Shridath Ramphal

“Despite the differences inherent in a multi-cultural society, Guyanese know we are one. Elements of difference – of race, of colour, of religion, of where in the land you come from, of how you speak, each competes for identity – but all under the canopy of being one; of being Guyanese. ‘Race’ emerges as a problem when we allow that element of difference to abandon the tent of oneness and set up a habitation of its own. When race is linked to politics the danger increases – then so, in resistance, must the strength of the home of oneness: of being Guyanese.”   Sir Shridath Ramphal (1928-2024)

Guyana’s majority communities of Indian and African origin have been fused by history into oneness with its other peoples. Nothing epitomises this better than Vreed-en-Hoop where, in a sense, slavery ended, and indenture began – merging into each other. William Gladstone, (the father of a future British Prime Minister) owned Plantation Vreed-en-Hoop and, on slavery’s abolition, became the most highly compensated slave-owner anywhere – owning plantations in Jamaica as well. Not content with those spoils he began ‘indenture’.
In 1988, when asked to speak in Guyana at an event marking the 150th anniversary of the end of slavery and the beginning of indenture, Shridath Ramphal called the address, ‘A Heritage of Oneness’. It revived linked remembrance of Gladstone’s slave ownership, the Demerara Revolt and the journey of the Whitby and the Hesperus – the ships that brought the first indentured Indians. He ended his address on the following note:

“If this commemoration is to fulfil its highest purposes, it must help us to rise to the real challenge that events 150 years ago have bequeathed to us: the challenge truly to make these events the genesis of a nation. We will be able to do so only when we understand that slavery and indenture were a continuum, that their victims shared a common experience of bondage, that the same history which tempts us to mutual alienation created a primordial kinship – a heritage of oneness we have been prone to squander but need ceaselessly to cherish and enlarge.”

In 2014, he elaborated on the theme of ‘A Heritage of Oneness’ in his published reflections entitled, Glimpses of a Global Life (Hansib). Eight years later, he was moved by the emphasis of Guyana’s Head of State, President Irfaan Ali, on the theme of ‘Oneness’ – moved into reissuing through social media, and this booklet, the words he wrote in 2014. His hope was that this recall of those beginnings might reach a generation of younger Guyanese and help to strengthen the impulse for ‘ONE GUYANA’.

• 228 x 152mm
• 56 pages
• Paperback