Across A Bridge in Linden: To El Dorado or a Symbol of our Historical Dilemma.

Wismar-Mackenzie Bridge, Linden

The Guyana Police Force. Improperly Dressed for Peace
(C) Norvell Fredericks

Demerara Bauxite Company was Canadian owned before nationalization
in 1970.Things have changed ((C) N. Fredericks)

The People United ((c) N. Fredericks)

By: Clairmont Chung

On July 18, 2012 residents in Linden, Guyana, blocked a bridge in protest against a plan to increase electricity rates. The State responded by firing on the unarmed crowd. Three people died and several more were wounded. Residents responded by seizing and occupying that, and a second, bridge. A state of siege, undeclared martial law, descended on the community and continues as I write. Here I attempt to show the history of our dependence on fuels, energy, and violence and why the bridge at Linden is such an important symbol. Linden is not alone, it’s happening to people everywhere. It is not a romantic lament about the good old days. They were not. It’s the same strategy of old. As I write companies are lining up to exploit gold and other mineral reserves in Guyana and everywhere. This is about the hives we inhabit producing the sweet for a few. The bridge is a symbol for all that is wrong with power and the deaths a toll even El Dorado cannot pay.

HUMANS AS ENERGY

There was a time when people met their energy needs by their sweat and blood. People were their own energy. For food, the bedrock of human energy, we hunted and foraged then; we sowed, we reaped, and ate. Plants and animals including humans formed a food chain, taking sustenance from the environment and converting it to energy. For shelter we harvested from our environment. As our populations grew we sought more efficient ways of providing. We developed tools to hunt, clothe and build. In parts, this meant the smelting of metals. We transformed beasts for burdens. For entertainment we made music and shared stories using our breath, the wind, and the drum to transmit sound. Some saw an opportunity to accumulate wealth from our sweat and blood: our energy. Hierarchies developed. Divisions for labor followed. The Militia invented: to protect the accumulated wealth. Slave labor followed. Wealth increased for a few. The few funded the dawn of industrialization. A new power matrix appeared that controlled our food, political power and energy. Food, political power and energy became centralized. Foraging and hunting was discouraged.

Energy and human labor were once the same. It is no longer the case. Now we get our food from the supermarket, our energy from the local electricity company, and power from political parties. In this centralized web, the political and economic elite invested in finding new fuels for energy. People were too unreliable. They tended to revolt and shared a peculiar habit called thinking.  Instead of using racial and ethnic groups against each other to reduce the cost of labor, business interests saw cheaper sources of energy as a way to maintain low wages and reduce costs. Fossil fuels entered the equation. Coal was used to heat the water for steam energy. At one time, trains, boats and even cars used steam. Natural gas made an appearance: used to light streets and homes. Then petroleum came. Electricity made an appearance. Linden reflected these changes more than most. Linden’s history symbolizes the rise in industrialization, the search for metals, and exploitation of human labor, cheap energy and machines to accumulate wealth.

    

(circa 1899) Taken from a blog, 'Then and Now" and identified as Demerara Railways. In the background left the sign  says,'Steam Sleigh Cecil Rhodes'. Another explorer after whom Zimbabwe had once been named: Rhodesia. 

Linden sits about sixty five miles from the capital, Georgetown, by car and straddles the Demerara River. It is treated as a twin city, Mackenzie and Wismar separated by the river. But it’s really a collection of small communities on both sides of the river with names like Amelia’s Ward, Watooka and Watooka West, Silvertown, Christianburg, Speightown, Nooitgedacht, and Richmond Hill. In fact, it’s a triplet with Christianburg, but we threat Christianburg as part of Wismar for our purposes here. The names reflect the waves and ethnicities of immigrants looking for a better life and sometimes fortune. The larger of the twin, Mackenzie, and its smaller sister across the river, Wismar, host the center of commerce. Coming by car from the country’s capital, Georgetown, you enter the town at the first of the two occupied bridges, Kara Kara. To get to Wismar you have to cross the second occupied bridge where the shootings occurred: Wismar-Mackenzie. The Wismar-Mackenzie Bridge serves as a gateway to the logging and mineral wealth of the country: this includes gold, diamond, and many lesser known ores. Linden, itself sits on deposits of bauxite. The expansion of Linden as a major town is owed to the mining of Bauxite which is shipped abroad and smelted into aluminum. Just as Linden reflects the world’s modern industrial history, it reflects the economic toll of high fuel costs, slow markets and uncertainty caused by the greed of international financiers. The call for Linden to pay increased electricity rates is a symptom.

