by clairmont chung
A few years back, I was standing on the corner of Water and New Market Streets observing a man clad in rags removing a beautiful ornate cast iron post from its base. Until that day, I had hung on and around that post numerous times without consciously noticing its beauty. The man detached one post and was moving on a second when another man stopped him. I could not hear the conversation. But the result was the gas lamppost thief left the area and his booty behind. Gas lighting came to (British Guiana) Guyana in 1870. But according to The Gas World, November 5, 1892, Page 514, by 1891 most of the lighting had been turned over to the electric company. They used wooden posts. By December 1893 gas lighting operations would cease. So these metal posts had been abandoned for over a century. As it turns out, that forgotten part of Georgetown, Tiger Bay[1], had benefitted from the first gas street lights in Guyana. Georgetown on the whole was relatively advanced with amenities like the sixpence telegraph and free mail within the city boundaries. By 1890 it had day-night telephone service. According to Sami Ei. Vylb, writing for Western Electrician, of May 1, 1897, Volumes 20-21, many of these amenities had not even graced the cities and towns of England. These lampposts were all that was left of that Dickensian period: or not. But for timely intervention, the magnet of international commerce, industrial and now technological growth would have sucked these pieces of history out to unknown parts as were our people.
Those lampposts were headed to the local scrap dealers to be melted and shipped abroad in some order. Scrap metal dealers are under attack everywhere. Even in the US and England scrap metal dealers and their ‘suppliers’ are seen as responsible for the significant rise in property losses. The rail system in London instituted a system of cameras and motion sensors to protect its property. Parts and pieces of fences, tools, fire hydrants, rail lines, monuments, utensils, and machinery are missing because of this appetite for metal. Even graves are not sacred. In Jamaica, the May Pen Cemetery just outside of Kingston has seen graves vandalized and the metal handles of the caskets as well as jewelry stolen. The same is true for the Le Repentir Cemetery in Georgetown.
In Nigeria, China, India, wherever ‘poor’ people live, children search dumpsites for old TV sets and computers and take them apart for metals. Gold is used in computer motherboards and along with other valuable metals are soldered using very toxic materials. Without these metals our Mac books and PCs would not work. This practice puts these children at great risk quite apart from their absence from a proper classroom. For them, owning a computer is out of reach. In Guyana the ‘trade’ is currently suspended. In Jamaica a ban is currently in effect, but did not prevent a recent breach that saw 97 container-loads leave the country without the required permission from the Board of Trade. It isn’t that there is no desire to recycle metals. The problem is the theft, exploitation and vandalism fueled by the global greed for metals. It is the greedy and their scavengers preying on the unsuspecting. This goes all the way to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and Wall Street and their agents in Beijing and Mumbai.
Of note, no computer motherboards or metal lampposts are constructed in these underdeveloped countries. Instead, they are deconstructed and shipped away. A few years back, someone stole a ceremonial cannon and a cannon ball from the grounds of a Ministry in Georgetown. It was so heavy; it ended up in the canal running in front of the Ministry and only located accidentally by a sanitation crew. A friend recently complained that someone stole his security grills. If you live in the Caribbean you know the homes of the affluent and the middle classes are protected by decorative metal work on windows and doors to secure themselves and the home. Some may argue grills are not, anymore, a middle class luxury. Someone had cut the grills off its moorings to the wall. This happened during the current period of suspension. My friend was able to recover his grills after paying a reward. He then had to visit a ‘dealer’ who then retrieved the grills from under his floorboards.
In Jamaica two cannons were stolen from the open space museum at Columbus Park in Discovery Bay, St. Ann, and two more from a museum in St. Mary. This prompted Executive Director of Jamaica National Heritage Trust (JNHT), Lolita Davis-Mattis, to remark, ‘….our heritage is now going to the scrap-iron trade.’[2]
Company Path Gardens, Georgetown
In Guyana, someone succeeded in stealing the bronze busts of the founders of the non-aligned movement from a monument dedicated to its founding fathers: Tito, Nehru, Nkrumah and Nasser. This was a monument to ideological independence. The monument stands in the center of the downtown commercial area and was unveiled during the 1972 Conference of Foreign Ministers of the Non-Aligned Countries[3]. Removing those busts required planning and hard work. Yet, no one saw this happen. I don’t recall which busts were stolen. However, they have since been restored. I understand at least one is now made of plastic.
