The Odyssey from Dhaka to Den Amstel

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The Sunday Essay · Migration & the New Guyana

The Odyssey from Dhaka to Den Amstel

What a Nation Built of Journeys Owes the Stranger on the West Coast

A man travels nine thousand miles from Bangladesh to a Guyanese village that formerly enslaved Africans bought with their wages. His arrival has become a political weapon. But protecting the migrant worker’s wage and protecting the Guyanese worker’s wage are not competing projects. We can audit how he was brought here without making him the enemy.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · Brooklyn, New York · August 23, 2026

Somewhere on the West Coast Demerara public road this morning, between Vreed-en-Hoop and Parika, imagine a young man from Dhaka walking to work. Perhaps he is a mason on one of the new housing schemes. Perhaps he is a welder, or an orderly on the early shift, or a laborer on the bypass road they are pushing through to ease the traffic at Tuschen. In this telling, he has crossed nine thousand miles of the earth — Dhaka to Doha, to Bogota, to Georgetown, or some variation on that route — carrying a debt to a recruiter, a photograph of his family, and the oldest human wager there is: that a stranger’s country will let him work, and that his work will let his children live.

He is a figure of imagination, but he stands for people who are entirely real. And he does not know that he has arrived in a place that understands his journey better than almost anywhere on earth. He may not know the name of the village he passes through. We should make sure he learns it, and that we remember it ourselves. It is called Den Amstel.

I. The Village That Bought Itself

Den Amstel sits on the Atlantic coast about eight miles west-north-west of Georgetown, between Blankenburg and Hague, on land that was once a Dutch coffee plantation — its name traced, in the village histories, to the river that runs through Amsterdam.^[9][10] The plantation failed in the middle of the nineteenth century; local histories recount flooding and drainage pressures, that eternal Guyanese antagonist. And then something happened that ought to be taught in every school in the Republic. Den Amstel’s land passed into the hands of the freed people in stages: a petition of the 1840s records sixty lots bought individually by formerly enslaved Africans as early as October 1838, in the very first months of full freedom;^[11] the village histories then recount one hundred and twenty-five of them pooling their resources for a communal purchase of the estate, and standing as its established proprietors by 1854.^[10][18]

Think about what that means. People who had themselves been purchased — who had been the property on the ledger — saved the wages of their freedom and bought the ledger. They drained the land, planted it, built the Ebenezer Congregational Church, raised the school, and with neighbouring Fellowship were declared a Village District in 1892.^[12] Den Amstel was one act in the great Village Movement, that astonishing burst of cooperative capitalism and institutional imagination that swept the coast after Emancipation — Victoria in 1839, Buxton, Plaisance, Queenstown — when the freed people of this country, denied credit, denied the franchise, denied everything but their own wages, built the free villages of British Guiana and governed them.

“The Village Movement is the founding proof of a proposition I have spent my life defending in another register: that the people this world writes off as labor are, given the smallest opening, its most disciplined builders of institutions.” — T.R.B.

Hold that image. We will need it.

II. A Nation Marked by Odysseys

There is scarcely a Guyanese family untouched by a journey.

The Indigenous peoples of this land possess histories older than the Republic, older than British Guiana, older than the plantations themselves — the first and continuing presence against which every later arrival must be understood. Theirs is not a story of crossing but of endurance in place, and no account of who belongs here can begin anywhere else. After them came the great coerced and contracted crossings that made the coastal society we inherited.

The ancestors of Den Amstel’s founders were carried across the Atlantic in the holds of ships. On May 5, 1838 — while the formerly enslaved of British Guiana were still bound under the so-called apprenticeship, with full freedom not to come until the first of August that year — the Whitby and the Hesperus arrived from Calcutta carrying the first indentured Indians.^[14][15] For a season, the two great unfreedoms overlapped on one coast. There followed the long crossing of the kala pani, the dark water, which over eight decades brought nearly a quarter million people from the villages of British India to these same coastal estates. The Portuguese came from Madeira, the Chinese from southern China — distinct streams, on distinct terms — though the record of these recruitment schemes returns again and again to two hazards: the agent’s inflated promise, and the debt that shadowed the crossing. And each arriving wave was met with suspicion by those already here. These journeys were not the same — chattel slavery, indenture, and wage migration are distinct regimes of unfreedom and constraint, and nothing is gained by collapsing them — but each left on this coast people who, under radically different conditions, had to make lives in a place that had not been home.

And then, in the century that followed, we became the leavers. The Guyanese odyssey reversed direction: to Brooklyn and the Bronx, to Toronto and Scarborough, to London and Leeds. I made that journey myself — from Third Street, Alexander Village, to Flatbush Avenue — as have hundreds of thousands of Guyanese. We know what it is to arrive somewhere with a suitcase and a qualification nobody will recognize. We know the barrel economy, the remittance discipline, the years of being the accented stranger whose labor was wanted and whose presence was resented. Every Guyanese family owns a chapter of this story.

“So when a man from Dhaka walks the West Coast road, he is not walking into someone else’s story. He is walking into ours, at an earlier page.” — T.R.B.

