The Government’s invention of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) – Association of People of African Descent (APAD) – is a comical contradiction in terms and a display of crass contempt for the citizens of this country. This perversity has occurred 181 years after African-Guyanese had created their own, first NGO and independent newspaper without Government intervention.
Former President David Granger, speaking on his weekly programme – The Public Interest – pointed out that African-Guyanese had evinced early indications of their initiative, identity and independence by establishing the British Guiana African Association and publishing its newspaper, Freeman’s Sentinel, only four years after Emancipation, in 1842.
In Mr. Granger’s analysis, African-Guyanese activism was a response to social alienation, discrimination and deprivation. Mass party-political and trade union organisation was a response to situations in which disease was rampant; housing was unwholesome; illiteracy was high, social security was almost non-existent; unemployment was widespread; wages were low and the majority of the population was excluded from governmental decision-making at every level.
The almost continuous emergence of NGOs in the post-Emancipation period was, therefore, the typical response of the African-Guyanese community which established the British Guiana Afro-Improvement Association in 1901 and the African Development Association in 1924. The British Guiana Labour Union and British Guiana Workers League were formed to agitate against the colonial economy in the 1930s. Organisations such as the Circle of Sunshine Workers sought to improve the working conditions of women and girls. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 provoked the formation of a wave of organisations – African Blood Brotherhood, African Development Association, African Welfare Convention, British Guiana African Association, Negro Progress Convention, New Negro Development Association and League of Coloured Peoples among others.
Evidence suggested, according to the former president, that the African-Guyanese perception of marginalisation motivated the formation of the African Society for Racial Equality and its successor African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa, and, later, the Pan African Movement (Guyana Branch), African Cultural Development Association, African Heritage Foundation, All African-Guyanese Council, Forum for the Liberation of African-Guyanese, National Emancipation Trust, Cuffy 250, Movement for Economic Empowerment and Revival, Awareness and Promotion of African Culture among others. There are now about 75 African-Guyanese NGOs which seek to preserve the culture and protect the rights of people of African descent.
The International Decade of People of African Descent Assembly-Guyana (IDPADA-G) is, now, the most appropriate country coordinating mechanism to implement the UN Declaration for the ‘Decade of People of African Descent’. The Former President expressed the view that the PPPC administration, however, is trying to suppress it and, at the same time, supplant it with the Association of People of African Descent – a spurious invention with the potential to humiliate Africans and debilitate their legitimate organisations. He felt that the collective intelligence of the African-Guyanese and need for the integrity and independence of their NGOs should be understood, not undermined and they should be helped not hindered in their mission to give everyone ‘a good life’.
