What went wrong in Guyana?

SO you want to make a movie or paint the romantic scene of a significant historical event or period in Guyana. But where do you begin? You have a script; you know where and when it occurred, so you’re ready to go to the location. Then it occurs, upon arriving there, that the biographer in the aged or reprinted book you read mentioned that he sat in the shade of a cork tree off the main bridge on the public road, opposite the small koker after drinking some water in the nearby canal. Now you’re in trouble, because there is no cork tree, neither is there any small koker, though the over-grown weed in the trench and a closer look reveals unchecked erosion, which are indications of the mentioned pristine canal with its then drinking water.

A check with the village office does not help, though the oldest villagers recall with a nostalgic smile, what you describe. The reality is there is no visual help available. The fact is that we have not cultivated the habit of chronicling our landmarks, whether they rest in Georgetown or across the towns and villages in this country, and those landmarks that remain will soon vanish if at the local Government level, laws do not exist that instruct that a record in film and precise rendition be made of any landmark. For example, the old train station office in the village cited for renovation to locate the new village office. Old buildings will eventually be replaced, but those buildings identified for demolition belong to a special space in our cultural archive, that our ancestors lived in. Posterity is why museums exist.

So, in the event of creating the edutainment flash back, records must or should exist to reconstruct the authentic atmosphere of the day in question. Because whether it be stage drama, film, graphic magazine or fine art painting, you can’t have Hubert Nathanial Critchlow talking to the British Governor of the day on his cell phone in a serious portrayal of those events. The historic Methodist Church of Victoria built by slaves is also gone, surely another building could have been attached, and a significant artefact of the East Coast preserved.

More than two years ago, I notified an authority of the National Trust about the existence of a water vat built in 1837 at the back of a colonial building on Middle Street. The building was advertised for sale. The architecture that replaces these buildings are usually ultramodern and more suited for the temperate atmosphere from where they are copied from almost verbatim. Many look like the Normandy pillboxes on June 6, 1944. The colonial building is demolished; the fate of the vat when last seen was suspended in the moment.

We know what the ancient Africans in Khemet [Egypt] Kush and Benin wore and looked like; what the Indians and Afro Asians of Harappa and Mahenjo-Daro and North Indians look like and how they dressed a thousand years ago; and the Europeans of Greece and Rome and the citizens of China B.C, Cambodia and Mesoamerica can be partially constructed in their space of time because of Art and of recent, the ‘Sciences of archaeology ’. We know that the Sahara was once fertile because of 11 thousand year old rock art that portrays savannah animals and strange enough drawings of humanoids that suggest ‘Aliens?’. The Artist preceded the palaeontologist by tens of thousands of years, but together they are today revealing aspects of the burning human curiosity on the compelling question about our origins.

But let’s not stray too far and try to keep it local, though a glimpse at the global ordinary can inspire and direct relevant initiatives for gaps that must be filled locally. We have experienced enough of where we have gone wrong in comparison to the corrective things that have been done right to enhance the national ethos. By ‘we’, I mean politicians and practitioners in relevant fields and citizens with interests towards preserving landmarks that archive our history. It cannot be disputed that cutting down all the silk cotton trees in Saint Phillips Church compound has obliterated an era and should not have been allowed. One of the oldest buildings in Georgetown that harkened to a Dutch design lay opposite Brickdam Police Station but it’s now gone. Is there a pictorial record made by City hall? If not, then, the very consciousness of managing this City from an archival perspective has not been cultivated, thus, the thinking does not exist.

With Independence the euphoria of becoming a new country blinded the realisation that regardless of how uncomfortable the colonial past might have been, it envelopes our history and is relevant to posterity. I can understand back then the conflict that existed with the neo-colonial classes of British Guiana, and their pretentions and racisms. But they too are encased in a period of who and what we were, like the eccentric character, who upon being taunted and called ‘Walker de nigger’ shouted back furiously to our boyhood taunts, ‘British you fool!’. He too is a periodic symbol, especially when the time comes that the story of early Stabroek/Georgetown has to be featured as the backdrop to some drama whether visual or literary. We have lost important sections of this city (Tiger Bay for reference) without visually recording it, those men who possess the memory of our Townships will pass on with the biographic literature too obscure to easily arrest.

I have endured this on several projects, that required a fanatical loyalty not to fill gaps with the borrowed similar, rather than the recorded authentic, which also leaves much in description to the dependency that what the Dutch did in Suriname should be similar to what was done in Guyana. Much of our visual history, plans and graphic plates are in private hands across Holland and England and even the United States, but what is still available here has to be preserved. As the saying goes, if you lose your History you will soon forget who you are.