History around us

WE DO NOT yet know what the small, claustrophobic room, lined with lime mortar, was used for. But, according to National Trust chairman Margaret McDowall, we know enough to have a pretty good idea.

“We know the room is too small for grain, and too large for valuables,” Ms McDowall said at a site visit of the Home Construction Ltd (HCL) compound in Tacarigua. “There’s a grilled cast-iron grate at the front, so it’s probably not a space for the plantation owners and their families to hide from slaves. So our tentative conclusion is that it was used to hold slaves.”

Tentative or not, the juxtaposition of the banal use of the room as a document storeroom on the HCL premises with the possibility that it was once used to hold enslaved people on the Orange Grove Plantation is jarring. It’s ironic the room is being used to house shelves of paperwork since there is clearly a need for more research and documentation of sites just like it all over the country.

The tour of the HCL’s premises on Wednesday came as the country prepared to commemorate the annual Emancipation Day holiday.

In the same month that this country mourns the passing of the historians Brinsley Samaroo and Gérard Besson, it is now on the cusp of welcoming the arrival of the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the ruler of Ghana’s Asante people and monarch of the historical Asante Empire.

But whereas Mr Besson and his ilk tirelessly illuminated the past, the Asante King is a direct descendant of and living connection to that past and its future.

We welcome this visit, which has already stirred interest and discussion, as well as a degree of cynicism. The latter is inspired not only by the complexities of our history but also the feeling that not enough is being done to give such occasions lasting meaning.

For instance, at times there is a feeling of downright resistance to acknowledging the past.

While in some countries there are active movements to sanitise history, as seen by ongoing efforts in Florida, US, to spin the wrongs of slavery, this country sometimes seems to inadvertently glorify colonial rule. It took almost four years for an activist group to change a sign at Lopinot even though all the relevant parties agreed it should be changed.

“The history of the African people is not taught in our schools,” Eintou Pearl Springer also lamented this week.

While we need to consider the removal of statues and the renaming of locations, we also need to bring up the standards of research, education and preservation so that we can have a clearer understanding of history. That history, whether we accept it or not, is literally all around us.