Where have all the brains gone?
Emancipation Day, 1999

Cassandra's Candid Corner
Stabroek News
August 8, 1999


*The Gold and Ivory Coasts figure prominently in my fairly comprehensive stamp collection. I have none representing the notorious Slave Coast on the west coast of Africa for the simple reason that no one ever wanted to celebrate the commodity supplied there. The east coast of Africa was equally notorious.

Man's inhumanity to man knows no bounds. Africans were captured by their fellow Africans and by Arab traders. The trade was facilitated by alliances made with African chiefs, who were paid in advance for the men and women they would capture inland, and given shackles to make their job easier.

Captives were separated from their families, husbands, wives, children and friends. Yoked with wooden collars, chained and whipped they often had to endure walks of over a hundred miles to the east or west coasts of Africa where they were sold or traded for tobacco, cloth and rum to Arab or European traders. Those that dropped by the wayside were left where they fell.

Zanzibar was the objective for slaves captured in eastern equatorial Africa. There they were sold to Arab traders and sent throughout the Muslim world. Those from west equatorial Africa were destined for use in Brazil, the Caribbean and the southern United States (the Middle Passage).

The horror and cruelty of those marches and subsequent voyages defy the imagination. A great number of records still survive to give an idea of the conditions that slaves had to endure, and the post slavery period has done little to erase the suffering from the collective memory of present day Africans whose forebears underwent those journeys and whose suffering is memorialised in song, dance and literature. Arthur Haley admitted that much of his Roots was creative writing and not much fact as far as his family was concerned, but it was sufficiently well researched to have more than a grain of truth about the generally appalling conditions.

By 1808 the United States ended the slave trade. Britain ended the slave trade throughout its empire in 1807, and slavery in 1834, but it took until 1838 for most of the Africans to be fully emancipated. There were 768,000 of them. Their descendants now wrestle with the same problems that people in the rest of the world try to deal with, and play their parts in modern society where by and large slavery has ceased to exist.

Throughout the length and breadth of Africa and the Caribbean there are relics of the former colonial masters to be seen. Some are dusty or broken and show decay and neglect. The Anglican cathedral in Zanzibar was finally built upon the site of the main slave market. Sierra Leone's capital Freetown has over sixty churches. Guyana has the tallest wooden cathedral in the world. Nelson looks out to sea in Antigua and inland in Barbados.

*The African slave trade is no more, but Africa still has its problems. The scourge that was slavery has been replaced by another great evil, less obvious and far more efficient at wiping out the tribes of Africa than anything that has gone before. The pandemic AIDS.

Forty-eight per cent of all confirmed AIDS cases are found in Africa and God alone knows how many others in remote areas. Africa is now the anthropologist's choice for the beginning of the human race. Where it all started is where vast numbers of people are dying. At this rate it will be virtually empty of people again in less than a hundred years. And if we're not careful so will the Caribbean.

The brain drain *When you look at a picture of the Cabinet, you begin to wonder just where the brains have gone. Unfortunately, Botswana is not advertising for any of them. It's even more unfortunate that none would be qualified to go anyway to do anything. Botswana knows a thing or two about crafting advertisements, let me tell you.

Every day our present government manages to shoot itself in the collective foot. Just what is the matter with them? Isn't there anyone in the cabinet with the gumption to set up a blackboard to chart out the triumphs since 1992? It need only be a very small blackboard. And do you suppose they will ever get things going? I have never in my life seen such dithering and indecision. They're like a lot of old great grandmothers, and that's just the younger ones.

*In opposition they railed about the executive powers of the president in Forbes Burnham's constitution, and swore they'd change it all. Now they want to retain them, rather as Robert Mugabe has retained Ian Smith's emergency powers. Cabinet said they will include the opposition parties in the GEC power deal. Their refusal to reveal the documents makes the rift even wider.

*I see that Anand Goolsarran has been tipped to take over the UN Internal Oversight post. A poisoned chalice if ever I heard of one. Luncheon has indicated that government would actively lobby on his part. You bet they would. This government needs Anand Goolsarran like the plague, and the sooner they can post him to any place on earth where he can't scrutinize their accounts the better they'll all sleep at nights.

I hope he resists the offer to go to the UN for three years because he'll be dumped like a hot potato when it's over. I suspect he's too intelligent to fall for it. I hope so for we all need people like him to look after our interests.

In his 1996 report the Auditor-General refused to hide the fact that several government accounts at Lloyds Bank in London were overdrawn and that huge amounts of unnecessary interest was being paid. One account was overdrawn to the tune of 1.4 million pounds sterling, and the other for US$12.114 million at December 31, 1996. The sterling account was for the Guyana High Commission in London, and the US dollar account for the now defunct GNTC. Does Mr Jagdeo have anything to say about that? Has the situation been regularised? Will the press now ask the right questions?

Anand Goolsarran's report on the Essequibo Coast Road was a heaven-sent opportunity for a PPP government to prove it was not prepared to put up with the kind of corruption it has long accused the opposition of when they were in power. What did they do? They sat on it, and pouted and pirouetted like fairies and hoped it would just go away.


A © page from:
Guyana: Land of Six Peoples