The enclosure housing the Monument is known as Company Path Gardens. Company Path is the name once assigned to paths used by the landowners of old to access their lands. Of course the land owners were also the city councilors: the government. The company path usually led from the waterways to their agricultural lands. The coastal areas of Guyana were built- up with canals used for drainage, irrigation, and transportation. Only the landowning classes would have free access to these paths. It was segregated. It is this history that forces a new look at the old and new uses of the lands and parks and how one informs the other.
To understand the demand for metal, we need not look further that the new cars and electronics we are buying. People who are yet to understand the effect of capitalism on our societies may understand it by looking at this trade.
Yet, no one seriously argues about the cessation of the trade in our labor. No class of worker argues against work. They argue only against its artificially low value. As the value goes down, the hours of work need to be increased. So we work more hours
leaving less time to enjoy the fruits of labor and our machines: cars and televisions.
Some suggest we should be thankful that we have work. Of course, captured Africans and, later, Indian indentured laborers enjoyed full employment. Scraped up from their huts and communities they were bought and brought to be remodeled as laborers. Sami Ei Vylb in the Western Electrician, ibid, described the crowd gathered to witness the first test of electric street lighting as ‘mostly blacks and coolies’. It is this free or near free labor that generated the wealth for the industrial revolution, tall buildings, and the technological revolution: all now renamed globalization. This is where the irony of a scrap metal trade lies.
The manufacturing world, which is the developed world, is on the hunt for metals. Even where manufacturing is situated in the developing world, the finance, technology and labor practices are supplied from the developed world. But the finance and technology are a guarded trade secret. It is cheaper for them to recycle metals than to mine metals anew. This does not mean they have stopped mining. But that is another disaster perhaps for another time. China appears to be the most voracious market and understandably so since it is the country producing the most products. India is not far behind. So we have these ever rising world powers sucking metals from the rest of the world. The traditional powers like the USA and Germany are still a market but not at the same levels as China.
In addition to manufacturing, metals are used in the construction industry. China and India are the newest destinations for scrap metal. Tall buildings are going up at an alarming rate in major cities. Tall buildings are another important metaphor.
In a recent discussion with a prominent government official, he remarked that oil will soon be produced in commercial quantities and this would solve Guyana’s problems. I remarked that commercial quantities of oil did not seem much help to Nigeria. I pointed to the poverty, blackouts, environmental degradation and indebtedness. He demanded to know whether I had ever been to Nigeria and whether I had seen the number of tall buildings constructed in its largest city, Lagos. He seemed momentarily stunned when I told him that, not only had I been to Lagos but had visited Delta State which is the center of the country’s petroleum industry and witnessed firsthand the damaging effects of the trade. Tall buildings reflect the consolidation and concentration of wealth: actually and metaphorically. The flip side is that they reflect growing poverty: a growing chasm. You need steel to build a tall building.
The World Trade Center was constructed with steel. It was a symbol keeping watch over the financial center of the world. When it was destroyed, the stock market receded. Nothing had happened to the money. But psychologically, metaphorically and physically it was under attack. It was an indication of worse on the horizon. It is no coincidence then that the more developed countries have more tall buildings than the less developed countries and more developed cities have more tall buildings that the less developed cities. This would have prompted the remark that the tall buildings of Lagos reflect the good oil has done for Nigeria. Yet despite its symbolism, the World Trade Center came down with such seeming ease and seemingly under its own weight: another metaphor. This is in no way intended as irreverence to the people that died there or supportive of the people who crashed planes into it. But engineers are still awed by the collapse of all that steel and its reduction to dust.
