Redefining an ethos for true African liberation
WHEN the church bells peal around midnight on Friday, July 31, 1998, they will not simply observe 160 years of freedom for the descendants of African slaves. They will be a metaphorical clarion call to the conscious ones to renew their efforts at fulfilling and consolidating in both material and spiritual terms, the achievements of freed slaves in the middle of the 19th century Guyana. Freedom Day, or Emancipation Day which is observed on August 1, or on the first Monday of August around the Caribbean, commemorates that August morning of 1838, when African slaves were legally free, following four years of apprenticeship. While voicing it abroad that the apprenticeship period was to help slaves become accustomed to the idea of freedom, the colonisers used the interim to seek sources of cheap labour to replace the Africans on the sugar estates, since most of the slaves let it be known that they wanted nothing to do with plantation life when their forced servitude came to an end. For those persons, who more than a century and a half after slavery, regard most black people as worthless and lacking in motivation, they should be told that it was African brawn and endurance which criss-crossed this agricultural coastland with canals. In what Walter Rodney terms, "the humanisation of the Guianese coastal environment" black slaves moved 100 million tons of heavy, water-logged clay with shovels for tools, while enduring punishing conditions of perpetual mud and water. In his book, "A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905" Rodney writes: "Generations of blacks working under white masters had markedly transformed this coastal habitat. James Rodway, the most authoritative of the country's historians, quickly focused on their environmental transformation in introducing his `History of British Guiana' in 1891. Rodway noted that `every acre at present in cultivation has been the scene of a struggle with the sea in front and the flood behind'. As a result of this arduous labour during two centuries, a narrow strip of land along the coast has been rescued from the mangrove swamp and kept under cultivation by an elaborate system of dams and dykes." After manumission, there was a more spectacular expression of African achievement. The freed slaves gathered up the pennies they had saved, and conveying them in wheelbarrows, went to the authorities and paid in cash for certain estates. Plantations on the East Coast and on the Essequibo Coast were transformed into villages which still exist today. In any language, this was a monumental step forward. Men and women, who just a few years before, were labelled chattel in the eyes of the law, were now landowners with the authority to have their say in the civic processes of the day. Throughout the decades since those villages were established, Africans have distinguished themselves in the field of education, in the many professions, in sports and in the halls of entertainment. And while the majority of black people have not accumulated wealth and economic power as the other races have done, this lack should not be simplistically ascribed to genetic make-up, since history proves otherwise. However, as the new millennium nears, it seems obvious that a new ethos for African existence must emerge, or a dormant guiding spirit must be awakened and redefined to give the descendants of this country's slaves, the vision to aspire, and the capacity to produce the wheelbarrows of coins to transform their aspirations into reality. 
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