Dealing with the past
Editorial
There is a feeling in some quarters that a modern society should not be bothering about the past; we should be looking forward, not backward. In addition there are those who adhere to the view that what has gone before - whether that takes the form of records of one sort or another, buildings, monuments or artefacts - has no merit if there is an association with an illegal regime or a colonial or slave-holding society. Certainly, the the bequest of previous generations in this country has been treated with scant regard. Documents have been burnt or allowed to disintegrate, tapes have been wiped, photographs have been jettisoned, aesthetic buildings have been pulled down, and whole collections have been left to moulder and decay. There are references to works published locally, for example, for which no copies are now known to exist, while in the art department, we are left to wonder about a nineteenth-century panorama of Georgetown which did not survive the passage of time. Ancient cultures have long recognized that societies are composed of those who have gone before, those who are living and those who are to come. It is that consciousness which gives them their feeling of continuity and their social and/or national definition, and it is that consciousness which provides them with the resilience to resist the cultural aggression of other groups. A people cannot make progress without a sense of history, for the possibilities of the future are premised on an understanding of the past. Like a man who has lost his memory, a society without a history cannot see its way forward clearly, and if it derides and destroys the evidence of that history it becomes impoverished both culturally and spiritually. No one chooses their past, and some pasts are a great deal more painful than others. However, that does not mean that the words and works of one's predecessors should be ignored, let alone consigned to oblivion. If mankind were to apply the principle, for example, that only those structures which had been built under the auspices of benevolent or legitimate regimes should be preserved, then that would put paid to some of the world's greatest monuments. A high proportion of these were erected by tyrants or by the agency of slave or forced labour, and heading the list are the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China. Where local monuments are concerned, in its earliest years the PNC regime demonstrated an anxiety to visibly break the bonds which tied the new nation to a colonial past. As such, therefore, the lions near the law courts were whisked off to an uncertain fate, and Queen Victoria was cast into the wilderness at the back of the Botanic Gardens. As time progressed, however, the administration mellowed somewhat, and Queen Victoria was rehabilitated, and William Russell, an unapologetic member of the nineteenth-century plantocracy, along with her. Where written and recorded sources are concerned, these constitute evidence of the past which has to be confronted as it is, and not as one would like it to be. For that reason records should be conserved no matter what their contents. The sad tale of the National Archives apart, in the 1970s the Chronicle destroyed invaluable materials which had been housed in the old building in Main Street, while in the really hard-guava days, GBC would wipe old tapes because they could not get access to new ones. As a consequence, recordings from the period of the late President Burnham, for instance, are not as plentiful as they should be. And under the present administration, the Ministry of Information library has done a mysterious disappearing act, while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has destroyed files. Where there is no institutional memory, the ministries will find it very difficult to function effectively. It has to be remembered too that even under the most oppressive of rulers, a society will reflect certain cultural features which are neutral, and might in some cases even be good. Guyana, for example, is English-speaking; it is that way because the last conquerors were English-speaking, and the language came as part of the cultural baggage. With the best will in the world it would simply not be possible, even if it were desirable, to erase all the forms of cultural expression which were inherited from previous generations, or even previous rulers. Coming to terms with one's history also means appreciating that which was good in it, and where appropriate, building on it.
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