   

THERE IS NO GOLD WITHOUT SLAVERY

Mining for Coltan in DR Congo

No place on earth has escaped our voracious search for energy. Excess energy is turned into gold: wealth. Even Columbus’ trips to the ‘new world’ were a search for energy and money. Places beyond our planet are no longer safe. As we looked at the pictures of Mars sent by Curiosity, One sees close parallels to Christopher Columbus. We have seen this before. Columbus reached the ‘West Indies’ by harnessing the power of wind and of men. Things have changed. There are no humans onboard Curiosity. Columbus had made trips to Africa before sailing to the Indies. He used an African as his navigator. Columbus’ arrival unleashed a series of events still felt today and particularly in places like Linden. It’s important to examine this history.

From the chronicles of Mansa Musa, Emperor of Mali, Egyptian scholar Ibn Fadi Al Umari recounted two separate expeditions outfitted by Mansa Musa’s predecessor, Mansa Abubakari II, which left West Africa and headed west. Ibn Fadi Al Umari noted that Abubakari II believed there were lands beyond the Atlantic Ocean. It was not Columbus who originated the idea. Only one of 200 ships returned from this first recorded expedition. The captain of the surviving ship reported the story of the entire expedition disappearing over a huge waterfall in a river. His ship had been slow and avoided the wall of water by turning back. Abubakari II led the second expedition of several hundred ships. None returned. This was more than 150 years before Columbus. The people Columbus later met, in today’s Haiti, told him that dark skinned people had come. Columbus recorded this in his own journal[1]. As proof, they showed Columbus gold-tipped spears the Africans left. He would have had this information from his earlier trips to Africa. Columbus rewarded the hospitality of the Tainos, “Indians”, by enslaving them in his gold mines.

Mansa Musa, the source of this information, succeeded Abubakari II and made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca referenced by another Arab scholar and travel writer, Ibn Battuta. Musa’s trip to Mecca was a religious pilgrimage and though he was imperial in his thinking he brought huge amounts of gold and reportedly shared it freely. They paid for their trips with gold from the 3 huge mines within Mali’s territory. He travelled through North Africa on his way to Mecca. They carried so much gold; witnesses reportedly began to think of Mali as El Dorado.

Unlike Musa, Columbus came looking for El Dorado. The story is told of him pursuing spices from the East Indies and being lost. The true story is that he came to take and we have been giving ever since. Mansa Musa reportedly travelled with loaded camel caravans of gold. Columbus’ time in Africa, in Tunis and Ghana, exposed him to these stories. Ghana was part of the far reach of Musa’s empire, which included what was to become the gold kingdom of the Ashanti. On Columbus’ advice, these same people were later captured and brought to these parts, Guyana included, for their labor: their energy. It was he, Columbus, that suggested to Queens Isabella, the Spanish Crown, that Africans be used to help tame the ‘New World’ and do the work that would enrich the Crown. Captured Africans provided the energy that enriched the landed class and ushered in the period of industrialization in Europe and the Americas. The slave plantations were really energy plantations. The canals that cris-cross Guyana’s Coast and make it habitable and farmable were dug by the free labor of captured Africans. Now, the people who once supplied the energy to build the empire, and for the industrialization that followed, are now unable to afford the new energy developed on their backs and that replaced them. This is reflected in the reported 70 percent unemployment in Linden.

Human energy is not a new concept. Some reports claim Mansa Musa travelled to Mecca accompanied by 60,000 ‘men’ and 12,000 slaves. Even in the ‘New World’ Europeans and indigenous people were used as slaves by their own people and, later, as part of the holocaust initiated by Columbus. Feudalism in Europe provided a ready supply of the disenfranchised for labor in the Caribbean. But it was Africans who came to replace these groups, who were captured and used as property, and came to symbolize a new kind of slavery: as chattel. It is this labor that provided the energy that built the foundations for this voracious marketplace today.