III. The Week’s Exhibits

I rehearse this history because of what happened this week, and because of how easily what happened this week could curdle into something ugly.

On Monday, the Leader of the Opposition published a broadcast alleging that Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc., a firm of Bangladeshi origin, received billions of dollars in state contracts soon after its local registration, and that the company is connected to the President’s brother.^[1] Sigma has rejected the allegations and retained counsel; its attorney’s letter is reported to state that the Guyanese company has received only one contract since its 2022 incorporation — a Shelterbelt rehabilitation award made in 2026 through competitive bidding.^[2]

That account, however, is difficult to reconcile with Guyana Water Inc.’s own defence of the procurement record. GWI’s August 18 statement identifies Sigma as the successful bidder on several water-treatment, well-drilling and rehabilitation projects,^[3] and Stabroek News reported in March 2024 that the same recruiting agency had received a GWI water-treatment contract in October 2022.^[5] There may be an explanation involving related companies, differing legal entities, subcontracting arrangements or imprecise corporate names. But that explanation should be supplied by the incorporation documents, beneficial-ownership records, award letters and executed contracts — not inferred by the public. The procurement records may answer some of the allegations, particularly the claim that no competitive bidding occurred; they do not yet reconcile the conflicting accounts of which legal entity received which contract, when, or under what ownership and control. Lawyers’ letters have gone out. The High Court may yet be asked to sort the timelines. The documents could sort them faster.

This is the same Sigma Engineers that received government authorization in February 2024 to liaise on the recruitment of up to five hundred Bangladeshi healthcare workers — none yet recruited, the Foreign Ministry said a month later^[5][6] — amid continuing concern over health-sector shortages and the retention of the nurses Guyana itself trains. And it comes months after Bangladesh’s interim government announced plans for a diplomatic mission in Georgetown with an explicit objective of expanding Bangladeshi access to Guyana’s growing labor market.^[7]

“Two sets of claims are now loose in the country, and they must not be allowed to fuse.” — T.R.B.

The first set concerns procurement: Who won which contracts, when, by what process, with what connections? These are legitimate questions — among the most legitimate questions a citizen of a petrostate can ask. They have documentary answers. The contract registers exist. The NPTAB records exist. The company registry filings exist. The way to resolve them is the way I argued in these pages two Sundays ago, in the Orwell essay: with precision. Publish the award letters. Publish the evaluation reports. Let the numbers and dates speak. If wrongdoing is shown, prosecute it. If the allegations are shown false, say so plainly. Defamation writs and Facebook broadcasts are both, in their different ways, substitutes for the boring, liberating discipline of documents.

The second set concerns the migrant himself — including claims, voiced by opposition figures since 2024, that imported workers could eventually affect the electoral roll and the country’s demographic balance, claims that circulate in cruder form in a thousand voice notes. And here I want to be equally precise, because precision cuts in both directions. Whatever his precise path here, the man from Dhaka did not award himself a contract. He did not design our procurement system, set our nurses’ wages, or write our work-permit rules. He came because Guyana offered work — part of a new migration that is not slavery and is not indenture, but that can still be made coercive by debt, deception, and dependence on an employer. To convert legitimate anger at elite dealing into hostility toward the laborer is the oldest misdirection in the colonial playbook. Walter Rodney spent his scholarly and political life teaching us to recognize that structure: systems of exploitation endure more easily when the aggrieved are induced to fight horizontally rather than interrogate the arrangements above them.

I wrote last year of the horizontal wound — the way broken social contracts discharge their pain sideways, onto the Venezuelan migrant, the hinterland miner, the neighbour of the other race. The Bangladeshi worker is now a candidate for that wound. We should decline to inflict it.

IV. What a Decent Migration Order Looks Like

For generations, Guyana’s migration question was why our people left. The oil economy has presented us with the opposite question: what kind of country will we become when other people begin coming here?

None of what follows is an argument for a labor free-for-all. It is an argument for institutions — and here the economics is not mysterious.

Guyana’s labor shortage is real. An economy that expanded by more than sixty percent in 2022, by roughly a third in 2023, and by more than forty percent again in 2024^[16][17] — with a construction boom, a health system straining to hold its nurses, and labour and skills shortages that the IMF itself identifies across the non-oil economy^[16] — will import labor. The only question is whether it imports labor under rules or under rackets. The President said this week, of Cuban workers, that they must come through legal channels and follow Guyana’s labor laws.^[8] Good. Then let us build the channels and enforce the laws, visibly, for everyone:

A transparent recruitment regime. Every licensed recruiter published. Every government authorization letter — like the 2024 healthcare-workers letter, which became public through social media — gazetted as a matter of course. Recruitment fees regulated, because recruitment debt can become the leash by which a worker is exploited after he arrives.

A labor inspectorate with teeth. The same Ministry of Labour that must defend the Guyanese worker’s wage must defend the Bangladeshi worker’s wage — because an underpaid migrant is not only a wronged man; he is downward pressure on every wage around him. The surest way to make immigration hurt Guyanese workers is to let migrants be cheated. Wage floors protect the Guyanese nurse and the Bangladeshi nurse, or they protect neither.

