As a community, we’re very selective about which parts of our heritage we recognise and which we don’t.

Why is that, do you think?

Selective recognition distorts history, and distorts our perception of what the heritage is.

Smokepots and wompers, outside cook-rooms, wattle-and-daub houses... Those only scratch the surface. They’re “safe” memories, and really not all that interesting. Most villages in the world had those things at one time or another. They’re not unique to Cayman.

Why don’t we pay some mind to the diversity of peoples and cultures that have contributed to today’s Cayman?

I’m not thinking so much of the recent newcomers such as the Filipinos and Goan Indians among us, as of the peoples and cultures of centuries ago.

No Arawak bones have yet been discovered in Cayman, so it may well be that these Islands never had any indigenous people. But our first settlers were an exotic assortment of scruffs and vagabonds, escapees and drifters, some of whom became part-time pirates and outlaws.

They, or their parents or earlier ancestors, came from several parts of Europe and Africa. Later settlers were small-time farmers and planters, and their African-heritage slaves. For half of its entire settled history, Cayman was a society dominated by slaves and their owners. Why do we never speak of that?

Is everybody in denial, or what? As an experienced family-history researcher, I long ago concluded that nobody has any cause to feel either proud or ashamed of what his or her ancestors did. Embarrassment, okay: pride and shame, no. They did what they did, and we do what we do. We can’t impose our values on history; there is no point in trying to hide what happened way back then.


Heritage Weeks

Some families have come up in the world, and some have gone down. Big deal. The Queen of England’s earliest known ancestors were pirates who were just as cruel as Blackbeard, and robbers who were just as greedy as today’s New York bankers. Even the best of family trees contain individuals of low moral character.

The peaceful merging of the descendants of slaves and their owners is a triumph that puts all Cayman’s other achievements in the shade. It deserves to be shouted from the rooftops. And yet we don’t even publicly acknowledge Emancipation Day, for goodness sake. We sweep the whole slavery issue into a cupboard and pretend to forget it’s there.

(That probably explains our communal reluctance to acknowledge the evil of our exploitation of migrant workers today. One can’t despise the fact of slave-ownership when one hankers after it oneself.)

It would present a more realistic picture of Cayman’s history if this year’s Heritage Weeks were to acknowledge our two hundred years of slavery. 200 years represents seven or eight generations. The next 140 years (from 1834 until 1974) – the years of the triumphant uniting of the races – represents five or six generations. The wompers years were just a small part of this.

The Heritage Weeks would do us a genuine favour if they tried to throw some light on the religious beliefs of the old settlers, too. How did a pious Christian community ever grow out of the cruelty of slavery?

Cayman’s heritage is a fabulously rich mixture. It is silly to overlook the generations of slavery, and it’s a great pity that our government historians do overlook it. Have they been ordered to ignore it, for fear of frightening the tourists?


Human traffickers

When we opened the Chamber of Commerce office in 1986, the Department of Tourism’s brochures didn’t even list Africa as one of the sources of the people of Cayman, for goodness sake. At my urging, the next printing did list Africa – and the numbers of tourists didn’t go down at all. Fancy that. Is there still some kind of official hang-up about the old slavery, that we don’t talk about it?

Of our Islands’ ancestral cultures, the West African and the West European were the most dominant. We ought to celebrate them, and teach about them in schools. How many schoolchildren know the names of the languages their African ancestors spoke back in their old homes?

How many know the origin of the Caymanian dialect’s confusion of “v” and “w”, for that matter?

The human traffickers of the Atlantic trade made a point of dispersing the Africans’ tribes, clans and families, in order to minimize the prospect of an organised revolt. That’s why none of the African languages long survived their arrival in the West Indies.

So it’s not easy to identify the precise homelands from which our African ancestors came. Nevertheless, it’s not impossible. DNA testing is something the Heritage Committees ought to get their teeth into.

“Our” African ancestors?

Well, no, not mine personally; but they are mine by right of adoption, I think. If the current anti-immigrant trouble-makers would stop their hostile screeching for a while, the rest of us might feel free to take a collective pride in all the ancestors of the peoples of Cayman. And all the heritage, too.

The veneration of ancestral spirits is common to cultures of all parts of the world – some more anciently than others. Public recognition of this common factor might be a way of overcoming the festering resentment of our “tribes” for long enough to create a modern micro-nation.
Well, with goodwill and time... Who knows?