The best way to answer the questions ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Who are you?’ is to have an extensive knowledge of your tangible and intangible heritage. —UNESCO
Last week, I visited the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site in Mauritius. After the abolition of African slavery, between 1834 and 1920, more than 462,000 Indian indentured migrants passed this immigration depot.
Today, the site stands as one of the most important places connected to the history of Indian indentureship. Aapravasi Ghat is not treated as an abandoned ruin. It is protected and is part of the national conversation about who Mauritians are and how their society was formed.
Aapravasi Ghat is a good model of how heritage should work. Heritage should not be something we remember only when there is a controversy or something we fight over. Heritage should be a part of how we teach our children to understand themselves and their country. When children visit a site like Aapravasi Ghat, yes, they are learning about indentureship. But more importantly, they are learning that their ancestors mattered and that the people who came before them helped build the nation.
This is something that we do not fully understand in T&T. I mean, we have absolutely no shortage of heritage.
On the contrary, we are surrounded by it. We have sites connected to the First Peoples, slavery, emancipation, indentureship, migration, labour struggles and tangible cultures. We have forts, estates, temples, churches, mosques, cemeteries and entire communities that carry stories of who we are. But too often, we pass them by without knowing their meaning.
We are very good at allowing them to deteriorate. Just take a drive by the Brechin Castle Sugar Factory and you will get a good idea of what I mean.
The problem is that whenever we try to discuss heritage, the conversation quickly becomes political. We have seen it with the Columbus statue, the steelpan, and now we are seeing it with Nelson Island.
The thing is, no country should be afraid to ask hard questions about what it should preserve, honour or reinterpret. But in T&T, these conversations too often become divisive.
Different groups see it as an attack. Then politicians enter the discussion and suddenly heritage becomes another fight. And in the meantime, our actual history gets lost in the noise and drama.
This is why we need a more mature national conversation. Preserving our heritage does not mean accepting everything about the past without question. It does not mean glorifying colonisation, slavery, indentureship or oppression. It also does not mean erasing every difficult symbol without explanation. What it means is that we must be honest and put things into context.
Our historical past was not a simple one. We had a complicated history, but it has led us to where we are today — a melting pot of ethnicities, religions and cultures. Therefore, we should tell our full stories with pride.
That is where heritage comes in. We need to stop seeing heritage as simply looking backwards and start seeing it as part of building national identity. When identity is properly understood, it creates pride, belonging and a deeper kind of patriotism. T&T needs this now, especially at a time when history is too often used to divide us.
Mauritius offers a useful model. It is proud of its multicultural heritage, not because its history was easy or perfect, but because it has made a deliberate effort to preserve the places that explain how its people came to be.
Aapravasi Ghat is not presented as only “Indian history”; it is part of the national history of Mauritius. That is the approach we need in T&T.
Each community has its own story, but together those stories form our national identity, shaped through many struggles, adaptation and creativity; in the cane fields, cocoa estates, barrack yards, pan yards and mas camps.
That is why I am pleading with our politicians to do better. Do not use our history and heritage to score political points. Do not use it to divide communities or create resentment. You have the power to leave a real legacy by preserving historic sites, funding, training heritage guides, digitising records and making history accessible to ordinary people.
Imagine if every child in T&T visited Nelson Island and learned its full history. Imagine if children were taken to former sugar estates and taught about indentureship, agriculture and labour. Imagine if they visited sites connected to slavery and emancipation, and understood not only suffering, but resistance and survival. Imagine if our heritage spaces were alive with school tours, exhibitions and oral histories.
That is how we build a country that understands itself. Heritage should remind us that all of us, in different ways, are part of this country’s story. It should help us understand not only where we came from, but who we are becoming.
And perhaps that is why Nelson Mandela’s words are so important for us now: “It is not our diversity which divides us; it is not our ethnicity, or religion or culture that divides us.”
What divides us is how we choose to use that diversity. T&T can continue using heritage to quarrel, or we can finally use it to build a more honest, proud and united nation.
