On the 24th September, whilst celebrating Trinidad and Tobago’s 43rd anniversary as a Republic with members of the T&T diaspora in New York City, Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, appears, to have quite innocently re-ignited the debate on the renaming of public institutions after persons who have served in high office.
In responding to a question, Dr Rowley made the following observations,
“I would love to [rename Piarco International Airport] but these things aren’t as simple as they appear. Before Dr Williams died…he said when he passed on he wants no acknowledgement, no statue, just continue to be the way you all are.
“But…I would love to consider, and will have the Cabinet consider the naming of our airport the Dr Eric Williams airport.
“Recently, I communicated with his family on this matter, who reminded me very firmly what Dr Williams wanted and that they would view any attempt to do otherwise as politicising his memory and I would not want to be accused of…using Dr Williams’ memory to get re-elected.”
As one would expect, Dr Rowley’s comments on this sensitive subject have drawn salvos from all directions.
Last Friday, Ricardo Bharath Hernandez, Chief of the Santa Rosa First Peoples Community, noted that they were following the discussion with great interest since Piarco was a First Nations word.
“A place name in such a prominent and visible place as the country’s International Airport is a signal honour to the First Peoples,” Hernandez was quoted as saying. He pointed out that after colonization several communities with indigenous names were renamed by the Spanish and British colonizers, and the remaining names of places, “are precious to the First Peoples as representatives of the lost languages.”
In the meanwhile someone has started an online petition suggesting that the airport should be renamed in honour of the former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday since it was his administration which built the state of the art International Airport that was supposed to have become a “gateway to the Americas.”
As far back as July 2016, there had been calls to rename Piarco after the late Prime Minister Patrick Manning. It was during his tenure in office that the T&T Civil Aviation Complex, was commissioned with the latest state of the art equipment. Two of Manning’s nominators at that time, had noted that eleven Caribbean countries, along with Tobago, had named their airports after former prime ministers, and that Trinidad was the only country yet to do likewise.
Here in Guyana, we had honoured our First Nations brothers and sisters when Atkinson Field, following a significant upgrade in 1968, was rechristened Timehri International Airport on 1st May, 1969. Timehri being a Carib word for rock motifs which were here long before any of our colonizers. At the auspicious occasion our Amerindian brothers and sisters had performed a ceremonial dance on the runway and given their blessings for the safety of all arriving and departing passengers and crew.
On the 21st May, 1997, Timehri International Airport was renamed the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Timehri. According to a Demerara Waves report of 19th August, 2018, a PNCR Special Committee was to consider a motion proposed by the Atlanta Chapter of the PNCR’s North American Group at the 20th Biennial Congress, to rename the airport once again, changing it to the Burnham-Jagan Timehri International Airport.
As Hernandez, the Santa Rosa First Nations Chief, has stated several prestigious institutions in T&T have already been named in honour of the late Dr Eric Williams, including The Eric Williams Financial Complex and The Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex. Here, we have the Linden-Soesdyke Highway, the town of Linden and the Cheddi Jagan Dental School.
Why are we emulating the practices of our past colonial masters and erasing the names of our First Nations brothers and sisters? Perhaps now is the time for Caricom to contemplate bestowing names from the lost languages of our First Nations brothers and sisters on our international gateways, instead of plastering the names of politicians on them.
