GUYANA INDEPENDENCE DAY MAY 26-2017 (51 YEARS)

Guyanese will celebrate 51 years of independence from British colonization on Friday May 26, 2017. The former British Guiana (BG) lowered the Union Jack and raised the Golden Arrowhead at midnight on May 25, 1966 as Guyanese gathered to witness the symbol of British colonial rule for 152 years lowered and the symbol of independence raised. The Prime Minister of the newly independent country was the Honourable Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham and Guyana became the 23rd member of the British Commonwealth.

British Guiana was also known as the land of many waters and the land of six people (Africans, Amerindians, Chinese, East Indians, Europeans and Portuguese) with the nine groups of Amerindians being the indigenous people of the land. Petroglyphs found near Kurupukari in the Iwokrama rainforest in Guyana prove that Guyana’s indigenous people (Arawak, Arecuna, Akawaio, Carib, Macushi, Patamona, Wapisiana, Warrau and Wai-Wai) have lived on the South American continent since at least 5000 BCE.

Although historians write that Christopher Columbus and his crew were the first Europeans who sighted the Guianas in 1498 the Dutch were the first Europeans to colonize the country in the 1500s. In his 1976 published “They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America” African Guyanese scholar and historian Ivan Van Sertima asserts that there was an African presence in the Americas before Columbus. Columbus was followed by other Europeans searching for El Dorado the golden city. Europeans never did find El Dorado but became rich on the coerced, unpaid labour of enslaved Africans. Beginning with the Dutch who colonized the Essequibo region when they established their first settlement on the Pomeroon River in 1581 Europeans exploited the Amerindians who they unsuccessfully tried to enslave and the Africans. The Amerindians fled into the interior of the country but the Africans were trapped thousands of miles away from Africa on unfamiliar terrain. In 1814 the Dutch ceded the three colonies of Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo to the British after the Anglo–Dutch Treaty of 1814. In 1831 the British unified the three colonies to become British Guiana and the only English speaking country in South America.

British Guiana was sometimes referred to as Bookers Guiana because of the stranglehold on the economy of “Booker Brothers, McConnell & Company” popularly known as Bookers. The company which had its beginning when Josias Booker arrived in the colony (from Britain) to work as the manager of a cotton plantation in 1815 was formally established in 1834 as Booker Brothers & Company and held a monopoly on the economy of British Guiana by the end of the 1800s. Bookers’ history is inextricably linked to Britain’s slave holding and imperialist past. When the Congress of Vienna divided the northeast coast of South America among Great Britain, the Netherlands and France in 1815, merchants from those countries quickly began to exploit the region's natural resources with unpaid African labour. The Booker brothers - Josias, George, and Richard by 1834 owned several plantations and established merchant trading houses in Liverpool to exploit a flourishing sugar and rum trade. They established Booker Brothers & Co. in British Guiana and bought their first transport ship “Elizabeth” in 1835.

In 1854, Josias Booker Junior and John McConnell (who had worked as a clerk for Bookers since 1846) created a new partnership which they named the Demerara Company. With the deaths of the Booker Brothers (Josias senior in 1865) and George in 1866, Josias Junior and John McConnell assumed control of all the Booker properties, including the sugar plantations and trading companies in Britain and South America. Milton Moskowitz writes in his 1987 published book “The Global Marketplace” that the Bookers Brothers company "became the principal shopkeepers of the colony," building a formidable trade during the late 19th century. Their "Liverpool Line," established in 1887, became one of the top shipping links between South America and Europe. In the 1830s the Booker family had collected thousands of pounds in compensation for losing the labour of the Africans they had enslaved. While the enterprising Booker brothers and other White men from Britain were establishing companies (including Sandbach Parker) and making money hand over fist in British Guiana, racialized people were relegated to the backbreaking and underpaid work that made Britain wealthy.

At the time of Guyana’s independence from Britain the population included the original people (Amerindians) of the land, some of the descendants of the colonizers from Britain, the descendants of enslaved Africans and the descendants of people who had immigrated to British Guiana as indentured labourers beginning in 1834 after slavery was abolished. Although the Portuguese from Madeira were the first group (1834) of indentured labourers to arrive in British Guiana, the largest group of indentured labourers (who at 39.8% are presently the largest ethnic group in Guyana) hailed from the Indian sub-continent, arriving in Guyana beginning May 5, 1838. The population of Guyana 51 years after independence also includes the descendants of the Chinese who immigrated as indentured labourers beginning in 1853 when three ships (the Glentanner, the Lord Elgin and the Samuel Boddington) left Amoy, Fujian Province, China with 1,549 labourers bound for British Guiana.

In spite of growing pains over the past 51 years, there has been progress of which all Guyanese can be proud. Happy 51^st Independence Day to Guyana and Guyanese!!