The latest chapter in the ongoing saga of awards of local importance being offered for sale on eBay continued last week with the discovery of the sale of the Olympic medals of the late local athlete Rodney Wilkes being offered for US$30,500.
The seller, felsenegg1978, is described as being based in T&T, and has been an eBay member since May 23, 2009.According to the daughter of Mr Wilkes, Grace Wilkes-Worsley, the 1952 bronze medal for weightlifting is being sold without the family's permission.
Further, Ms Wilkes-Worsley claims that the medal was lent to the late amateur historian Louis Homer and never returned, which is likely to make the sale a case of liquidation of stolen property.
Mr Wilkes' medal, the first Olympic medal ever won by a T&T athlete, is unquestionably an item of national interest, but it is not the only Olympic medal being sold on eBay, just the item with the greatest local investment in pride and one which also appears to be accompanied by a narrative of potential malfeasance.
This incident follows the embarrassing situation earlier this month in which the Ansa McAl Group stepped forward to buy a national award at an auction price of US$25,000, given to the family of the late Adrian Cola Rienzi which also ended up on the online auction website.
The descendants of the late trade union leader, who have lived in Canada for decades, apparently know little about the legacy of the labour champion, which may have contributed to the odd path taken with the Order of T&T which was bestowed posthumously on him in 2012.
Clearly local companies, or even individuals, cannot be expected to continuously spend large sums of money to repatriate artifacts of national history. That opens the country up to being seen as an easy mark for people with useful bits and pieces of the country's history available to place on the open market for such items.
Ms Wilkes-Worsley should have taken her complaints directly to eBay, backed with formal police complaints and sought a halt to the sale before taking up the matter with the seller of the item.
There is a legal process for handling lost or potentially stolen property items both locally and with eBay, and while the media are useful for airing such concerns, it cannot act with the effectiveness of a police investigation.
These incidents point also to the lack of a serious effort to gather and display items of history in this country and the need for a major revamping and rethinking of the National Museum's capacity and scope of operations. It has been a notable aspect of the last half-century of T&T that it is amateur historians who have shone the brightest and most popularly viewed lights on this country's history.
Louis Homer, G�rard Besson, Michael Anthony and Angelo Bissessarsingh, a columnist with this newspaper, have all contributed significantly to the exploration, preservation and stoking of public interest in the lived history of our islands.
The National Museum is, regrettably, not seen as a first stop for treasured items of memorabilia and historical value in this country and the ready sale of these items on a global auction website only further clarifies that unfortunate situation.
The humiliation of seeing medals of honour being hawked on eBay is only the most visible backspray of an institutional disinterest in preserving history and encouraging its exploration as an informative reference for our lives today.