Liberty Park, Wall Street, NYC
Brookfield Properties[4] owns Zuccotti Park and also owns One Liberty Plaza, NY. Zuccotti Park is the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The park was once named Liberty Plaza Park but not since its recent renovation and new steel sculpture. The Occupy Wall Street movement unofficially renamed it Liberty Park. It borders Liberty Street and sits across from One liberty Plaza. Its original name was probably homage to that famous American Freedom fighter and its first president George Washington- or perhaps, the less likely reason being the fact that area was populated by Africans before their coerced relocation to Harlem. Again it was the banks and the powerful that conspired to force Africans out of the area. In 1712, one short block over from Liberty Street, on Maiden Lane, Africans revolted with picks and shovels and succeeded in killing 12 Whites while close to 30 Africans were killed in the battle, hanged or committed suicide.[5]
During the war for US independence, George Washington routinely held his clandestine meetings in the Wall Street area. Africans were the main inhabitants. Often no mention is made of this fact or that Washington owned ‘slaves’: the people on who whose backs Wall Street was built. The tall building, One liberty Plaza, was built by none other than US Steel, the corporation, which built the park as a concession to the City of New York granting a zoning waiver to build a taller building than the law allowed. It too is occupied and surrounded by the ‘who is who’ of banking and insurance.
Georgetown like Wall Street sits on reclaimed land. Like Georgetown, Wall Street was once Dutch: New Amsterdam. However, New York’s first slave market was established by the British on Wall Street in 1709. In fact, it got its name because of a wall built by captured Africans to prevent invasion. In Georgetown, the land is only useable because of the series of canals dug by shovel and pick axe[6]: an amazing feat of reclamation. Wall Street likewise was amazingly reclaimed from the sea by landfill and free labor. Just like Zuccotti Park, Company Path Gardens in Georgetown is surrounded by banks and insurance companies. Directly in front is the Bank of Guyana. Obliquely across is the Hand in Hand Life and Fire Insurance Company. Not so far away is American Life Insurance Company. Adjacent was Colonial Life Insurance (Clico). It went the way of Lehman Brothers in New York: collapsed under its own weight. Guyana and Trinidad Mutual Fire Insurance Company Limited is a short block away as is Demerara Mutual Life Insurance Society Limited.
These are not tall buildings in the same sense as One Liberty Plaza. But they performed and perform the same function. They financed and insured slavery and its progeny. Clico’s collapse would not be so bad except it took with it the pensions and retirement dreams of many. Its parent company in Trinidad, CL Financial is still under scrutiny for questionable financial practices much like those of Lehman Brothers and required a recent act of parliament to access public funds for its bailout. This is despite its billion dollar empire spread throughout the world. Trinidad’s parliament also barred suit against its Central Bank; effectively ending private shareholder inquiry into the bailout.
Guyana is not exempt from the effects of the world’s financial crisis. Nowhere is. How could it be? It is the Guyana’s of the world that was exploited to build the Wall Streets of the world and is required to maintain it.
As if this and the surrounding tall buildings are not sufficient homage to money and metal -certainly no homage to Liberty- they installed the ironic “Joie de Vivre” a 70 foot steel sculpture painted red at the north side of the park in 2006. At the south side is “Double Check” a bronze of a Wall Street ‘suit’. No one has tried to steal these. Brookfield, its current owners, narrowly lost a bid to lease and manage the World Trade Center just months before the September 11 attack. Like the people brought here to build the empire’s wealth, ripped away from family not knowing who if any are in the ‘new’ world, so too are these pieces of metal ripped from the earth, transformed into whatever use by a stranger only to now be retaken, when no longer functioning in the old use, to yet be transformed into a knew use and title.
For background, know that New York State is called The Empire State and its tallest building was once The Empire State Building. It is still a major tourist attraction, but they have now placed nets and barriers to deter the jumpers.
America and Europe no longer needs the labor they once craved. Computers fill the void. In fact, they are deporting the children of those laborers and newcomers in ever increasing numbers: the highest in their history. Neither China nor India needs foreign labor. It has its own citizens. Even though, in China some are jumping to their deaths to escape the conditions in factories[7]. Robots would not have that capability. In India suicides among farmers are epidemic and reportedly, in part, because of the unconscionable credit terms banks sell[8]. In Egypt lives are on the line. It’s coming to a location near you: in the US too. In New York and elsewhere, those who challenge the oligarchs are pepper sprayed, arrested and evicted from the privately owned, public access, spaces like Liberty Park.
