Save our stories before they disappear

Sep 17, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – I asked a middle-aged woman if she knew Rabbi Washington. She vaguely recalled the name but nothing more. This is exactly how most of our collective memory works these days. When I mentioned other Guyanese public figures from the 1970s and 1980s, she drew a blank on most of them. It was then that I realised that we are losing an entire generation’s lived experience simply because nobody thought to write it down.

The 1970s and 1980s were two of the toughest decades in Guyana’s history. It was a period filled with hardship, discrimination, victimisation, political harassment and public terror for many ordinary citizens. Yet most of what we know of that period comes from the speeches and memoirs of political leaders. Those leaders wrote their own versions of events. They naturally painted themselves in a favourable light, while the daily struggles of common people—the mother who couldn’t find cooking oil, the father who lost his job for no good reason, the family forced to flee Guyana —remain largely unrecorded.

Many Guyanese from that era have passed away. Countless others have migrated to places like New York, London, and Toronto, taking their memories with them. Their children and grandchildren in the diaspora often know very little about what their parents endured. This is not because they don’t care, but because the stories were too painful to tell or simply never asked about.

I once met a woman in Canada who told me that she would never return to Guyana. She witnessed the death of a close relative of hers at a public hospital and that traumatised her so much that she washed her hands of Guyana and hardly wanted to speak about the country. We have a small window of time left to capture these experiences while the people who lived them are still here. We cannot afford to waste it. Every week that passes, another elderly Guyanese in Queens or Brampton forgets another detail, or passes away without ever being asked a single meaningful question about their younger days.

History is not just about presidents and prime ministers. It is also about how ordinary people survived, adapted, and persevered through difficult times. Their voices deserve to be heard just as loudly. The politicians have their autobiographies and their official records. But the woman who stood in line for bread at five in the morning has no chapter in any textbook. That is a gap that makes our history incomplete. I am urging Guyanese everywhere, especially those in the diaspora, to start recording these stories now, using whatever tools are available—a phone camera, a voice recorder, a simple notebook. Sit with your parents, your aunts, your uncles, and ask them open-ended questions about their daily lives, not just the big political events, because the small details often reveal the deepest truths.

What did they eat during the shortages? How did they feel when they heard the news on the radio? What made them finally decide to leave their homeland? These are not trivial questions. These are the building blocks of a real history that belongs to everyone, not just the powerful few. We have the technology to preserve these voices permanently. But we lack the will and the urgency. That is a shame for which we will have to answer for one day.

It does not matter if the stories are painful or embarrassing or seemingly ordinary, because every single one adds something to official history. A nation that forgets its people’s everyday struggles is like a family that throws away all its old photographs—you still exist, but you no longer know who you really are. So let us stop waiting for some government commission or academic institution to do this work for us. They have their own priorities and their own biases. Let us take responsibility ourselves, starting with our own families, and gather these precious memories before they are gone forever.

The children of the diaspora deserve to know what their parents survived. The grandchildren deserve to know where they truly come from, not just the name of a country on a map but the heartbeat of a people who refused to be broken. If we do not act now, we will have no one to blame but ourselves when future generations ask about Rabbi Washington and we can only shrug and say, “I think I heard that name once.”

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

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• Guyanese public figures, Peeping Tom, Rabbi Washington, stories

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