Teach the Truth, Defend the Inheritance

Teach the Truth, Defend the Inheritance

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

A major focus could be the treatment of the first peoples: Lokono, Kalinago, Wapichan, Makushi, Patamona, Wai Wai, Akawaio, Arekuna-Pemon, Warrau and others. This editorial argues  that Indigenous Guyanese must not appear in textbooks only at the beginning of history, followed by disappearance from the national narrative. 

Their contemporary political rights, knowledge systems, conservation practices, languages, village governance, cultural institutions, and continuing struggles over land and consent belong in modern Guyanese civic education.

Guyana stands again at a decisive historical crossroads. Vast oil reserves are producing unprecedented revenues. Gold continues to leave our soil. Foreign corporations, international financiers and political intermediaries now circle a country once dismissed as marginal, poor and strategically irrelevant.

But before Guyanese celebrate this new era as proof of national arrival, we must confront a more sobering question: have we learned to recognize the old machinery of exploitation when it returns wearing modern clothes?

Our ancestors knew that machinery well.

They encountered it in the plantation economy—a system in which land was seized, human beings were enslaved, labor was coerced and the wealth produced in Guyana was shipped outward to enrich colonial masters, absentee proprietors, merchants and the British Crown. The plantocracy did not build its fortunes through benevolence, partnership or “investment.” It accumulated wealth through a system of racial terror, theft of labor and the calculated degradation of African people. 

The story did not end with emancipation. It evolved.

After slavery, colonial power sought new pools of cheap and controlled labor. Indentureship was imposed within an economic order designed to preserve plantation profitability. Indigenous peoples endured continuing incursions upon their lands, resources and ways of life.

Yet Guyanese people did not submit quietly. Enslaved Africans resisted from the first day of bondage. They plotted, fled, fought, organized and rebelled. The Berbice uprising of 1763, led by Cuffy and sustained by countless others whose names history has neglected, remains a declaration that human beings cannot be reduced to property. Emancipated Africans built villages, bought land, formed institutions and fought to exercise the freedom they had been denied. Workers struggled for dignity. Communities defended culture, identity and survival. Political activists carried the fight forward into the long campaign for self-government and independence.

The rights and liberties we now possess did not arrive as gifts from empire. They were wrested from systems built to deny them. That is the inheritance Guyanese children must understand.

Burkina Faso along with several other nations in Africa and the Commonwealth decision to remove colonial terminology and colonial assumptions from its education curriculum should provoke urgent reflection in Guyana. We too must ask whether our schools still teach our history from the viewpoint of those who conquered, extracted and ruled—or from the standpoint of the people who endured, resisted, rebuilt and created this nation.

Words matter. They condition how a people understand power.

When invasion is called exploration, conquest is called discovery, dispossession is called development and exploitation is called partnership, injustice is made to appear natural. The colonized become background characters in their own history. The conqueror becomes the hero. The victim is told to be grateful for the civilization supposedly delivered at the end of a gun, a chain or a contract.

Guyana needs no curriculum of hatred. It needs a curriculum of truth.

But it must do more than recount suffering. It must teach resistance, achievement, organization and agency. Our children must learn that their fore-parents were not merely acted upon. They acted. They defied the whip, challenged the plantation, bought land, formed villages, built families, defended communities, organized labor and demanded a nation of their own.

This is especially urgent in the oil age.

Guyana’s current wealth is not merely a commercial opportunity. It is a test of whether political independence has matured into economic sovereignty.

We must teach future generations how to read the arrangements through which their national patrimony is managed. They must understand royalties, profit shares, tax concessions, production agreements, environmental obligations, regulatory failures, local-content requirements, public accountability and the consequences of allowing wealth to escape while communities remain underdeveloped.

They must be taught to ask: who owns the resource? Who negotiated the terms? Who carries the risk? Who takes the profit? What remains in Guyana when the resource is gone?

These are not abstract questions. They are the modern expression of an old struggle.

The plantation class used chains, coercion and forced labour to cart away Guyana’s wealth. Today, a neo-colonial industrial order can achieve comparable outcomes through unequal agreements, corporate leverage, weak oversight, secrecy, tax arrangements and the political capture of public decision-making. The instruments are different. The danger is familiar: a country rich in resources, while its people remain spectators to the export of their own inheritance.

This is not an argument against foreign investment. Guyana needs capital, expertise, technology and trade. But partnership cannot mean surrender. Investment cannot mean that the investor acquires the lion’s share while the owner of the resource is left to manage polluted rivers, weakened institutions, inadequate infrastructure and unfulfilled promises.

A nation that does not understand its past can be deceived in its present.

The forthcoming presence of King Charles III in the Caribbean heightens the importance of this conversation. The British monarchy cannot approach the descendants of enslaved people with ceremony while avoiding its central historical responsibility.

The Crown sat atop an empire enriched by African enslavement, indentureship, plantation production and colonial extraction. Britain’s wealth was not made in isolation; but from the blood, labor and suffering of millions.

There must be no sanitized account of that record. Slavery was among the worst crimes against humanity. It was legalized theft of life, labor, family and future. Its legacy did not vanish when the formal system ended.

It lives on in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, opportunity and power across the Caribbean and the wider world.

A genuine apology is necessary because it identifies the crime and acknowledges responsibility. But words without repair, restitution and concrete redress are insufficient. They risk becoming performance—carefully managed expressions of regret designed to preserve comfort without confronting consequence.

We owe the freedom fighters, village builders, labor organizers, Indigenous defenders and anti-colonial patriots more than ceremonial remembrance. We owe them vigilance. We owe them courage. We owe them an educated citizenry capable of identifying exploitation whether it comes in the form of a plantation decree, a colonial ordinance, a mining concession or an oil contract.

Their legacy must be paid forward.

Let Guyana therefore undertake a serious, transparent and scholarly review of its curriculum. Let teachers, historians, Indigenous leaders, community organizations, students and families participate. Let the result be a national education rooted in evidence, dignity and civic consciousness—not partisan indoctrination, not ethnic exclusion, and not colonial nostalgia.

Teach our children the truth: where we came from, what was done to our peoples, how they fought back, and why sovereignty is more than a flag and an anthem.

Only a people trained to recognize exploitation in every shape and form can prevent its return.