Shot in peaceful Protest @ Linden
(Guymine.com)

Today, human labor is not as important to the energy sector as in the past. In fact, Karl Marx’s analysis of labor as the creation of value and wealth probably needs revision because of the marginalization of the laborer. Marx’s workers added value to the item for sale. The owner sold the item, paid his expenses and kept the excess. But labor is not just an addition to the value of the item labored upon. It’s the harnessing of energy which powers the means of production that forms the basis of wealth and power. The all-inclusive ‘means of production’ has expanded to include robots, fossil fuels, hydro power and nuclear energy. Workers have no direct control over these forms of energy as they had over themselves. Workers’ action is largely ignored and eliminated. Note the recent massacre of 40, and counting, striking workers at the Lonmin platinum mines in South Africa. It seems we have returned to a time even beyond slavery where workers are not protected even by the value of being property. We are reflected in the balance sheet of corporations as an expense: wages, and without the benefits of healthcare and pensions. We are no longer an asset.

 

Instead of machines raising our standards of living, they are marginalizing us. After slavery was abolished, East Indians, Chinese and Portuguese indentured laborers replaced the slave system. Then, as in slavery, workers began to resist and organize for better conditions. The response has been to phase out human labor. Now, the work is scarce. When we do work, it’s for little pay that cannot cover the cost of the energy we need for survival: our food and our fuel. Machines now do a substantial portion of the work. These machines dig into the earth for fossil fuels: oil, gas and coal; and for uranium, platinum and gold. These materials are then used to make more tools to increase the same search for energy. Our computers, phones and other gadgets run on electricity.We work to keep them running and for food to keep us running. The manufacturers of these products and the energy monopoly lead us with a ring in our noses to the slaughter. These gadgets have become indispensable. From the point of view of the manufacturer, machines are now able to do some of the work and cheaper. Robots do not strike, call in sick, or get pregnant. Curiosity will not rebel.

It’s in this new industrial marketplace that Linden would begin its modern development. Men and women seeking fortune, like Columbus, found their way up the Demerara River. Without acknowledging the people already present, they gave the places new names.

Just as the formal practice of indentured labor ended and steam came to fore, the first of the great wars started. Linden owes much of its expansion to the wars. These were wars fought among Europeans, in the main, for control over the search for metals that made the tools to secure the new wealth. More critically, it was WW I and II that provided the appetite for the bauxite Linden produced. Cheap labor built the railways and the steam ships. Steam was prominent in Linden’s development as it powered the railway from Wismar to Rockstone.

The railway opened in the 1897 and ran for another 50 years bringing the same items brought today in the trucks delayed by the occupiers of Linden’s bridges. Steam powered boats helped transport people and their property between linden and Georgetown. Steam was replaced, eventually. By the second war, petroleum was it. The R.H. Carr, a diesel powered boat, commissioned in 1927, would connect Linden to Georgetown. It was a sign of change. Diesel draglines dug for bauxite ore replacing the steam powered engines. Steam had become too expensive when compared to the new fuels. Electric power generation in Linden switched from steam to diesel. But all is not well.

Machines do the Work in Linden

The spiraling rise of the cost of fuel has brought the bridges and people in Linden into international spotlight. Petrol hovers around US$5.00 a gallon in Linden and increases further away from the capital. This is in a society where the minimum wage is still, officially, US$130.00 per month. Unofficially, the minimum wage is around half of that. The bridge at Wismar is the cheapest way to the country's ports: the gateway to the much needed foreign markets. It’s the shortest way. The cost of fuel dictated that. It is the rising cost of fuel that dictated increased electricity rates and forced the confrontation between residents and the state over the increase. But perhaps there is a more sinister presence.

