TERRENCE HONORÉ

AS WE seek to remove some of the ruinous remnants of our colonial past, we must be careful not to lose track of the realities that have shaped our destiny. Each occurrence affected another. The European presence and the resistance. Even so, coloniality has caused many men of notoriety to still stand mockingly before us…like Columbus.

But to deny the recognition of men who fought for freedom is tantamount to gross negligence. While the colonisers did their thing, the hapless Indigenous and the enslaved Africans were forced to bear the burden of painful economic progress. But we must not forget those who fought against the scourge of the colonial whip.

From the melee, we must preserve the memory of men who fought the onerous, exploitative colonial system. Even as we remove the last vestiges of colonialism, we must also celebrate men like Donald Stewart, or Daaga as he was known. He led a failed rebellion against the British regiment in 1837. He represents our resistance to the exploitation of our colonial past.

There is a disconnect between our past experiences and our present representations.

I was recently reviewing the statutes for mounting statues and discovered that there was no rational explanation for the lack of recognition of deserving heroes of our history.

While there has been much discourse regarding pulling down statues of infamous people in our midst, there has not been as much discussion on the recognition of past heroes and statues being mounted in their honour. We are spending more time denouncing and denuding aspects of our past, but failing to promote and project the relevance of our ancestral contributions.

Granted that statues were essentially a colonial thing, meant for a king or nobleman, many would have shied away from erecting monuments for common men, in open spaces, halls or rotundas. But sometimes it's just good enough to name a street, or small park, to honour someone of the highest esteem. This has been the practice for both good and not so good characters in the timeline of our history.

But in recent years our authorities did not hesitate to mount statues for a few deserving individuals…like stalwarts of our calypso music, Lord Kitchener and the Mighty Sparrow in Port of Spain, Sundar Popo in Debe, or the bust of Mervyn M Dymally in Cedros, as well as Tubal Uriah Butler in Fyzabad. They got their recognition, but there are others who came before and even after who also deserve to be given the tribute of a monument in their honour.

I am making an argument for a statue to be mounted in a place of public scrutiny for Daaga. His place in our history must be considered, given the "parade" of discredited crooks and charlatans from colonial times. Men like Begorat the "torturer of slaves" who has a street named after him in Mayaro, and Picton, with a street and a village and a school bearing his ignominious name. With their deeds, we don't know if to curse them or pray.

While we press for reparations from post-colonial nations, we cannot co