Bridget Brereton sets out her stall at the beginning of her new book, History Matters, a collection of newspaper columns published in the Express between 2011 and 2021. In the first column, which has the same title, she reports that her colleagues at UWI’s Department of History were often shocked at how little of the country’s history new students had been taught – and these were young people who had studied the subject at school.
Brereton agrees with Khafra Kambon, former head of the Emancipation Support Committee, who complained in an interview of the lack of history teaching. The interviewer responded: “We shouldn’t be enslaved by our history,” to which Kambon replied that it’s when you don’t know your own history that you can be enslaved by the past.
A further complication is that many people imagine the country has very little history, or that very little of it has been written, or both; in fact, our islands are bursting with history, which has been recorded formally and in other documents for centuries.
Brereton acknowledges that “truth” in history (as everywhere else) “is notoriously tricky.” Nevertheless, she has devoted her life to it. Not only is she a professor emerita of the university, who has influenced generations through her teaching; she’s also written, edited and contributed, directly and indirectly, to a vast number of books and other works, and given generous encouragement and support to countless other writers.
She is also a public intellectual (UWI could do with more of those these days), though she doesn’t quite match the definition she cites in writing about Lloyd Best: “Someone who fails to mind his own business.” Brereton almost always sticks to history, which is very much her business. But she gladly steps out of the academy to offer knowledge, opinion and ideas.
Brereton writes in her own unmistakable voice: quietly authoritative, reasonable, broad-minded, forthright. She is vastly knowledgeable and adept, able to inform her reader without writing down to them, and to share a lot of information in a small space without making it seemed crammed with facts.
Brereton does some gentle myth-busting, since it’s part of the historian’s job, she writes, to “expose myths, legends and popular misconceptions about the past. Even if they are cherished…” Hence she points out the lack of contemporary evidence that Canboulay/Kambule was originally celebrated on August 1, then suppressed in the 1880s; and that although Trinidad was not a traditional slave colony, nothing suggests, as some French Creole historians have argued, that slavery here was in any way more “benevolent” than elsewhere in the region. She deflates the notions that indentureship was equivalent to slavery, and Indian labourers were tricked into coming to the region.
“Columbus-bashing, though good fun, gets a bit boring after a time,” she remarks. Brereton feels the statues of former heroes now regarded as oppressors, such as Signor Columbus, should be removed, but kept in museums, not tossed into the Gulf of Paria, say
