(Ex­tracts from Re­marks de­liv­ered by Ein­tou Springer at the Min­istry of Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism Eman­ci­pa­tion Cel­e­bra­tion, Ju­ly 28th, 2010)

"The col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of a peo­ple is the ba­sis of their com­mon iden­ti­ty, the lens through which they see the world. This is the view of the Eman­ci­pa­tion Sup­port Com­mit­tee and it is of crit­i­cal im­por­tance in our so­ci­ety where our his­to­ry re­mains large­ly un­taught and where it is taught it is dis­tort­ed and, in these days, sani­tised. The knowl­edge of our his­to­ry is of crit­i­cal im­por­tance in help­ing us de­cide how we go for­ward as a peo­ple. The mytho­log­i­cal bird, the Sanko­fa, re­minds us that in go­ing for­ward we need to look back. It is an im­por­tant step that this min­istry has been re­named "Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism" for this year as the Eman­ci­pa­tion Sup­port Com­mit­tee gives spe­cial pride of place to com­mem­o­rat­ing the 40th an­niver­sary of the Black Pow­er Rev­o­lu­tion.

We re­mem­ber that the ban­ners blazed un­apolo­get­i­cal­ly "Africans and In­di­ans unite". It is hoped that this re­nam­ing will do some of sev­er­al things such as give na­tion­al re­spect, sup­port and recog­ni­tion of the work that the Eman­ci­pa­tion Sup­port Com­mit­tee has tak­en un­to it­self on be­half of the en­tire so­ci­ety. We lament the fact that the blood of our young black men fer­tilis­es once again the ground al­ready sod­den with cen­turies of their blood. This time, how­ev­er, the car­nage is self-in­flict­ed. The dec­i­ma­tion of cen­turies has now turned in­ward. The jails and the in­creased polic­ing can do but so much.

Do we have the eyes to recog­nise in our young, an­gry youth an an­ces­tor whose un­buried bones, whose im­prop­er­ly in­terred spir­it is not at rest? Can we recog­nise that our chil­dren, still liv­ing, ek­ing out an ex­is­tence in the direst pover­ty and in filthy schools with a cur­ricu­lum that does not recog­nise their self-hood have noth­ing to claim? If their so­cial and psy­chic sit­u­a­tions pro­claim them noth­ing, if the bom­bard­ment of the new tech­nolo­gies and the pop­u­lar me­dias feed the very vi­o­lence in which our so­ci­ety was con­ceived and nur­tured, what can we re­al­is­ti­cal­ly ex­pect? If they have noth­ing to claim, what do they have to de­fend?

Where are the icons, the places for nur­tu­rance of the col­lec­tive mem­o­ry? Where are the mon­u­ments to the great pan­men, should they not form a place of pil­grim­age up the hill? Where are the mon­u­ments to George Pad­more, Hen­ry Sylvester Williams, Kwame Toure, Mzum­bo Lazare, El­ma Fran­cois and we can go on... Who knows the name Joe Tal­manana and what it rep­re­sents in the saga of the sur­vival of the cul­tur­al­ly re­tained prac­tices of the Africans from which our Car­ni­val, now vir­tu­al­ly lost to them, has evolved. It is time for the so­ci­ety to con­front the his­to­ry and come to terms with it.

It is time to have a cul­tur­al pol­i­cy for this coun­try that would un­der­lie how we per­ceive our ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem, our eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, our no­tions of de­vel­op­ment and our val­ue sys­tems. We have at our dis­pos­al the pos­si­bil­i­ties of col­lec­tive mem­o­ry; for even as the Eu­ro­peans razed, their era­sure was not com­plete. The im­age of the Sanko­fa beck­ons.