SN, Editorial, Thursday, July 19th 2007

Fragile memories

Searching in our national archives for a trace of his great great grandfather, the novelist David Dabydeen found an entry in a ship's ledger from 1855 that told him-for the first time in his life - the full name of his ancestor, the date of his arrival in Guyana and the date of his death. It was in many ways an epiphany like Alex Haley's famous (albeit now disputed) recovery of his African past in the 1976 bestseller Roots - a moment at which an almost vanished person briefly escapes from the fog of history and illumines a life that derives from his own.

Mr Dabydeen's quest, which was filmed by the BBC as part of a documentary on indentured labour, ended in a room full of decaying archives. Just before he stumbles over that fateful record, the camera films him picking tattered fragments of other archived material off the floor and shaking his head sadly at the volumes of priceless historical data crumbling in a room that affords little protection against bookworms, cockroaches or even the rain. (The documentary can be viewed online via Google Video.)

Indentured labour was a euphemism for the reinvention of slavery. Almost immediately after the formal abolition of that institution, John Gladstone (father of the prime minister) set about making new arrangements for cheap labour that would help his West Indian planter friends survive Emancipation. After devising a few bureaucratic fig leaves for the new trade in people (health certificates, English contracts with 'signatures' from illiterate Indians etc.) it was very soon business as usual. In time more than a million Indian 'coolies' would be exported like cattle all over the world, a large number of them installed in former slave quarters, and mistreated like the Africans they replaced.

Nearly a quarter of a million of these unfortunate souls were confined on plantations in British Guiana. Their odyssey through the last phases of British imperialism and the subsequent complications of their postcolonial life are reasonably well known. But apart from the living witness of their descendants, all that remains of these first immigrants are documents housed in conditions similar to those Mr Dabydeen was lamenting. In other words, our neglect of the last and, in some cases, probably the only historical traces of thousands of lives that shaped our own is allowing them to vanish completely.

Almost thirty years ago something very different happened in Brazil. Taking advantage of a 1979 amnesty law, human rights groups worked with lawyers who had special access to military files and, with secret funding from the World Council of Churches, they photocopied the entire archive of more than a million pages. The project was carried out over several years in absolute secrecy. Once created the duplicate archive was used for books and articles that made the state's use of torture an ineradicable part of the historical record. Ironically the military's careful documentation of its own outrages made the archive's veracity unassailable. (The whole project is brilliantly recounted by Lawrence Weschler in A Miracle, A Universe: settling accounts with torturers.)

Some Guyanese may feel that slavery and indentureship are part of a painful past, one that we should forget altogether. But modern history suggests otherwise. In Latin America, for example, the Brazilian torture archive remains a unique corrective to the specious state narratives left behind by tyrants like Gen. Pinochet. History used to be written only by the victors, but that has begun to change. As descendants of the people who were traditionally written out of history, our decision to allow parts of our past to slip away in badly maintained archives is an unforgivable lapse of judgement.

If someone were to argue that the desapericidos lost to South American military governments in recent times be quietly forgotten, we would think them mad. And yet we are allowing something equally shameful to happen. We are forgetting the horrors of an empire that subjected millions of people to a brutish existence so that it could enjoy sugar. Sugar produced in the squalor of a plantation culture that is still within living memory. (In another part of the documentary Dabydeen interviews an old woman who may be the last surviving indentured labourer in Guyana.) Nothing testifies to this history as eloquently as the paper that records our ancestors' names, however fleetingly. When this disappears, we lose one of our few authentic connections to our communal past. Forever.

I was lucky to meet Mr. Dabydeen the man is a true gentleman in addition to his good writings.

Shundell Persaud did a similar thing some time ago. It was very moving.

Bai ,

all I can say is I glad my ancestors left India as indentures , it was a decision they made , nobody kidnap them and bring dem ..their sacrifices and struggles bore many a good fruit fuh me and mine , they endowed me and mine with an iron will to be hardworking and successful and if they remained in India the greater the chances I might hagve been selling my body organs to survive or being subservient to an indian massa .

Indentureship might have been painful but it cannot be compared to slavery . Indians were allowed more privileges under indentureship than afros under slavery .

Look , one must be honest , how many descendents of slaves and indentures you see hustling to go back to Africa and India ..damn ! both slavery and indentureship were hard and harsh but we are all better off than our poor relatives in africa and india .

David is a heck of a nice guy but I dont see David applying for citizenship for India. He has done better as an Indo Guyanese than might have as an Indian in India .

BK gurl how yuh doin ? ah bin busy like hell recently .

kidmost, the early period of indentureship was no different from slavery. the Indians were treated in the same harsh manner as the Afros, the conditions under which they worked (even the living quarters that they were given were what the former slave used to live in and "rundown logies) did not improve either the only difference was the small pittance they were paid for 10 hours work.

Hey BK , no one is saying it was not hard and harsh , what I am saying is it was no worse than them living in India then and even now . Many Indo Guyanese who have returned to India to see where their ancestors came from are shocked that even with Independence , many of these people live in similar , if not worse , conditions .

We must be aware of the hard harsh conditions of our ancestors , we must recognize and respect their will , courage , struggles , sacrifices and achievements but we must not dwell on the downside of this experience , we must look at it as a step towards our progress .

Indians for too long see themselves as victims , not victors , we were not victims of indentureship , we are survivors of indentureship , a strong people .

Hope I made sense here ....see you guys latter !