Everything calypso or nothing

THE EDITOR: The PNM’s and the Emancipation Support Committee’s phobia of things colonial is a cancer that sees them using their political power to rewrite history. In so doing I don’t recall anything in the Constitution which says the steelpan must be carried around the necks of everyone in TT and rammed down our throats.

This was brought home to me as I happened to be flicking through the cable TV channels and I ended up watching a very insightful documentary on TTT on the history of TT, beginning with Columbus’s discovery of Trinidad via the Trinity Hills and the various incursions between Sir Walter Raleigh et all, inclusive of all the conquistadors and so on.

It dawned upon me that the three ships that Keith Rowley hates so much were not there for fun and games and did nothing to subtract from nationalism, but instead represented a most poignant historical chapter which should be preserved.

The three ships on the national coat of arms is also synonymous with the time of the First Peoples, which is now but obliterated from TT’s landscape, when it should be the opposite. It speaks to the traditions that inform the naming of the forts in both Trinidad and especially Tobago. This is way more engaging than the slavery and indentured chapters, if one takes the time to explore it. For all intents and purposes, history did not begin in the 1960s, when pan was invented.

What we have now is a government prone to tribal instincts. If it sees a park with a colonial name which dates back to the time when slavery existed, that has to go and be replaced with something Pan-African (no pun intended).

It will not dare name anything after Adrian Cola Rienzi, who nobody knows – not even an obscure part of a highway or a boat to Tobago which celebrates separatist politicians. And over PNM members’ dead body as it relates to Basdeo Panday. If there is a street with a queen’s name, they will change it for something Afro-Trinidadian. Everything has to be calypso or nothing. The coat of arms is their latest victim.

There is no room for the early settlers like the ancestors of Ricardo Bharath Hernandez and Symon de Nobriga. I really wonder how de Nobriga and Colm Imbert really sit there and ignore their historic contributions to TT and not feel uncomfortable. But that’s them. Just as they are not kind to history, history will not be kind to them.

LINDA CAPILDEO

St James

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