Cannons, cannon fodder and security grills are now transformed into high art and tall buildings. Now we, once proud pursuers of the American dream, stand as security guards in those tall buildings securing the money earned on our misuse. Outside, watching us, stand sculpture of steel and bronze. As our steel and bronze go missing, plastic litters our streets. Our metal monuments are not safe. Stabroek Market[9] is not safe. Cuffy[10] is not Safe. Bogle[11] is not safe. Neither Nanny[12] nor Gandhi[13] is safe unless Company Paths are reclaimed. The alternative would be plastic steel pans. What would we call those musicians?
Elections are just over in Guyana, St Lucia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt. They raise more questions than they answer. Company Path Gardens, with its monuments to independence, is still quiet. In the US, the noise on TV tells us it’s that time again: the race is on. Zuccotti Park threatens more, with its monuments to money, still buzzing with ‘occupants’ in protest mode. In Egypt, Tahrir Square is in full violent rebellion. Its monuments used as shields.
The hegemonic powers of the US and Britain have always chosen our national leaders. No election, no coup d’état, has been exempt. Gadhafi is its latest victim. Others wait in line. When we moved to elect a popular government, it was turned back. Sometimes the government was turned. Even today, as I listen to the rhetoric of the parties vying for power in Guyana, I hear nothing that challenges that construct. I look for some sign, some acknowledgement of this history. But see nothing. I see quite the opposite. Little is mentioned of our rich and brave heritage and revolutionary struggles. Much like the last US elections we are forced into a kind of silence rather than be called an agent against change: change over real change, a new way of thinking. We need to be men and women for real change not just ‘‘blacks and coolies’. It seems like all our metal is gone and only plastic containers litter our streets.
Notes
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Note lonely lamppost in the foreground (Circa 1871)
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Those lampposts were headed to the local scrap dealers to be melted and shipped abroad in some order. Scrap metal dealers are under attack everywhere. Even in the US and England scrap metal dealers and their ‘suppliers’ are seen as responsible for the significant rise in property losses. The rail system in London instituted a system of cameras and motion sensors to protect its property. Parts and pieces of fences, tools, fire hydrants, rail lines, monuments, utensils, and machinery are missing because of this appetite for metal. Even graves are not sacred. In Jamaica, the May Pen Cemetery just outside of Kingston has seen graves vandalized and the metal handles of the caskets as well as jewelry stolen. The same is true for the Le Repentir Cemetery in Georgetown.
In Nigeria, China, India, wherever ‘poor’ people live, children search dumpsites for old TV sets and computers and take them apart for metals. Gold is used in computer motherboards and along with other valuable metals are soldered using very toxic materials. Without these metals our Mac books and PCs would not work. This practice puts these children at great risk quite apart from their absence from a proper classroom. For them, owning a computer is out of reach. In Guyana the ‘trade’ is currently suspended. In Jamaica a ban is currently in effect, but did not prevent a recent breach that saw 97 container-loads leave the country without the required permission from the Board of Trade. It isn’t that there is no desire to recycle metals. The problem is the theft, exploitation and vandalism fueled by the global greed for metals. It is the greedy and their scavengers preying on the unsuspecting. This goes all the way to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and Wall Street and their agents in Beijing and Mumbai.
Of note, no computer motherboards or metal lampposts are constructed in these underdeveloped countries. Instead, they are deconstructed and shipped away. A few years back, someone stole a ceremonial cannon and a cannon ball from the grounds of a Ministry in Georgetown. It was so heavy; it ended up in the canal running in front of the Ministry and only located accidentally by a sanitation crew. A friend recently complained that someone stole his security grills. If you live in the Caribbean you know the homes of the affluent and the middle classes are protected by decorative metal work on windows and doors to secure themselves and the home. Some may argue grills are not, anymore, a middle class luxury. Someone had cut the grills off its moorings to the wall. This happened during the current period of suspension. My friend was able to recover his grills after paying a reward. He then had to visit a ‘dealer’ who then retrieved the grills from under his floorboards.