    

As In the rest of the Caribbean there were people in organized societies in Guyana before Columbus came. In Linden, there were people living in communities before the rush for metals and wood and before the slave trade. Noted Guyanese anthropologist Ivan Van Sertima posits that the African influenced civilization of the Olmec in Mexico may have spread as far as South America[2]. The New World was only new to Columbus. Subsequently, Native Indians fled the Caribbean islands to the mainland to escape the holocaust Columbus initiated. Some settled in today’s Linden and are often forgotten in the discussion of its history. Guyanese anthropologists, Walter Roth asserts that the Wai Wai, their cousins and ancestors arrived in the region about 10,000 years ago in pursuit of large-game that had migrated south from the North American landmass. During the period of the African holocaust, plantation slavery, African maroon communities coexisted with Native communities throughout the three counties that now form Guyana: Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo[3] I wish to avoid the Eurocentric view of history that usually begins with European arrival: usually it’s Columbus; and that once plantations were established, there were no other independent communities and certainly not of Africans. It is Africans and Indigenous people who, both attempting to escape the holocaust formed the bedrock of the early population that began the building of the community we know as Linden.

Ethnic East Indian refugees leave
Wismar to avoid race based
violence circa 1964 

The Demerara Bauxite Company (DEMBA), a symbol of the desire for raw material to fuel the industrial development, was founded in 1912. George Bain Mackenzie bought it in 1917. He saw a fortune in the supply of the war machine with this new metal: Aluminum. However, it was WWII that triggered Linden’s most recent expansion. The Allies of WWII needed metals for their mechanized war. People from all over Guyana, predominantly African descendants of captive labor, and some from abroad swelled Linden’s population looking for jobs and opportunity. People came from the Caribbean Islands for work. DEMBA, a subsidiary of a Canadian parent ALCAN, ran the town. DEMBA generated its own electricity and dispensed that to the rest of the town. Even its pension packages included continued electricity. There was no attempt to profit from the sale of electricity. Profits were realized from the labor that produced the ore. The end of the war marked a decline in markets but the continued military and industrial build-up, including the arms race of the cold-war era continued to sustain Linden.

 L.F.S.  Burnham in Linden 

The decline of the USSR and the competition from cheaper production in China and Australia brought Guyana’s bauxite production to its knees. It remains there. Part of the rising cost of labor was the effectiveness of the labor movement.

Linden has always had a strong labor movement and much of its current resistance can be traced to that tradition. Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, whose name the collective communities now carry, would testify to the strength and independence of Linden’s labor. Former President Burnham depended on Linden’s support in his rise to political power. He had become popular partly because of his role, as a lawyer, in a fight to restore land rights of some of its residents against Demba’s expansion. Later he could count on their support. He benefitted further from the division between the races exacerbated by the CIA and US attempts to muzzle Cheddi Jagan: the Communist. The racial violence and separation of 1962 to 1963 helped to consolidate African support behind Burnham: seen as the African response to Indian Jagan. He would later champion an ideology that mixed Pan-African nationalism and socialism, in culture and economy, and that initially appealed to segments of the country and the African population in particular.

However, Linden tested that loyalty. Things began to change after nationalization of the bauxite industry in the early 1970s. The bauxite workers were initially swayed by the rhetoric of nationalization. They worked harder and even improved the quality of bauxite and alumina produced. They believed in nationalization and saw the possibilities. However, traditional markets closed in response to nationalization and the economy stagnated from the rising fuel prices. It needed foreign currency for fuel and other essentials.

As the country gasped for foreign exchange, like fish in a polluted river, the Burnham led government sought to tap into the accumulated pensions and bonus earnings of the bauxite workers. It was an act of desperation. The government determined that DEMBA’s contributions to the pension and bonus schemes should be turned over to the government. The government argued that this was not earned income. Workers struck in response. It was not the first time. But this was a different time. The Guyana Mine Workers Union was hijacked by the government through intimidation and other coercion. It packed union ranks with loyalists. In response, some of the workers formed their own labor organizations. The Organization of Working People (OWP) emerged and challenged the conversion of their pensions for use by the state. Many were arrested, beaten, tried, fired, teargased and wounded in the ensuing battle. One attack involved teargas being shot into the cells of the police station while several members of the OWP were in them. The near death attack on ‘Stickman’ and the murder of Edward Dublin signaled the end of that period of open labor resistance. Many in the current opposition were engaged in acts of intimidation and terror against members of the OWP and also the Working People’s Alliance (WPA). OWP members stuck to their positions and remain defiant even today. The same cannot be said for the WPA with surety.

