Not many Guyanese, I am sure, think much about it but we have a National Trust whose high and shining objective is to preserve the national heritage. The Trust exists, its remit is wide and important, the task it undertakes goes to the heart of safeguarding the nation’s identity. But, as with so many agencies, institutions, and associations in Guyana, the Trust for want of sufficient funding and lack of enough qualified and dedicated people cannot begin to do all the work it should and would very much like to do to conserve the soul-material of our land.
When it comes to our history, who can doubt that much more should be done to identify, preserve, interpret, catalogue and publish what is valuable and significant in creating a sense of ourselves as a people living within a recognizable and cherished historical perspective.
G.K Chesterton might have been referring to Guyana when he wrote the following in one of his essays – entitled, appropriately I think, “On Love”:
“The modern world seems to have no notion of
preserving different things side by side, of
allowing its proper and proportionate place to
each, of saving the whole varied heritage of
culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying
something by destroying nearly everything.”
We have too little respect for our past. Even our main historical sites are largely neglected and in the main go on from year to year deteriorating without serious investigation or proper preservation. We pull old buildings down without the slightest hesitation. Historic items of machinery from the sugar industry – and no doubt from the rice, bauxite, gold and timber industries too – are thrown out for scrap or left to rust. Our national archives have not received the attention and funding and care and the qualified people to serve them which they deserve if we were really serious about our history. We are our own worst vandals.
Our heritage does not consist merely of the well known: the ancient stoneworks on Fort Island; the glorious timber building of St. George’s Cathedral; Stabroek Market; and other such treasured witnesses to our past. Our heritage consists of less substantial but just as valuable works: small mosques, temples, and churches in our villages built long ago; an old sugar estate range lest we forget; the manuscript, say, of Norman Cameron’s The Evolution of the Negro; all the original issues of Arthur Seymour’s seminal Kyk-Over- Al; vessels that used to traverse the rivers in old pork-knocking days; tableware our grandparents ate from; paintings and prints from long ago and ancient maps; the old tapes of famous political addresses; recordings of our master musicians and poets of long ago; old kokers up the coast.
Such things have disappeared or are in danger of disappearing because they seem insignificant or old-hat and no longer useful. We tend to be insensitive to their value as historical artifacts. We destroy old things – old books, old handmade furniture, old machinery, transport from another age, old houses, old family papers and collections – and by doing so we unwittingly throw away a vital part of the legacy which we should be leaving to our children and our children’s children. And this is true also of the old customs and memories of how things were and how things were done which we fail to treasure and record and which therefore disappear as the generations pass. We must thank Godfrey Chin again and again for the astonishing work he did before he died in his Nostalgias to lessen the loss of our communal memory. Historians will bless him as they will bless people like Allan Fenty and Francis Quamina Farrier – and I know there must be others.
I am by no means advocating an over-fanatical devotion to the past. Indeed, we have to get things in perspective. Worship of the past and what it created can be taken to extremes. Such over-emphasis, in fact, is a distortion of what the word “heritage” actually means – which is “that which has been or may be inherited”, which of course embraces not only the past but the present as well. Our heritage very definitely includes contemporary material and the popular culture of today. Our historical heritage should combine with the current creative effort – new buildings, new works of art, new artifacts, new documents, new artistic creations – to form a single unfolding statement of ourselves as a people. We create our history most truly by preserving what is contemporary most carefully.
I wish to stress this, since it is so easy to forget the historical importance of what is being done now. Yet, of course, it is the purest common sense. The rarest old document, the most ancient edifice or work of art, was once fresh and new as today’s newspaper or Christmas card. If we wish to develop a real sense of what our heritage is we must take pains to recognize not only the use to which we put our current creations but also their potential value as witnesses in the historical drama of the nation.
Periods in history very quickly disappear from view. The minutiae which make up the density and truth of life are not thought important enough to record or retain. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who set out in their great 19th Century journal to be “historians of the present,” observed what generally is forgotten: “A period for which one has neither a dress sample nor a dinner menu is dead and gone and cannot be revived.”
Long ago, when a good friend of mine- distinguished for years in the sugar industry – came to leave, he was clearing out his files accumulated for 25 years or more. Before I had a chance of stopping him he had consigned a tremendous mass of material to be destroyed. It is hard to blame the practical man for acting to dispose of what appears to him simply out-of-date rubbish which has served its purpose and should be thrown out to make space for the new and relevant. But that, I’m afraid, is exactly how we carelessly throw away priceless historical evidence and devalue the inheritance we pass on to others.
A continuing national responsibility of great importance which devolves not only on the Government of the day but on us all is to make ordinary Guyanese aware of the rich history they have inherited and careful to preserve what belongs both to us in this generation and to our descendants as we pass on.
