Dear Editor,
I wish to present a few short observations about previous offerings on the naming affair, re the Guyana Archives.
Naming national spaces and places is not a perfect, absolute or pure science: It is more often acts of recognition of a person’s contribution to society…sometimes both local and international and often too for no real reason other than exercises of power.
Our national airport, in my humble opinion, was appropriately named Timehri as an honour to our indigenous people: The Jagdeo cabal saw it fit to rename it after the founder leader of their party. There were hardly any split hairs over this at the time and the PPP had the political power then to make and maintain such a change. Before this we had the renaming of Mackenzie-Wismar-Christianburg to Linden: Any significant bells ringing here? We also have Roxanne Burnham Gardens and Melanie Damishana…What are the connections of the names to these places? We shouldn’t forget that in the throes of all this “power” naming, it was suggested in a jovial stage moment to name the Demerara Harbour Bridge…Viola’s Passage!
Yet still, all the colonial names of streets and places are retained even though the main contributions of those name-holders, were to plunder resources and dehumanize and oppress colonized peoples; but we have not clamoured for such change. The museum is the Walter Roth Museum named after an Englishman, who, even with the title “Protector of the Indians”, was noted by his peers at the time for belittling indigenous belief systems as compared to those of Europeans…and his name adorns our National Museum.
Rodney was an academic and intellectual of extraordinary being and achievement; and no, his stature cannot be arbitrarily conflated with that of the local history elites, their achievements notwithstanding. For the national good, as opposed to partisan political interests, we, at the local level, must be brave enough to recognize, affirm and reward Rodney for all his international and national efforts for new thoughts and beginnings in the social, economic and political spheres of life. He is a son of the soil and he returned to Guyana upon the offer of a professorship at the University of Guyana but was blocked from taking that position by political intervention of the leadership of the day. That took away nothing from his brilliance and contribution to academic thought, neither international nor local; nor did his socio-political activism and foray into local politics in Guyana.
The study and recording of history is not unrelated to archivism: Hopefully the archives, in addition to the library, will hold a collection of his works, some of them groundbreaking and seminal, so that the nation will have spared no effort in preserving the academic achievement and legacy of Rodney.
In my humble opinion, the archives can be appropriately named after this great Guyanese student and professor of history. As a nation, we owe him no less.
Yours faithfully,
Rick Dalgetty