In Jamaica two cannons were stolen from the open space museum at Columbus Park in Discovery Bay, St. Ann, and two more from a museum in St. Mary. This prompted Executive Director of Jamaica National Heritage Trust (JNHT), Lolita Davis-Mattis, to remark, ‘….our heritage is now going to the scrap-iron trade.’[2]
Company Path Gardens, Georgetown
(Non- Aligned Monument Park)
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| Company Path Gardens in the foreground. Monument hidden by foliage |
The reason I find this issue worth writing about is that it parallels the fate of so many things, including us, we produce in the developing world: really the whole world. Everything we produce is sucked-out and finds its way into places where it is remodeled and resold to us. It is a kind of metaphor for our fate. Some leave home to be ‘educated’ and plan a return to contribute: not so much now. Now, we just leave. Some see this as exercising a right: freedom of movement. But this requires closer scrutiny. Some can’t leave. If we are not properly secured, and sometimes even when we are, we are in danger of being uprooted and sold way below our value. Even when we leave voluntarily, we are being pulled by forces beyond our control. It is these forces that drive this metal trade, it’s a very visible manifestation, and often involves material that has been discarded or is lying unused. This is the condition of many of our youth. It is these youth in the frontline of metal recapture.
To understand the demand for metal, we need not look further that the new cars and electronics we are buying. People who are yet to understand the effect of capitalism on our societies may understand it by looking at this trade.
Yet, no one seriously argues about the cessation of the trade in our labor. No class of worker argues against work. They argue only against its artificially low value. As the value goes down, the hours of work need to be increased. So we work more hours
leaving less time to enjoy the fruits of labor and our machines: cars and televisions.
Some suggest we should be thankful that we have work. Of course, captured Africans and, later, Indian indentured laborers enjoyed full employment. Scraped up from their huts and communities they were bought and brought to be remodeled as laborers. Sami Ei Vylb in the Western Electrician, ibid, described the crowd gathered to witness the first test of electric street lighting as ‘mostly blacks and coolies’. It is this free or near free labor that generated the wealth for the industrial revolution, tall buildings, and the technological revolution: all now renamed globalization. This is where the irony of a scrap metal trade lies.
The manufacturing world, which is the developed world, is on the hunt for metals. Even where manufacturing is situated in the developing world, the finance, technology and labor practices are supplied from the developed world. But the finance and technology are a guarded trade secret. It is cheaper for them to recycle metals than to mine metals anew. This does not mean they have stopped mining. But that is another disaster perhaps for another time. China appears to be the most voracious market and understandably so since it is the country producing the most products. India is not far behind. So we have these ever rising world powers sucking metals from the rest of the world. The traditional powers like the USA and Germany are still a market but not at the same levels as China.
In addition to manufacturing, metals are used in the construction industry. China and India are the newest destinations for scrap metal. Tall buildings are going up at an alarming rate in major cities. Tall buildings are another important metaphor.
 |
| (New York Skyline (Daniel Sturman |
It represents the concentration of wealth so that major developed cities display a wealth of tall buildings: an indication of the concentration of wealth. If you look at a horizontal view of Manhattan, its skyline is an accurate graph of the concentration of wealth. Midtown and Wall Street rule. The taller the building, the higher is the concentration. More clearly, banks, insurance companies and other financial peddlers hold their wealth in buildings: tall buildings. All the tall buildings in your city are owned by a bank, insurance company or related financial institution.
In a recent discussion with a prominent government official, he remarked that oil will soon be produced in commercial quantities and this would solve Guyana’s problems. I remarked that commercial quantities of oil did not seem much help to Nigeria. I pointed to the poverty, blackouts, environmental degradation and indebtedness. He demanded to know whether I had ever been to Nigeria and whether I had seen the number of tall buildings constructed in its largest city, Lagos. He seemed momentarily stunned when I told him that, not only had I been to Lagos but had visited Delta State which is the center of the country’s petroleum industry and witnessed firsthand the damaging effects of the trade. Tall buildings reflect the consolidation and concentration of wealth: actually and metaphorically. The flip side is that they reflect growing poverty: a growing chasm. You need steel to build a tall building.
