Emancipation 2023 and naming some rebellious ancestors

 

Monday before Emancipation Day 2023. There is a petition to support Red Thread. Red Thread has reported to the police about death threats made against. The police have not bothered with Red Thread. A white visitor to Guyana is concerned about a friend he made, a young Black gay man who is using cocaine and other drugs. The white man wants to help the young man.  2023 problems.

Emancipation Day and there is a picture on front page of a newspaper  of a woman prisoner - her face in distress, Black woman.  I write letter to the Editor . 

 

200 years ago, enslaved people were planning to rebel against the white Government of the day. I went to Bishops and QC during Burnham years and after, and I  did 'well' but did not realise that thousands of people rose up in Demerara over two or three days. And that there was a brutal put down. 

 

 Maybe because, mixed race coolie man that I am, this history is not supposed to mean anything to me. Or that the post-Independence powers did not want us to know that our ancestors were rebellious. Did the ancestors who started arriving from India 15 years after the revolt know about the revolt? Or that I should stick to my race only, when thinking of rebellious ancestors. Did people warn the ancestors from India that they must not revolt or that the white man would shoot them, hang the bodies up , or cut off the heads and put the heads up on long poles?  A white man did draw pictures of the white justice and - pictures drawn, in a book written without any sense of horror, or shame.  I realise that we have heroes - Cuffy and Quamina - honoured in and around Georgetown, but it was not them alone. And beyond monuments which make them seem far away, high up, how to make them close, immediate, family. 

The white people condemned others who rebelled, kept records of the condemnation of 73 people described as 'insurgent negroes' and the vicious forms of justice. 

So now, from the comfort and privilege of 2023, is to write some of the names now, invoke them again, not as condemnation, and in Hindu tradition of naming ancestors as we pay homage, and to locate them out of Georgetown where they lived and worked and planned the rebellion, or as close as possible. And thinking of  the thousands of others whose names are not known now.

 The story map is embedded below, or you can access by clicking here.