WHEN Arrival Day was declared a national holiday some years ago under the past regime, I began to design artwork to place prestige advertising greetings for my clients in the print media for May 5h.
A few of them trusted my skills, so they didn’t need a perusal before publishing. So I published. The days following the publication of the first Arrival Day advertisements were filled with frequent phone calls.
Afro-Guyanese businesses wanted to know if I didn’t know that Afro-Guyanese were in Guyana long before 1838? While my Indo-Guyanese clients wanted to know, “How yuh could put everybody else on Indian Arrival Day?
And so the discourse went on. In the end, I decided to explain the illustrations I had used and the history behind ‘Arrival Day’. It was the first time many were hearing of the historical coming of many Guyanese through indentureship.
What had happened was that the holiday was granted, based on public pressure from individuals in the Indo-Guyanese community. The State delivered, but had avoided informing the activists about all that this period in Guyanese history constituted.

UNSUITED BEDFELLOWS
History and politics are not suitable bedfellows at anytime; one is based on records with evaluations to justify new data that must be supported, while the other is malleable to the moods and emotions within the rhetoric of the circled wagons.
The question is: How did so many Guyanese not know that part of our story? And it did not stop there. Recently, in a conversation with an official in the Ministry of Education, I discussed another incident that had occurred a few years after the first Arrival Day celebration. This was during the commemoration of ‘Black History Month’ in either 2012 or 2013. ACDA had paid a visit to a South Georgetown Primary School to conduct a programme that included visuals. The intention was to invite an introduction and discussion on the displayed visuals that would be initiated by the students.
To our dismay, none of the students could identify any of the five historical or folk cultures on display; and neither could their teachers. This unexpected turn of events resulted in the programme being halted.
How could no student or teacher identify at least an image of Fort Nassau? To cite another example, RESCU, a drug information group that I am a part of, was invited by some teachers who felt the urgent need for this information to be directed at their students. RESCU was an invitee at a Ministry of Education symposium to discuss the local impact on drugs in the schools when I met the teachers. We responded and went to the school and conducted the programme. But as I was about to explain the ritual practised among the Aztec and Mayas of using mind-altering cocaine on their human sacrifices, a teacher walked up to me and whispered, “You can’t tell them about that, because we don’t do history in this school!” This was an insight into a school system I couldn’t fathom, or could not have believed existed.
I thereafter sought out a retired headmistress I knew, who explained that because of the CXC schedule, the missing information would have to be taught at the the Primary School level. And the thought occurred to me, ‘Why are we allowing people like this former headmistress to go to waste?’

ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
The creative way of applying alternative information-education would have to be through the arts in the school system; visual and dramatic target development on the selected subjects. It will cost a tidy sum, but won’t run into billions of dollars.
Why should it be done? Well, because we’re incomplete, not understanding even the basics of the social and cultural formula that involves our ‘National Being’.
To embrace this creative awareness stimulation will generate employment under the theme, ‘Edutainment’, and will make the reading of related literature relevant. Besides, it will also produce demographic dramatic blueprints that can earn them local income while existing to encourage upper-level productions and adoptions, as well as open the doors for Cultural Industry merchandise products.
There are dozens of imports that can be produced right here, as long as the images exist that justify the external market investment. The fact that in the absence of mental and creative engagements, all that pervades the active consciousness of the Guyanese population is, at best, pedestrian politics, waged not in our interest, but by people who lack the expertise to meaningfully endeavour and inspire outside of political office.
Significant periods of the timeline of who we are will elude us, if it’s potential in this fast new age of media licensing and entertainment fail to be utilised by us, in our interest, because we may understand, but resist to believe that we are worthy of competing creatively.
And the concept behind this line of thinking is to allow it to unfold itself, in much the same way that Arrival Day did.
This is a good example of why other doors can be opened towards a wiser and more prosperous population.