Admirals Nelson

The Nelson statue debate goes and comes like a recurring nightmare. Editor, please indulge me by reproducing this piece I wrote on December 14, 2008, almost 12 years ago.

Some mornings at five o’clock, Admiral Nelson brings me up-to-date on the latest news. It’s a reassuring experience, because just hours earlier, before I drifted off to sleep, I had heard and read of calls to get rid of him.

The Barbadian gentleman reads the news as authoritatively as his namesake of two centuries earlier ruled the seas when Britain was great. I look forward to hearing that news bulletin if for no other reason than that I am assured that Admiral Nelson has lived to see another day.

I must tell you that I enjoy the bi-annual debate on the statue of Lord Nelson. I find it amusing. It takes place around National Heroes time in April and at Independence in November. A mixed coterie of historians – professional and arm-chair – along with several others, take to the newspapers and airwaves, and now the blogs, to relieve themselves of much pent-up flatulence.

I wonder why they stop at Nelson. What about the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, the Royal Barbados Police Force, Her Majesty’s Prisons; and why is Oliver Cromwell, warts and all, still “loitering” around our 30 representatives in the august House of Assembly?

The Reichstag had already been burned when the Russians arrived in Berlin in 1945. Like all conquerors, they indulged in certain excesses.

In 1999, the new redesigned Parliament Building was opened. (Incidentally, there seems to be a replica of it at White Park). English architect Sir Norman Foster did an interesting thing: he left intact, indeed, he highlighted the graffiti the Russians scrawled on the walls of the ruins.

One wonders what point Sir Norman was trying to make. Could it be that it is silly to try to erase history? One also wonders how the Germans, many of whom still carry the guilt of the Holocaust, can live with that humiliation.

They could have ordered the architect to forget the idea, or even sanitise the graffiti; but then, no European city displays its fractured history more visibly than Berlin.

We Barbadians must be careful when we start tearing down things. We must take our history with us, comfortable or uncomfortable.

I am most uneasy with these modern-day one-hour martinizers of Barbadian history. I considered it a governmental sleight of hand when, “hot-an’-sweaty”, Trafalgar Square was renamed National Heroes Square, thereby giving instant validity to the argument that since Nelson was not a Barbadian hero, he could no longer remain there. So why wasn’t the statue removed in 1999?

It’s like the government decreeing my bedroom an operating theatre, then ordering me out because I’m not a surgeon.

Instead of selecting a spacious location, artistically designed by Barbadians, where people, especially children, could learn in reflective ambience about our history, they hit on a noisy, sliver of land at the top of Broad Street, in a city the paros take over after working hours.

While we rant and rave, Antigua treasures and maintains Nelson’s Dockyard, and petite Nevis has her own Nelson Museum, said to house the largest amount of artifacts and memorabilia anywhere. Why don’t we offer our Nelson to them?

On my first visit to Guyana in 1972, I was surprised to see a life-sized statue of Queen Victoria in Georgetown. It was at the peak of President Forbes Burnham’s most acerbic rhetoric. I don’t know if it’s still there. I haven’t returned to Guyana.

The racial conflict in Barbados in the years ahead is not going to be between black and white. I hope Barbadians at that time won’t be too distressed to see the statue of the Right Excellent Errol Barrow replaced by Mahatma Gandhi. I very much doubt “The Skipper” would mind.

Meanwhile, all I ask those who wish to dump Nelson is to make sure you have the right gentleman. While it’s not important to some whether the bronze statue ends up in the Careenage, I do hope the CBC announcer can swim.

“The past is never dead; it’s not even past.”- William Faulkner

Carl Moore