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President Ramotar stated that the increase in electricity rates that led to the protest was a 2008 agreement between the PPP government, under Bharrat Jagdeo, and the IMF. He added that the opposition APNU agreed to the implementation in March 2012. So you see, the increase is not to bring Linden’s rates in line with the rest of the country. It is not an increase initiated by the providers of the electricity: BOSAI, the current operators of the bauxite mines. BOSAI has no interest in the power generation as a business. It is like the attempt to take the pensions of the workers of the 1970s. Incidentally, electricity supply is written into the retirement agreements for workers. It’s a benefit fought for and won. Instead, this move is to fulfill an agreement that was made elsewhere: a burden placed on the people. It is an attempt to take more of the meager earnings of the community and transfer to others outside of the country.

The IMF is no friend of developing nations. It is a bill collector. For the current government to pay its bills it has to get money from the people. How can the IMF have the authority to tell an elected government what to do? While even we, who elected the government, cannot. Like the exorbitant VAT and petroleum taxes all are needed to fund our debt to the IMF and similar bad agreements. The IMF represents and collects for a larger conglomerate of financiers with offices on Wall Street.

Watooka Club: Facilities once restricted to expatriate executives (Evan Wong)

Today, a great irony is that what’s left of the bauxite industry is sustained by Russian and Chinese interests. China and the USSR were the governments that helped sustain the Burnham regime during that time. Despite their communist history, the business interests from these countries seem to care even less about labor than the racist, capitalist, Americans and Canadians, before nationalization. Mackenzie was once a segregated town. Even in its heyday of bauxite production, African movement around Mackenzie was restricted. Protestors were banished to Wismar. You needed a pass to go from Wismar to Mackenzie. You had to state your business. The Watooka area was reserved for whites and near whites. Watooka even had its own currency system; not available to the masses of Linden. Native, indigenous, inhabitants were rounded up and banished to a part of Wismar now known as Buck Town. It’s referred to as a reserve: some reserve. When you have free run of all the land then told that, now, this piece is yours; that is not a reserve. The rest of the land is now a preserve of the giver.

It is the bridge between these twin communities that is now the center of attention, but not for its own sake. The bridge in Linden continues as a gateway to the new metals and other natural resources of the poorest –cash poor- nation in the western hemisphere: Guyana. The minerals and resources hang like a curse around its neck, while countries in the Caribbean with no mineral wealth enjoy significantly higher standards of living. Over this bridge, built by Lindeners’ labor for the bauxite company of old, trucks take energy, food for people and gasoline for the machines, to parts of the interior. There many, including many Lindeners, are engaged in a not so systematic destruction of some of the last remaining sources of fresh water and air in the world.

Prospectors, large and small, from Europe and Asia, North and South America use fresh water to wash away the landscape in search of minerals. Logging clears the land and makes it easier for the washers and diggers to follow. We are told it is mainly for gold and diamond. More and more land is being commandeered and washed into the rivers and lakes. New islands of discarded gravel, poisoned with mercury and cyanide, have appeared in the rivers. In another generation of these practices, the entire country would be washed back into the delta from which it rose. Except, then, it would be a dead delta.

     

So when Lindeners, occupy, take control of the bridge, it is not only about the too high electricity rates. It is, indeed, a symbol of all that is and has been wrong from Columbus to now. It’s not only about the murdered three but about the murdered trees. It’s about all that died in pursuit of the energy: the power and the gold. It’s about saving a nation from itself.

