Heritage
Editorial
Stabroek News
April 23, 2004
We reported on Tuesday that a blueprint for investing in the tourism sector had been launched the previous Friday by the Ministry of Tourism and Conservation International. The good news is that historic Georgetown has been included in the pilot scheme; the bad news is that no other areas of the heritage have been embraced. After all, it is not just the capital which has been under siege from the forces of despoliation, but the material heritage of the country as a whole. This is in contrast to the small island of Barbados, for example, which has been remarkably responsible about maintaining its built and industrial heritage, and even Suriname, which has managed with such success to retain the character of historic Paramaribo, among other sites.
Where Barbados is concerned, tourism brochures inform the public that there are still seventeenth-century buildings preserved, such as St Nicholas Abbey erected in 1650, or the Jewish synagogue and adjacent cemetery dating from 1654. The island has in addition restored its military material heritage including the Gun Hill Signal Station, erected originally in 1818, and restored by the Barbados National Trust in 1982. While it may nowhere near in the class of St Kitts' beautifully preserved Brimstone Hill fort, which covers an astonishing 38 acres, and whose various stuctures were said to have been built by Africans over a period of ninety years, it is of historical interest nonetheless.
The main history of Barbados, of course, is the history of sugar, which is true of this country too with some qualifications. And the various public and private authorities in our sister Caribbean territory are way ahead of us in preserving all facets of the sugar heritage. The industrial past is on display in the Sugar Machinery Museum, among other places, while the material framework of Barbadian social history can be seen in the Tyrol Cot Heritage Village, with its nineteenth-century wooden chattel cottages, and the earlier stone and grass-roofed hut which functioned as slave quarters. It might be added that Tyrol Cot also has the house of Sir Grantley Adams, still maintained with its 1937-era furnishings.
The various estate houses, such as the 300-year old Sunbury Plantation House, or the one on Francia Plantation with its double Demerara shutters, installed in the nineteenth century by a Guyanese carpenter perhaps, are a magnet for tourists. Since quite a few of these are still privately owned and occupied, preserving them for posterity has proved a less daunting challenge than in the case of the older managers' houses in our estate compounds.
In Guyana, in instances where a senior staff compound has been abandoned, the houses are simply left to fall into decay. As such, therefore, the buildings are a temptation for vandals, and in the case of Leonora, for example, we reported two weeks ago that arsonists had torched some of them. But it is not simply the managers' homes which should be preserved for posterity; we should follow the example of Barbados and be maintaining any surviving range houses, not merely for the tourist industry, but also for ourselves, so we can be reminded of how the workers who went before us lived.
And where is our equivalent of a sugar industry museum - or various examples of this heritage preserved in situ? It is true that the Chateau Margot factory chimney still survives, although one suspects this might be more the consequence of luck than any active intervention on anyone's part; when seen from the East Coast road it gives the impression of not being quite on the perpendicular, and that in due course it may provide competition for the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
And then there is the (mostly, but not unrelievedly) unfortunate story of our windmills. Yes, Guyana had windmills in the early nineteenth century and possibly before that, concentrated largely on the West Coast of Demerara. These were eventually abandoned as a source of power for the sugar industry, because the wind was not regarded as reliable enough for the purpose. Barbados, of course, was famous for its windmills, some of which are still preserved intact, and can be seen on the island's postcards.
Up until comparatively recently, at least, the brick foundation of a fairly large windmill survived covered by bush on Hog Island; one presumes that over the decades it had been raided as a source of bricks for other building enterprises. There is too the story of the iron windmill on the West Coast, which was relatively intact up until the 1980s, but according to Dr David Eastwood, Agriculture Director for Guysuco during the 1990s, had been vandalised by local residents who took pieces of the ironwork as weights for fishing nets, and used the foundation bricks for domestic purposes.
However, this particular story does have a silver lining. As described by Dr Eastwood in Booker-Tate's in-house magazine, the windmill eventually collapsed into a drain, from where it was retrieved by Guysuco workers. At Uitvlugt estate its skeleton was reconstructed under the supervision of then Factory Manager, Mr Abdul Gafur, and it now graces the Head Office grounds at Ogle.
It does not, of course, have its decorative ironwork any longer, but we do have pictures of what this looked like from Cousinery, a Frenchman who made drawings of either the identical structure or a very similar one at the beginning of the ninetenth century.
Guysuco and the workers and managers who participated in this rescue operation are to be congratulated for their contribution to the preservation of our heritage. However, we cannot depend exclusively on the good offices of dedicated individuals who happen to be sensitive to the importance of the past. What we need in the first instance is a more co-ordinated approach to the preservation of our sugar heritage, our built heritage as a whole, and our industrial heritage. Barbados discovered a long time ago the value of historical tourism. If we postpone things too much longer, there will be nothing left of historical interest to attract the tourists.