The past is not a foreign country. It is the ground beneath our feet, the water in our pipes, the cadence of our speech, the rocking chair in which we once rocked our children to sleep or enthralled with a story – and Barbados is in danger of throwing far too much of it in the skip. A holocaust of memory For 400 years, this rock has been a laboratory of empire, resistance and reinvention, yet we still move too fast to respect and understand our own history. When “Granny” dies, her rocking chair – a literal heirloom, crafted by Barbadian hands and polished by generations – too often goes to the dump, or the shipping container, to be copied and rebranded abroad as “British Caribbean” or “British Tropical” furniture and sold back to us at a premium. The same casual vandalism afflicts our sonic heritage: radio in Barbados is 90 years old, yet many, if not most of the crucial recordings that chronicled our passage from colony to democracy have been wiped, binned or simply mislai...
Broadcasting, Journalism, Filmmaking & Media Training in the West Indies