Dear Editor,
I could not agree more with your ideas on what our strategy should be for cultural tourism on the coast (SS editorial April 11). I have the impression that our national museum does provide drawings of what Georgetown used to look like as a plantation city below high tide, but the strands of reason are too far apart and speculative.
I wish someone, or some organisation like the UG History Society, with youthful energy would recreate in plan the evolution of this city’s topography. Early writers are a good place to start, but the rationale for developments within the last century should be urgent while we still have knowledgeable Allis, Allsopps and Sohans among us.
It was my privilege to have studied sugar technology at the world’s first Sugar Institute, which can also lay claim to being the world’s first Food Institute. The top floor of this building in Berlin, Germany is the Sugar Museum. The city of Berlin was quick to recognise the work of one of its leading chemists who discovered how to extract sugar from the beet in 1747; and the museum traces the development of the beet into the sugar beet and the commercial extraction of sugar from it.
That is by no means all. It features the entire history of the sugar cane from time immemorial to its beginnings in Hispaniola in the New World, courtesy of Colum-bus’ second voyage and the trade and industry it spawned up to today. I even saw a detailed model of a slave ship with little wooden Africans in storage and vivid descriptions of the inhumanities of the slave trade. In the Institute of Sugar Technology below I was able to read every single copy of every publication of GuySuCo down to the sports page, all neatly bound and shelved. They sure study their competitors!
Their 1980s technology was breathtaking. One factory I visited produced more sugar in 3 months than our entire country produced in a year. After the farmer dumps his load of beet in the factory compound almost the only people you see are the security. A mechanical arm scoops up the beet and transfers it to a conveyor to begin the processing. Inside the factory the quiet is interrupted by hums and clicks only when you pass near sanitarily sculptured units like diffusers, heaters, filters and centrifuges. Almost the only people you see are the cleaners. Two engineers running on a silent electric railway carriage along the ceiling overlook everything below and on computer monitors.
Dave Martins is right in his Monday column that we are forged in the crucible of this country. Pity, that too many only get this wisdom after they migrate to developed countries. Even the Germans call the USA the land of unlimited possibilities. Nevertheless, they mostly stay in Germany and play their part, large or small. Would that we could discern and trust our own home-grown people while they are still at home! Maybe then we will better value what we have inherited and do more to preserve the essentials for posterity.
Try to estimate, for example, the effect on students of GTI and others in Thomas Lands if they were to pass every day by a well kept old steam or diesel locomotive, and a visibly operational sluice/koker with a large ruler measuring Georgetown Datum in the Cummings canal, together with instructions and reasons for correct and responsible operations on a noticeboard for all to see.
Yours faithfully,
Alfred Bhulai
