sierra Leone, from where they were persuaded to emigrate to the West Indies. One unintended consequence of this latter arrival when African cultural practices weren’t seen as a threat, was that after the Indentured Africans were distributed to plantations in all three countries, they became the nucleus and catalyst for the flowering of African culture. Among the new arrivals were Igbo, Kalabari, Mende, Temne, Mandinka, Yoruba and, above all, West Central Africans such as Kru and Congolese.
If we were to map the areas where there are more significant expressions of African Culture you can bet that some of the new arrivals were settled there in greater numbers – like in Bagotsville on the West Bank. After their Indentureship, some returned to Sierra Leone but, like other Indentureds, most remained. They gravitated to African Villages and bought lands where their immigrant drive for economic improvement soon made them exemplars.
Some African cultural retentions have spread in the wider Guyanese populace in the kind of food we eat. While we may think of foo-foo and conkie, let’s not forget that the entire repertoire of “ground provisions” dishes from soups (including metemjee) and “boil and fried” is of African provenance!!
So today let us all celebrate this African Heritage that is now “ours”!!
…and climate change
While your Eyewitness had been prepared – through the reports in the press – he was still shocked to read that rice and sugar production in the first half of this year declined by 53.1 and 47.7 percent respectively!! Imagine half of our two major agricultural crops – which employ more than half of our workforce – wiped out!! While the suffering of the sugar workers has been in the news – note it’s only the estates being revived are mentioned. Imagine the plight of the others like at Skeldon!!
But rice!??! Most folks don’t realise that the vast majority of rice farmers – actually paddy farmers – cultivate plots of less than 5 acres – from which they barely eke out a subsistence existence. So when they reap only half of their normal harvest it means starvation time for them and their families. So spare a thought for them on this Emancipation Day!
If the government’s serious about diversifying into agriculture for “food security” for the region, shouldn’t they be taking care of these farmers??
…and reversions
Isn’t it a wonderful sight to behold so many people garbed in their African Clothes?? Was a time when to wear them was seen as “backward” – but thankfully that’s all in the past!!