The World Trade Center was constructed with steel. It was a symbol keeping watch over the financial center of the world. When it was destroyed, the stock market receded. Nothing had happened to the money. But psychologically, metaphorically and physically it was under attack. It was an indication of worse on the horizon. It is no coincidence then that the more developed countries have more tall buildings than the less developed countries and more developed cities have more tall buildings that the less developed cities. This would have prompted the remark that the tall buildings of Lagos reflect the good oil has done for Nigeria. Yet despite its symbolism, the World Trade Center came down with such seeming ease and seemingly under its own weight: another metaphor. This is in no way intended as irreverence to the people that died there or supportive of the people who crashed planes into it. But engineers are still awed by the collapse of all that steel and its reduction to dust.
Back in the day we used old oil drums, of steel, to store garbage for disposal. Not anymore, Plastic drums have replaced them. Trinidadians pioneered the use of those drums as musical instruments: Steelpans. Recently, the Ministry of Culture in Guyana imported a full set of steelpans from Trinidad for its programs. We still build steel pans in Guyana. But, I believe, the government recognized that Trinidadians build them better. Besides steel drums are hard to find, unless you are in an oil or steel producing country like the US. There was a time when American and British cars were the only cars and were made of mostly steel. US Steel, the corporation, presided over this industry, but not anymore.
Liberty Park, Wall Street, NYC
(Zuccotti Park)
 |
| One Liberty Plaza |
During the war for US independence, George Washington routinely held his clandestine meetings in the Wall Street area. Africans were the main inhabitants. Often no mention is made of this fact or that Washington owned ‘slaves’: the people on who whose backs Wall Street was built. The tall building, One liberty Plaza, was built by none other than US Steel, the corporation, which built the park as a concession to the City of New York granting a zoning waiver to build a taller building than the law allowed. It too is occupied and surrounded by the ‘who is who’ of banking and insurance.
 |
| Liberty Park (Zuccotti Park) |
These are not tall buildings in the same sense as One Liberty Plaza. But they performed and perform the same function. They financed and insured slavery and its progeny. Clico’s collapse would not be so bad except it took with it the pensions and retirement dreams of many. Its parent company in Trinidad, CL Financial is still under scrutiny for questionable financial practices much like those of Lehman Brothers and required a recent act of parliament to access public funds for its bailout. This is despite its billion dollar empire spread throughout the world. Trinidad’s parliament also barred suit against its Central Bank; effectively ending private shareholder inquiry into the bailout.
Guyana is not exempt from the effects of the world’s financial crisis. Nowhere is. How could it be? It is the Guyana’s of the world that was exploited to build the Wall Streets of the world and is required to maintain it.
As if this and the surrounding tall buildings are not sufficient homage to money and metal -certainly no homage to Liberty- they installed the ironic “Joie de Vivre” a 70 foot steel sculpture painted red at the north side of the park in 2006. At the south side is “Double Check” a bronze of a Wall Street ‘suit’. No one has tried to steal these. Brookfield, its current owners, narrowly lost a bid to lease and manage the World Trade Center just months before the September 11 attack. Like the people brought here to build the empire’s wealth, ripped away from family not knowing who if any are in the ‘new’ world, so too are these pieces of metal ripped from the earth, transformed into whatever use by a stranger only to now be retaken, when no longer functioning in the old use, to yet be transformed into a knew use and title.
 |
| Joie de Vivre |
America and Europe no longer needs the labor they once craved. Computers fill the void. In fact, they are deporting the children of those laborers and newcomers in ever increasing numbers: the highest in their history. Neither China nor India needs foreign labor. It has its own citizens. Even though, in China some are jumping to their deaths to escape the conditions in factories[7]. Robots would not have that capability. In India suicides among farmers are epidemic and reportedly, in part, because of the unconscionable credit terms banks sell[8]. In Egypt lives are on the line. It’s coming to a location near you: in the US too. In New York and elsewhere, those who challenge the oligarchs are pepper sprayed, arrested and evicted from the privately owned, public access, spaces like Liberty Park.
