Hugh (Tommy) Payne's excellent book, Ten Days that Changed the World, is an emancipation treasure. Written like a suspense story, this book dramatises the pre-emancipation economy of the still enslaved Africans as mainly pig rearers, their habits of communication, their common resolve to be really free. It brought back to life the vigilance of the colonial officials, their 'to and fro-ing' with the city, with the Governor as the central figure of the whole process. This book, A history of the Guyanese Working People, Dwarka Nath and Ruhomon's histories of East Indians, Lutchman, along with Daly's work and others, employed in the schools of Guyana as textbooks will help to dispel many of the myths that sustain political life even today and help unproductive political forces to remain in command or domination.

For August First, the most relevant is Payne's. It is time that Norman Cameron and the history Gazettes of the university be brought into high school libraries.

In this historical story, fully backed by documents of all sorts, Damon was in fact not only the front runner, but the symbol of the new age that had been promised and was in fact at the door, held back from entering. Before the end of one regime - that of enslavement - Damon, to use shorthand for him and the Essequibo, was defying the new regimes entering like a thief in the night.

Africans demonstrated, holding an all-night silent vigil in the La Belle Alliance churchyard, making history. To his astonishment, Damon, though they had taken pains to avoid an offence, was in the eyes of the Just committing a capital offence. He paid with his life. African consciousness was in the forefront of the emancipation movement.

In this glorious confrontation of cultured, unlettered labourers with imperial policy, they shattered the pretences and the falsity of the learned and the rich, not necessarily the same persons or classes, but the same cause, and opened up the struggle for human rights in 1834.

The enslaved men and women were saying to the powers: 'We had been a free people. You enslaved us. Now you tell us that we are no longer enslaved, but that we are compelled to perform forced labour.'

The Africans well knew who had been producing the wealth that had made empires rich and powerful, financing whole European regions by means of the triangular trade and its linkages into ship-building, metal works, crafts and trades and the industry of coercion, the expansion of manufacture, internal wholesale and retail trade, a great push to banking and other commercial services and in fact giving rise to the Dutch West India Company and the whole idea of corporate development. Thus they were chanting, "Emancipation Bill guh pass

Bakra man sah eat long grass" (sah= will have to) - a summary of the motion of the political economy of the times.

The self-liberation of Haiti had already caused extreme panic in the whole hemisphere almost similar to the Cuban revolution of later days. In the USA states were enacting laws against the harbouring of fugitive slaves and "ideas from Haiti" were almost under quarantine.

I know that some will never cease their alarm at the statements that follow in this paragraph and the next: The collective memory of the African Guyanese is the richest available. It is a memory of over two centuries of enslavement. Then in 1834 Africans were by law freed and then at the same time by law indentured for six years, which, thanks to Damon and others turned out to be four years. Only Antigua among the British islands, to my knowledge, decreed full emancipation in 1834. The four years of apprenticeship elsewhere and certainly here, had neither the formality of indentureship nor the formality of true apprenticeship. Apprenticeship was a softer expression for an extension of slavery with some modification. Essentially lack of freedom of choice remained in a long continuation from the day the first ship landed its cargo from West Africa. Scholars might call this ongoing lack of freedom of choice, a continuum.

In the formal indentures there had been an element of consent even though this consent was compelled by circumstances created by the same foreign powers and social forces responsible for the enslavement of the Africans. In the case of the Africans there was no semblance of consent either in the enslavement of chattel slavery or in the misnamed apprenticeship that followed it. But for the August rebels and their leader, Damon, this historical swindle might have passed unnoticed, at least unmarked.

In their self-emancipation, the African chattel slaves freed not only themselves and their children, who were also chattel in this country, Guyana; they also freed the economy from the luxury of enjoyment of unfree labour. Had Africans walked off the plantations as in Palmares, and had the local plantations been in need of labour they might have been open to enslave whomsoever they could. In the circumstances as they were the struggles of the Africans and their allies had brought about a change of law, a change of jurisprudence, a change of legal system which no longer entertained the category of human property, or chattel slavery. Those hard-core individuals of other races who sometimes taunt Africans with the memory of slavery or the promise of enslavement need education. Â

1834, much to the disquiet of the former slave-owning classes, left sections of opinion in the European countries alert against having their efforts defeated by disguises of slavery. Indentureship long and frequently remained suspect. Although they seemed to take so-called apprenticeship in their stride, to my limited knowledge, they were alert against anything in the schemes of immigration that had the flavour of unfree labour. With them and ahead of them were the Indian liberation organisations and the legislators of the colonial assemblies who dispatched investigators and demanded accountability on the part of the colonial plantations and governors. The peculiar bondage of the groups of indentured labourers and communities is an experience in its own right, which freedom-loving people cannot ignore. Political platforms are very respectful of these histories of bondage, but since the supporters are not urged to respect the bondage of others, we have to see it as a convenient respect or respect for the record, when it should be the gut feeling of any who claim to be making social revolution. This is not said abusively. Such behaviour shows the power and complexity of the racial rivalry and racial disrespect which the Europeans worked so hard, in their own narrow interest, to make our second nature.

The end of chattel slavery brought a backlash from the plutocracy. It took the form of economic repression which was adjusted and readjusted to break the movement of the now free Africans to build their own economy. The ex-apprentices found various means of defeating the economic repression. Many of my writings have used data from Alan Young and others to argue that the ex-apprentices, in particular those who undertook the construction of villages, did succeed in diversifying the economy. My most important book now in preparation will expand this argument in several directions.Â

Sugar expected in the new period willing dependency instead of the compelled dependency of former time, including the transition from slavery to apprenticeship. They saw anything but a spirit of dependency and retaliated. Allan Young concludes from his study of the official measures, and he was a land surveyor by profession, that the strategy of the rulers, in the 'it' language of those days, was "to keep the Negro landless."

Rodney found that after twenty-five years of village self-determination, "in the mid 1860s the colonial power awoke to the realisation that a whole alternative political centre now existed, that local government was in the hands of a different class - the rural proletariat combined with a few peasants. This was untenable because they were coming into conflict with the central government which was still controlled by planters. At this point in the 1860s the central government moved to curtail the exercise of local government."

We can recall much more of the contributions of Guyana's Africans to their self-development and their country's progress. European historians and the early Dwarka Nath told the same tale of the lazy African and sang praises of the industrious Indian labourer. This was a class position, in strange support of the common public enemy - Sugar.

So 'voluntary' was the industry of the indentured Indian labourer - once 'coolies' by class as Africans were 'slave' by class - that a curious investigator found that at any time they were either "at work, in jail or in hospital."Â

The secret of the myth of the lazy African was that when they had won the right to bargain for wages and to accept or reject a price, the Indian indentured labourers who succeeded them eventually were carefully bound by contract. Thus two labour regimes had been set in action against each other.Â

The fall of production is another myth used against free African village labour. The free industry of Africans was demonstrated by the finding that whereas after the village movement began, the total value of production in Guyana (Gross Domestic Product)was falling, the share of that product owned by Guyanese, the Gross National Product was rising. Much of that GNP was the increasing share of African-owned value produced.