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Heritage month is the time to specially celebrate and remember our past. Our pasts are important because they have helped shape and create our present and will have an impact on our future. People who place a high value on themselves tend to place a high value on their pasts and tend to treasure and preserve important elements of their pasts.
    In Atlanta, Georgia , there is a space set aside to honour the memory of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Given ordinary commercial realities, the space taken up by Atlanta’s MLK Memorial is prime real estate. Given people’s desire to make big bucks, it would make sense to take all the stuff dedicated to Dr King, move it out to some cheap scrubland and re-display it on cheaper ground. It would make commercial sense. After all we’re only talking about a simple engineering task of moving a metal statue and some marble and stone.
   Or, here in our Bermuda, we could take this National Heroes Day that we’re going to have in October and we could all just let the holiday be dedicated to somebody else, say ‘Toebell Burgess’.  We could all take a cooling-out holiday and have a cold one in memory of ‘Toebell’.  After all,  ‘Toebell’ must have been a hero to somebody — at sometime or other.
  In Bermuda’s Heritage Month, as the month begins to unfold, I see that the kind of heritage devaluing process that I’ve just been describing appears to be rampant.
  1852. In big bold stone letters, high up on the western face of the Alexandrina Hall, these four numbers are carved. 1852. By itself, it’s just a number, like a two or a four or a ten. Just a number.  But knowledge of my heritage tells me that the number is highly significant.

Ex-slaves bought the land
In Bermuda, slaves were emancipated in 1834. So the ex-slaves who bought the land on which Alexandrina Hall now stands had worked, had sacrificed, and had saved enough money to make that purchase. That carved out 1852 would mark the year that the Hall was finished.  That means that the adult men who built that building had all been slaves just eighteen years before.
   That building — Alexandrina Hall — is their monument. It is also a monument to the times. That building, Alexandrina Hall, is also a monument to, and a reminder of Bermuda’s slave heritage.
  For the past many years, on or close to 1st August in each year, a few black Bermudians have been taking to the stage and have been orating about Bermuda’s slave past and Bermuda’s black heritage. The story is usually that of slave hardships and later emancipation. In all the times that I’ve heard and seen these little stagings, I’ve always been reminded of the fate of the black men and  black women who were delivered into, born into, or sold into slavery.
   There is a group of black men who are today’s owners or possessors of Alexandrina Hall and who intend to sell Alexandrina Hall.
   Given the values that their selling intention displays, I think that in this year, and starting now, these black men should forswear their acquaintance with the words and emotions of slaves coming out of slavery. They should forswear the words and roles of the slaves and ex-slaves. Instead, they should take up the roles of those old African chiefs who captured and sold their fellow black men and black women into slavery. In changing roles, they would be acting completely in character and in sync with their actions in 2008 in this Alexandrina Hall matter.       
  They would be acting as they are behaving. They are yesterday’s black African sellers of men descended to today’s black Bermudian sellers of a large part of Bermuda’s small but precious national black heritage.
   They are acting in the same manner as did those old African slave catcher and slave sellers.
Editor’s note: More letters on this subject will be published next week and we encourage additional feedback. E-mail editor Tony McWilliam: [email protected] or leave your comments below.[[In-content Ad]]

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