Elections are just over in Guyana, St Lucia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt. They raise more questions than they answer. Company Path Gardens, with its monuments to independence, is still quiet. In the US, the noise on TV tells us it’s that time again: the race is on. Zuccotti Park threatens more, with its monuments to money, still buzzing with ‘occupants’ in protest mode. In Egypt, Tahrir Square is in full violent rebellion. Its monuments used as shields.
The hegemonic powers of the US and Britain have always chosen our national leaders. No election, no coup d’état, has been exempt. Gadhafi is its latest victim. Others wait in line. When we moved to elect a popular government, it was turned back. Sometimes the government was turned. Even today, as I listen to the rhetoric of the parties vying for power in Guyana, I hear nothing that challenges that construct. I look for some sign, some acknowledgement of this history. But see nothing. I see quite the opposite. Little is mentioned of our rich and brave heritage and revolutionary struggles. Much like the last US elections we are forced into a kind of silence rather than be called an agent against change: change over real change, a new way of thinking. We need to be men and women for real change not just ‘‘blacks and coolies’. It seems like all our metal is gone and only plastic containers litter our streets.
Notes
[1] Tiger Bay, not its real name, was nicknamed after the famous port area in Cardiff, Wales. Tiger Bay or South Cummingsburg, its real name, is also a port area and like most port areas enjoy the best and the worst of everywhere. Many of those gas lamps were manufactured in Wales and were, more than likely, shipped from the Tiger Bay area in Cardiff..
[2] The Gleaner, May 9, 2011
[3] The Non-aligned Movement was formed as a response to the cold war wherein members would pursue a policy of interdependence without any direct allegiance to the two superpowers: US and USSR. Former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru is credited with coining the phrase, non-aligned, in the mid-1950s. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito and Indonesia’s President Sukarno were the pioneers that officially led to the 1961 founding.
[4] Brookfield Properties continue to build when others seem shy. It recently broke ground on its newest project: a twin tower-like monstrosity clearly intended to replace the void of the Trade Center replete with glass and steel. One of its Directors, Diana L. Taylor, is the girlfriend of NYC’s billionaire Mayor Bloomberg.
[5] During the Dutch occupation of New Amsterdam, later named New York, some Africans served as captive labor and others as free labor and had some civil and social rights attached. The coming of the British, in 1665, changed all that with new laws on any transformation from captured to free.
[6] Walter Rodney, History of The Guyanese Working People 1805-1905, The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 1981
[9] A popular market in Georgetown with an iconic clock built in 1881 entirely of iron by the by Edgemoor Iron Company of Delaware, USA
[10] A leader of the 1763 revolution of captured Africans in the Dutch colony of Berbice and claimed as the national hero of Guyana with a remarkable bronze sculpture in Square of the Revolution to commemorate that and inspire the coming revolution.
[11] Paul Bogle 1865 led a protest march that escalated into a full scale rebellion known as the Morant Bay Rebellion. British retaliation amounted to a massacre where over 430 Africans were killed and another 350, including Bogle, tried and executed. More were tried and punished with imprisonment and floggings. A monument stands in his honor at Heroes Park in Downtown, Kingston Jamaica.
[12] A monument also stands in Nanny’s honor in Heroes Park, Kingston Jamaica: A fearsome maroon woman who led several victorious military assaults on the British forces. She was feared as a soldier and as an Obeah Woman who could do miracles including catch bullets.
[13] A bronze statue stands in Georgetown’s Promenade Gardens opposite, Independence Park, in honor of this fierce fighter for India’s independence.
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| Brookfield Propeties latest Midtown Project Looks very much like World Trade Center (two) |
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| "Double Check" behind police barricade (Liberty Park) |
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| Homeless New Yorker just feet from Wall Street |
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| The Bronze bull a symbol of Wall Street prosperity |
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