19 April 2001, 804 words
In offering guidance to Caribbean historians two weeks ago, Education Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar told them exactly how history should not be studied. Not, however, that this was her intention.
"You must seek to transfer this knowledge to the rest of our Caribbean community...because knowledge to be applied must be useful," she told the 33rd Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians. "Tell us more about our ancestors' sacred respect for the environment and more about the soul-sustaining cultures brought here from Africa, Asia, Peru and Mexico."
Sacred respect for the environment? The mastodon and the sabre-tooth tiger, not coincidentally, became extinct soon after homo sapiens appeared on the scene. As for "soul-sustaining cultures": yeah, once you weren't a slave, or female, or low-caste, or a human sacrifice.
Assuming she believes what she says (always a dicey assumption with politicians), the Education Minister's view of history has less to do with unearthing facts and more with writing PR for the past. Thing is, I am not sure that many of the historians at the conference didn't implicitly agree with her. If you just looked at the titles of some of the papers presented - "Cricket and the Socio-Cultural Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity in the Caribbean", "The Indian Press and the Indian Ethnic Renaissance in Trinidad", "Beautiful and Dangerous: Women's Depiction in 18th-Century Caribbean" - you'd think it was a conference of sociologists instead of historians.
Now sociology is, of course, a crucial aspect of history. So is economics, geography, psychology, archaeology, botany and linguistics. But there is a certain cadre of historians, at both the academic and vulgar levels, for whom history is merely a framework for ideology. It is not coincidental that Sunday Express columnist Kamal Persad, taking the same line as Persad-Bissessar, called for a revival of "ancient Hindu scholarship in the social sciences and humanities".
There is, however, no such animal. Historian David S. Landes, in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, notes that "Some of the most important work on Indian history has been done by Indian scholars, yet these, ironically, have had to rely almost exclusively on European records and accounts. Almost no written documentation comes down to us from the Indian side [although] the Indians were literate...Mark here the difference between hieratically literate and generally literate societies. The Europeans were of the latter category."
Why this is so has been explained by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown, who became intrigued by the fact that the Hindus of India had virtually no histories while the neighbouring Chinese had libraries full. In a study of 25 societies, Brown found that all the caste-based ones had myth and legend instead of accurate depictions of the past. These caste societies also lacked political science, social science, natural science, biography, realistic portraiture and uniform education - in other words, any intellectual activity that might have threatened the hereditary and divine claims of the brahmins.
It is therefore not surprising that the Hindu columnists have an ongoing campaign to rewrite the history of both India and Trinidad. In doing so, they are following in the inglorious footsteps of our local Afrocentrists, who argue that Egypt was the fount of all civilizations, that all Africa's present deficiencies are the result of colonialism, and that ancient Africans knew all about atoms and the expanding universe.
It is worrying, though, when our intellectuals share the same assumptions as our damn fools. In his contradictory, brilliant essay The Muse of History, for example, Derek Walcott writes, "...history...is a kind of literature without morality...The vision of progress is the rational madness of history seen as sequential time..."
People who adhere to such notions can neither study nor interpret history, especially modern history. J.M. Roberts, author of Twentieth Century, writes tellingly: "One general idea held by numerous people in western countries, but almost nowhere else except by tiny numbers, was historically speaking very new; the twentieth century was almost certainly the first which opened with many people believing that what they might expect from life was change, rather than a continuation of things as they had been."
Our problem, therefore, is that we have a set of antediluvian people who are terrified of change, and who conceal their terror under the rubric of "tradition" (and, to be fair, Walcott condemns these persons in the same essay). It is for this reason that they want to rewrite history in their own image; and truth be damned. But, if those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, those who believe in a non-existent past are worse off: doomed to exist in an evolving world which they can neither understand nor master.
Copyright ©2001 Kevin Baldeosingh