Honest numbers. Publish the work-permit statistics quarterly: how many, from where, in which sectors. Rumour is fed by darkness. Demographic suspicion flourishes precisely because the public does not have authoritative figures against which to test political claims.

And pay our own. No imported nurse is a substitute for collective bargaining with the ones we trained. A government that recruits abroad while failing to bargain seriously with the workers it trained may fill vacancies, but it has not addressed the conditions producing them.

“The surest way to make immigration hurt Guyanese workers is to let migrants be cheated.” — T.R.B.

This is what I have called, in the context of the Barima tragedy, a culture of competence in critical matters. Migration is a critical matter. It deserves administration, not improvisation punctuated by scandal.

V. Xenia

The Greeks whose epic gave us the word odyssey had a name for the custom that governed the arriving stranger: xenia — guest-friendship. It was not sentiment; it was theology and statecraft fused. Zeus himself was Zeus Xenios, protector of strangers, and the Odyssey is, among other things, a long audit of households by how they treat the unknown traveler who appears at the gate. Odysseus comes home to Ithaca disguised as a beggar precisely so that his own country can be tested. The suitors fail the test. The swineherd passes it. The poem’s verdict on which of them heaven favours is not hard to read.

Guyana is being tested now, at the gate, by a tired man with a duffel bag. And the ancient category will not fully serve us, for he is not merely our guest. He is not simply passing through — he may become a neighbour, a ratepayer, a parent at the school gate, and in time a citizen. The modern obligation must go further than hospitality.

We do not need Homer to teach us how, because we have Den Amstel. The people who bought that plantation — lot by lot in the first months of freedom, then together as a village — had every reason history can supply to be hard-hearted. They had been strangers in the most absolute sense, property in a land not theirs. Instead they built a village whose churches, schools and playfields still stand, and they built it through the most radical act of trust on record in this country: pooling wages with people who had nothing but their word. People of Den Amstel stood on that same public road in April of last year, in the Justice for Adrianna protests, demanding truth and transparency in the death of an eleven-year-old girl^[13] — because they still believe the society can be made answerable.

That is the inheritance the man from Dhaka is walking through. He is not a threat to it. He is its next chapter, if we govern well — another stranger on this coast, working, saving, wagering everything on the future. The scandal, if there is one, lives in air-conditioned offices in Georgetown, and it should be pursued there with subpoenas and spreadsheets. It does not live in his knapsack.

Ask the questions. Publish the documents. Prosecute what deserves prosecution. And when the answers come back, let us be able to say that in the season when we audited the powerful, we also kept faith with the stranger — that the country the formerly enslaved of Den Amstel bought with their wages was still, nearly two centuries later, a country worth walking nine thousand miles to reach.

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Den Amstel was bought, lot by lot, by people who had themselves been bought.

The village that was bought by the formerly enslaved must never become the village that turns on the stranger.

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References

1. Kaieteur News, “‘Fly-by-night’ company linked to Pres. Ali’s brother gets $3.9B in contracts in five days …$12.3B over following years, opposition alleges,” Aug 18, 2026. kaieteurnewsonline.com
2. Guyana Chronicle, “Sigma Engineers rejects Opposition Leader’s allegations, signals legal action,” Aug 18, 2026. guyanachronicle.com
3. Guyana Water Inc., “GWI reaffirms commitment to transparent procurement and accountability,” Aug 18, 2026. guyanawaterinc.com
4. National Procurement and Tender Administration, public awards database. npta.gov.gy
5. Stabroek News, “Govt appoints agency to recruit 500 healthcare workers from Bangladesh,” Mar 26, 2024. stabroeknews.com
6. Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, statement on the recruitment of healthcare workers, Mar 25, 2024. dpi.gov.gy
7. Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha, Council of Advisers’ decision to establish a mission in Georgetown, Jan 30, 2026. bssnews.net
8. News Room Guyana, “Cuban workers must come through legal channels and follow Guyana’s labour laws — Ali,” Aug 18, 2026. newsroom.gy
9. Stabroek News, “The World Beyond Georgetown: Den Amstel,” Sep 4, 2011. stabroeknews.com
10. Guyana Chronicle, “Den Amstel: a village with a strikingly rich history,” Mar 15, 2014. guyanachronicle.com
11. National Assembly of Guyana, National Day of Villages address, citing the 1846 petition on Den Amstel lot purchases. parliament.gov.gy
12. Office of the President, remarks at the James McFarlane Corry commemoration, Den Amstel. op.gov.gy
13. Stabroek News, “Citizens protest at Den Amstel, Melanie Damishana over Adrianna’s death,” Apr 27, 2025. stabroeknews.com
14. Royal Historical Society, “Beyond This Day: 29 January 1838 — Indian indentured trade and the first crossing.” blog.royalhistsoc.org
15. UK Parliament, “The West Indian colonies and emancipation” (Living Heritage). parliament.uk
16. IMF, Guyana 2025 Article IV Consultation, Country Report No. 25/103. elibrary.imf.org
17. Department of Public Information, “Budget 2023: Guyana’s economy grew by 62.3% in 2022.” dpi.gov.gy
18. National Trust of Guyana, Den Amstel village history.

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