LINDEN’S ELECTRICTY RATE IS NOT LOW; THE RATE FOR THE REST OF US IS TOO HIGH

Guyanese pay some of the highest rates in the world. It’s been now confirmed that this is as a result of agreements with and pressures from the IMF: an austerity plan. Add water, it too comes at an unsustainable cost, and you get the brew for an uprising. In Trinidad and Tobago citizens pay about 4 cents per kilowatt hour of power. In Barbados the cost is about 8 cents a kilowatt hour. None of these countries use nuclear or hydro power to generate its electricity. In Canada, the rate averages around 12 cents per KWH. In the United States the average is about 15 cents per KWH. I use an average because there is no national company but several small companies that compete and theoretically reduce the cost of power. Both Canada and the US have oil reserves and both use hydro and nuclear power to generate its electricity. At 26 cents per KWH, Guyanese pay twice as much as Canadians and it increases as consumption increases. People of one of the poorest countries in the world pay one of the highest rates for electricity. They cannot afford it. The result is that people throughout the country are stealing electricity through hook-ups that bypass Guyana Power and Light (GPL). They have to steal water too. Hence, Lindeners blocked a bridge to bring attention to a robbery initiated by the IMF and carried out by the government: the planned increase in Linden’s rates would see it triple that of Caribbean neighbors. Some residents will see a rise of 1000 percent.

The trucks stalled on the eastern side of the occupation waited to supply residents and workers engaged mostly in gold mining and logging. They are the relatives and friends, and just as exploited, of the occupiers and employed in the most dangerous, unregulated, and low paying work. Their situation exists because of the absence of employment in the traditional sectors and of the scant attention paid to job development and real education. Those making the return trip, stalled on the western side of the occupation, bring the mined minerals and logs for sale and export. What they leave behind are conditions that resemble the wild west of America’s gold rush of the 1800s. The law is almost non-existent. Violence and crime abound. A friend describing the work to me shook his head and said, “Slavery”. The destruction of the natural environment continues unabated with little evidence of the reported millions earned from mining and logging. Rivers that flowed free and clear are now clogged and muddied with poisons.

COLUMBUS IS BACK: THE ORIGINAL ‘CHOKE AND ROB’

As if not enough, there is a scheme to build a Hydro- electric generation station and dam at Amaila Falls. This scheme is being peddled by the Wall Street venture capital/project management firm of Sithe Global whose parent company is another Wall Street titan, Blackstone: a huge venture capitalist. Wall Street is just another code word for 'choke and rob'. The same people that helped bring Wall Street to its knees are engaged in building a dam in Guyana. Wall Street is in Guyana. It never left. The occupation of Wall Street has globalized. It has moved to Linden.

It might be of interest that the proposed hydro dam planned for Amaila Falls is smack in the middle of the areas identified with significant deposits of coltan. It’s like the gold and silver Columbus sought. A more recent comparison is the aluminum from Linden’s bauxite. Coltan[4], columbite-tantalum, is the new super-metal used in the manufacture of all electronics: our phones, computers and other high temperature gadgets like fighter jets and other weapons of mass destruction. It’s a great conductor of guess what; electricity. Companies are publicly advertising that they are mining coltan in Guyana and looking for markets. But apart from the potential fortune available in coltan, the hydro project would earn a fortune for Sithe Global and its backers. A substation is planned for Linden and another at Sophia, with transmission lines to run from Amaila, through Linden, to Sophia in Georgetown. A number of Sophia’s, so called; squatters would have to be relocated.

The projects current construction costs are listed at about US$ 800 Million. It would be US$1 Billion when the initial cost of the financing is added. It would take several lifetimes for Guyana to repay US $I billion. Imagine what a new hydro plant costing 1 billion would do to the rates of electricity in Linden or in Guyana. It’s like the bridge over the Berbice River where crossing was 50 cents before the bridge. It’s now US$11.00 (in one direction).  It’s about the same percentage rise planned for Linden’s electricity rates. The much longer Holland Tunnel from New Jersey to New York under the Hudson River has just risen from $9.00 to$12.00 to enter NYC. For Sithe Global and Blackstone it’s not about rates of electricity, it’s about imagined rates of return. The IMF will step in and guarantee payment. It will badger us for austerity programs to find money to repay our debts. Feasibility matters little. For now, it looks good on the balance sheet to attract more sucker investors. But moreover, Amaila Falls Hydro Project sitting in the center of the coltan deposits hides the true intent. It is not to reduce rates as the government posits. Where in the world are rates of electricity and other necessaries, anything, going down?

