Dear Editor,
I fully support Mr Rakesh Rampertab’s contention that the history of banditry in the eighties (SN April 27, 2008) ought to be researched, documented and published.
It will be a tragic loss to history if the many events of the 1961 – 1992 Guyanese era were to go unrecorded and unpublished by professional historians. At present all we have of the early 1960s are a few highly skewed books written by politicians untrained in the science of historiography, and old yellowed newspaper reports. As Mr Rampertab noted, books of the post-independence period, written by more historically-minded authors, tend to shy away from the more sensitive topics, perhaps in the false belief that their documentation and publication will stir up strife, or because the authors wrote from an ethnocentric perspective. Well, we must not forget the truism, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” For the sake of the present and future generations, we must remember and record our past, bitter though it be, so that we and them can learn from it, so that its horrors will not be repeated and that our future may be less bitter.
History is frequently written by fortunate ‘winners’, rarely by unfortunate ‘losers’; but this does not mean that the ‘losers’ have no history. Winners are not necessarily those who have won a war or were conquerors, but also include those – even losers of wars – who managed to record history as they viewed it and were able to make their record an ineffaceable part of their culture. Winners, in other words, are those who are prolific writers, publishers and disseminators of history as they view it, e.g. the Jews. Losers are those who failed to write down history as they saw it or had their records effaced/hijacked by the winners, e.g. Gnostics.
In high schools, students who do history are taught that it is the ‘study of the past’. They use ‘approved’ books with the assumption that what is written in them are ‘true facts’. The questions of who wrote those books, under what circumstances they were written, what were the authors’ motivation and biases, who approved them and how ‘true’ are the ‘facts’ they chronicle are never addressed. These students grow up into adults assuming that what they were taught are the ‘true facts of history’; any variation, no matter how logical, reasonable and supported by irrefutable evidence, is branded as ‘heresy’ or ‘revisionism’ in an effort to suppress another view of history. This is the problem posed by the few skewed books of our pre- and post-independence history. The lack of precise knowledge of our past continues to fuel tensions in our present.
The 1961- 1992 period offers a fertile field of research for professional Guyanese historians to re-discover the rich unwritten and hidden history of that period. I am sure many primary source documents and written eye-witness accounts of that period are languishing away in dusty file cabinets and drawers. There are also persons still alive who can be interviewed for their recollection of events. I still have my diary entry of an act of failed banditry that occurred in Rose Hall Town in the wee hours of the morning of Monday March 14, 1983.
The chronicling of our recent past will require the expenditure of much time, effort and funds by earnest and determined researchers. But it can be done. All it requires is the will to do it.
I look forward to reading future professional Guyanese publications on topics, to name a few, such as the following:
How the PNC/PPP (take your pick) under-developed/undermined (take your pick) Guyana.
How private enterprise survived and prospered in the period 1964-1992.
An analysis of the Hoyte Economic Recovery Programme.
The Great Flour Ban/Restriction.
The Parallel Economy of the 1980s.
The Banditry of the 1980s.
Burning the Canefields.
The Marginalization of African Guyanese.
The Marginalization of Indo-Guyanese.
The 1971 Rupununi Uprising and Aftermath
The 1961-1964 Civil Disturbances.
Who killed Rodney?
If we don’t record our history, then someone else will and we will be the losers. If we all record our history, we will all be winners.
Yours faithfully,
M. Xiu Quan-Balgobind-Hackett
