Your article in the Friday 23 Jan. edition of the Cayman Compass announcing an “investigation the alleged blocking of the beach access at Prospect Point”, highlights what I have predicted years ago as the confrontation between Caymanian residents and mainly expatriate owners over ‘rights of way’. Commissioner Gerrard in 1953 warned ‘generational Caymanians not to sell their birthright [the land] to those whom he described as ‘aliens.’ for “a mess of pottage”.
Gerrard in his prescience, set the example when he leased 100 acres of Crown Land (which has since become known as the ‘Seven Mile Beach’) to Englishman Benson Greenall for 99 years. Years later, I publicly endorsed Gerrard’s idea and advocated that generational Caymanians should never sell absolute titles to their land to those whom he described as ‘aliens’. The advocacy went viral in the mid-1970s and resulted in my being castigated and singled out for official opprobrium. Today, the land is gone and as a people we are increasingly denied access to what was literally the lifeblood of the jurisdiction. The predicament reminds me of the question posed by the Apache chief Geronimo, so many moons ago. When his people were placed in a similar predicament, Geronimo asked, “With all this land, why is there no room for the Apache?”
In my writings I have stated that there was a sacred and sacrosanct relationship between generational Caymanians and their land, hence our motto ‘He has founded it upon the seas’. It was a relationship which bore similarities to the Hebrew people and the promised land of Caanan. The similarity ends there however, since our Moses encouraged us to sell our land to the ‘alien’. And to compound that predicament, there is no clause in Adam’s Will entitling us to reclaim that which we were warned not to part with. Regrettably, it has come to this time where generational Caymanians and those who share our values, will have to spend an increasing amount of time and resources ‘contesting space’ to which we should have had an inalienable right in the first instance.
This struggle is about preserving these rights for our progeny, let us not falter.
JA Roy Bodden
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