Ancestral Rights, Ancestral Land: Reparations and Collective Property in the Plantation's Wake

ABSTRACT The “African Ancestral Rights Bill” raised by the Reparations Group in Guyana represents a communal claim to land. It required Guyana's government to constitutionally recognize African Guyanese rights to 15,000 hectares of land, the equivalent of about 18 percent of Guyana's total land mass. Foregrounding an idea of ancestral rights, the bill diverged from more conventional communal claims to land in that it represented a declaration of a debt in the form of land that the postcolonial national government—the successor state of the Dutch and British colonial administration—owed to the descendants of enslaved people in Guyana. This article asks how the group's focus on ancestral rights to land converges on or diverges from conventional interpretations of Indigenous rights to land in the country. Ancestral rights, the article argues, offer a way to think about material reparations beyond monetary redress for descendants of enslaved Africans through claims to land in the postslavery and postcolonial context of the Anglophone Caribbean.