We need a dictionary of West Indian biographies

The staff and members of the History Department of the University of Guyana used to produce a feature in Stabroek News called History This Week. These vignettes from   Guyana’s past added up to an important contribution in making Guyanese aware of their heritage and their heroes and heroines. I remember, for instance, wonderful features on George William des Voeux, the great magistrate, and marvelous Herbert Moshett, one of the pioneers of Guyanese art.

There is so much wonder in any life – so much interest and excitement and achievement, so much agony and failure too, everything so vivid if only we knew the details. But in Guyana, and in the wider West Indies, we hardly bother to remember. “What the earth swallows is soon forgotten,” Isaac Singer wrote. He could have been a West Indian.