Amaila Falls: The Zone of of Operation (the dark space is the flooded reservoir) 

Some criticize those who advocate against the current kind of development. They posit that all the other countries have done the same and Guyana’s turn is now. They fail to understand that it is Guyana and similar cash cows that are stripped of its raw materials and used to sustain the developed world. It was never a gain for us. In the aftermath of the Linden bridge takeovers some premises were looted and the alleged looters arrested by the people. People, you need to arrest the real looters. We are not poor in any sense. We are being robbed: underdeveloped. Some of us have been reduced to scavengers where we roam taking things left unattended, and some attended, so that we may eat another day. If caught, you can be killed without a trial. This by the same police who themselves scavenge by harassing citizens for money at every stop. After 500 years of this, there will be no redemption without serious catastrophe.

In the midst of this, IAMGOLD advertises its coltan deposits in Guyana and OMAI has signaled its intent to return. This comes after a 1995 toxic spill from OMAI’s mines that threatened the entire region and is yet to be competently assessed or prosecuted. REE Metals advertises its 44 square miles leased from the Guyana government for Coltan mining[5]. The government denied any such agreement. Members on both sides of the political divide have interests in mining, logging, wildlife export and in seeing the dam built. It’s a real conundrum for some. But it’s not just about energy and minerals. It’s about fresh water and air. It’s the effect on the environment. The environment issue seems foreign to some. They have to eat now. So, they choke and rob.

The drawings supplied by Sithe Global show the need to create a reservoir[6]. The reservoir will permanently flood an extensive area far beyond the reservoir's boundaries. Unique trees, plants and animals will die as a result. Fish that use the river and tributaries for spawning will eventually become extinct. It is already happening. The rise in temperature of the water will also affect river life. The reduced oxygenation from damming will further reduce fish and other populations. Animals that depend on these fish and animals will die or be forced to relocate. The effect on human life has not been accurately assessed. The full impact of such a monstrosity cannot be covered in this article. It is of a scale too immense and tragic. Look at the state of the Uganda’s Bujugali Dam also a Sithe Global project and still incomplete after nearly a decade[7]. The planners treat Amaila Falls as some isolated unpopulated place. In fact, it’s part of a large eco-system: the Guyana shield from the Orinoco River to the Amazon River. It is unique in the world and represents with the Amazon basin the world’s largest source of fresh water and air. It is recognized as the lungs of our planet. Any diminution in its effectiveness compromises the entire system and planet.

A committee has been appointed to address the grievances of the Linden community: Region 10, Upper Demerara and Berbice. The committee includes names like Mclean[8] who carried the bags for OMAI[9] that presided over the near destruction of the Essequibo and Parris who presided over the intimidation of Linden workers in their fight for rights and dignity. I urge Dr. Clive Thomas to separate himself from this committee, if those names are not replaced.

Region 10 is not just Linden. It’s Kwakwani whose residents also struggled for better wages and treatment in the bauxite industry. But more importantly, Region 10 spans the heart of the resistance movement, the maroon movement, against slavery. It is these people that form the core of Linden’s population. At its eastern extremity it nears the former Canje Plantations, east of the Berbice River, where captured African labor at Plantation Magdalenburg began what would become the 1763 Revolution. It’s a revolution because the seat of power was captured and the enemy fled. Africans swept down through the Canje Trail, into Region 10, leaving a trail of fire, and to the Berbice capital center: Fort Nassau. Region 10 is Pere Boom, (Pear Tree) on the Berbice River where 45 colonists and families were massacred in the war for liberation. When Cuffy, declared himself Governor of the Negroes of Berbice, he meant roughly Region 10 with Fort Nassau as the capital. He was prepared to cede the lower part of the Berbice River to the Dutch. Others lieutenants wanted to sweep west and connect with other Africans in Demerara: the rest of Region 10. None of what I described here would have worked so  spectacularly without help from Native people. Cuffy had Europeans fighting with him for freedom too. He laid siege to Governor Van Hoogenheim’s fort and forced him to abandon the seat of power. Region 10 was also the site of the Demerara Rebellion in 1823 that some see as even more important than 1763. It began on the same day, August 18, as did the second attack to retake the Wismar bridge where police shot live rounds and more teargas in their imposition of martial law: just as it had been almost 2 centuries earlier. The 21st Fusileers and the West Indian Regiment intervened then and many times since. Now its the Joint Services.

