…Bajans
With Barbados also celebrating the 50th Anniversary of their “independence” from Britain – but still revelling in their self-designation as “Little England” – not surprisingly Prince Harry was invited to represent his grandmother, the Queen of England. Barbados also retains the Queen as their Head of State and “Monarch”. Our Head of State and Executive President David Granger was invited and he showed up to also partake in the glow of Harry’s presence.
It was a bit surprising to your Eyewitness that President Granger wasn’t conferred with any honour by Barbados since he’d awarded our Order of Roraima on THEIR Prime Minister at our Jubilee Independence bash.
Pressed to explain the anomaly Prezzie averred as to how the Bajan PM had stood up in our corner on the Border issue. But it seems that the help we gave to Barbados and Bajans have been interred with our forefathers bones.
So allow your humble but history-minded Eyewitness to set the record straight – which the Bajans insist on repressing.
At the abolition of slavery in 1834, unlike Guyana and Trinidad, their island had nowhere for the frees slaves to leave the plantations and be on their own. They had to remain on the plantations and continue to do the same work as slaves – but for wages that left the worse off than when they were slaves!!
Meanwhile in Guyana, where our enterprising freed slaves told the planters to “stick it” and left in droves to form our historic “village movement”, guess who VOLUNTARILY came over to take their place? Go to the head of the class, dear reader, you’re right – the same Bajans who treated us so shabbily when we fell on hard times after the 1970s!!
Bajans started coming right from the start in 1835 – the same year as the first Portuguese from Madeira. And while they and every other immigrant group like the Indians and Chinese – have been blamed for undercutting the wages of our freed slaves – the Bajans have slipped under the radar. Fact of the matter is MORE Bajans came here to work in the sugar industry than the Portuguese!! They kept on coming as indentured servants up to 1928 – long after Portuguese emigration ended in 1882!!
Things were so hard with them in Barbados that they even were willing to undercut the wages of the Indian and Chinese indentureds! When the Police Force was formed in 1939, most of the recruits were Bajans because they sucked up to the British while the latter feared our local ex-slaves would rebel.
Guyana basically took the steam off Barbados by absorbing their excess population – But do we get any thanks?
Not from the way they dissed Prezzie!
…City Hall
Poor vendors of Georgetown. These individuals are direct descendants of those individuals who refused to accept the pittance offered to the freed slaves after “abolition” and gravitated to the towns to make an independent living. Their forbears were a hardy and pioneering lot and these qualities were passed in to our present generation.
The problem is that all the governments have failed to “regulatise” them in a fashion where they can go on to use their creativity and willingness to work long hours to break into a higher tier. A couple of decades ago, Dr Kenneth King had come up with a plan on behalf of ACDA but then it seemed to have died with its conceptualiser.
But the unkindest cut of all was applied by the City Council’s Gang of Four, which used them to harass the PPP’s Town Clerk but then dumped the ones from Stabroek Market Square into the garbage after the elections.
They were promised a new location – but three deadlines have passed and they’re still stuck in “limbo”.
That is, “on the edge of hell”.
…Finance Minister
Today, the Finance Minister will have his budget scrutinised by the Opposition.
If he has even a smidgen of shame, he should resign!
