Dear Editor,
I fully support Mr Rakesh Rampertab’s contention that the history of banditry in the eighties (SN April 27, 2008) ought to be researched, documented and published.
It will be a tragic loss to history if the many events of the 1961 – 1992 Guyanese era were to go unrecorded and unpublished by professional historians. At present all we have of the early 1960s are a few highly skewed books written by politicians untrained in the science of historiography, and old yellowed newspaper reports. As Mr Rampertab noted, books of the post-independence period, written by more historically-minded authors, tend to shy away from the more sensitive topics, perhaps in the false belief that their documentation and publication will stir up strife, or because the authors wrote from an ethnocentric perspective. Well, we must not forget the truism, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” For the sake of the present and future generations, we must remember and record our past, bitter though it be, so that we and them can learn from it, so that its horrors will not be repeated and that our future may be less bitter.