We have come full circle. Or perhaps it was never any different. Uncertainty in Mali further drives-up the price of gold. War rages in DR Congo over Coltan mines: the new aluminum. Sithe Global pedals its stock and instruments to new kings and queens of America and Europe and wherever there is money; like Columbus did to Isabella: all on a promise that former slaves and indentures, their children and their children’s children would work and pay forever. Have we forgotten that it is we who showed Columbus the way to the bridge?

Deposits of Coltan in Guyana

So the bridge in Linden is not about high electricity rates alone. It is about the unsustainability of the lives we live. It is about the energy we used to be and cannot now afford. It is our lives being sacrificed like it has been for the last 500 years for access to power and money. It’s about drawing a line in the dust of our past.

The government must understand that it cannot control the will of the people. No amount of force of arms would protect it. It turned a planned five day protest into something unforgettable and irreversible. Had the people of Linden not had the dignity, the state lacked, it would have been a worse bloodbath. Its troops were surrounded on both sides of the bridges, outnumbered, and cut off. The people of Linden could easily have overrun those forces and start something much worse. Did the IMF tell the state to shoot too? Was that part of the agreement? The government would have needed all the foreign support available and that too would not be enough. It was not enough in Iraq and would not be enough in Afghanistan. Do not test the people. Cuffy reminds us of the limits of human suffering.

The religious and civic leaders need to enter the debate. The pandits, priests, evangelists, imams, shamans, our spiritual community, need to give counsel now. They need to stand and show the people the true depth of their beliefs. It is clear that our government is beyond its depth. There is still a smidgen of time before the tide turns.

   

Finally, Guyana can fulfill the promise it always carried and show the world what its earliest inhabitants always knew: the forest is indispensable and a multiracial society can unite and demand we leave the forest and its rivers the way we met it: now. It will take all of us to do it. Because once we cross that bridge, there is no return. It will do us all. The real gold is actually green. No amount of curiosity can kill this idea. The alternative is a toll no one can afford: not on this planet.       

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[1] The Journal of Christopher Columbus Google

[2] Van Sertima, Ivan, They Came Before Columbus  1976, Random House, New York

[3] John Pinckard writing in 18^th century Guiana noted the existence of these communities. He remarked about the numbers particularly in upper Demerara. He is quoted extensively in Vere T. Daly’s, Short History of Guyanese People. History tends to identify maroon communities in Jamaica, but they existed wherever slavery existed and particularly in Upper Demerara.

[4] There is an ongoing war in DR Congo for control over its coltan mines. Over 5 million have died. Several hundred thousand women have been raped. Rape is used as a method to clear the land.

[5] REE International Acquires Rare Earth Property With Estimated Value of $10 Million

[6] Amaila Falls Maps and Drawings

[7] Sithe Global has been associated with the Bujugali Dam since 2007, but the project has been building since 2002.

[8] In addition to his management role with OMAI, Mclean has been linked to CIA operations for many years since his time as head if the country’s military. Most recently WikiLeaks cables revealed he
was still reporting to US Embassy officials in Guyana. He is currently an executive of BOSAI who bought the bauxite operation from OMAI.
OMAI also owned the bauxite company which it sold to the current owners Bosai and Rusal and is reportedly thinking of returning after causing the largest spill of cyanide tailings in Guyana’s history into the Essequibo River. 

Mining Bauxite in Linden 

Beast and Human as Energy, Georgetown

Amaila Falls: With substations
at Linden and Sophia

This ought to clarify some of the confusion. Scientist believe the
continents were once joined. The Lost City of El Dorado may have
          been its correct name because it is believed to have  broken off from Africa.