Letter of the Day | The burden of landlessness

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The challenge of the lack of land ownership by the majority of Jamaicans has come to the fore once again with the treatment of the residents of Coopers Pen, Trelawny. The very name, ‘Pen’, has British colonial underpinnings, reflecting a time when plantation owners bred and kept animals tended by slaves.

Yet, despite the official end of slavery, not much has changed with these pens. The properties remain largely in the hands of the rich or remain simply as so-called Crown lands. The freed slaves were left to wander about seeking to earn enough to acquire a piece of the land they once tended. Much of this land was simply not made available to them. And, even if a piece was handed over, they would have no registered title to it and would find it almost impossible to prove any legal interest as, invariably, they would not have a registered title.

But the greatest challenge, I believe, we face as a country is the injustice of landlessness that has been perpetuated, possibly through ignorance, by the State in continuing the robbery that the colonisers foisted upon the foreparents of most of us of African descent, thereby placing us in a situation in which we are considered to have no rights to the land on which we are made to dwell. How absurd it is that we have had to start our emancipation as squatters! At least most of us.

In a position presented by medical doctor Orlando Thomas through his TikTok broadcast that the real reparations that we need are for each Jamaican to be afforded a piece of land in Jamaica, I believe this is our inherent right. I hope that the government will see as one of its key missions the making of land or housing available to every adult Jamaican who is without such a possession. The fact is that contributing to the National Housing Trust through salary is mandatory in Jamaica, and therefore every worker contributes to the provision of housing and truly should be afforded somewhere suitable to live.

DAVID ALLEN

Civil Engineer