The Tribune

The loss of memory often dissolves into a loss of hope. It is similar to something precious flushed down a drain, difficult to recover and sometimes lost forever.

A prominent Bahamian vividly recalls as a boy of six or seven leaving Woodcock Primary, Over-the-Hill, at the end of the day.

The school, dating to the 1840s, was named after the Anglican priest, Fr William Woodcock, a priest of St Agnes Church who founded the school. He left funds to maintain the school after his death.

The boy’s headmistress, Mrs Mabel Cordelia Walker, often walked him to the gate as she headed to the Reinhard Hotel. She wanted to make sure he got home safe. As he passed by the hotel heading to his home on Martin Street, Dr CR Walker curiously and invariably drilled, “Young man, what did you learn new today?”

Not yet in double-digits, he knew the question was coming, so he prepared an answer in advance. At that age he did not recognise how remarkable were the woman and man, both educators and activists, who saw in this black child and his peers, all manner of human possibility.

Like many others who lived Over-the-Hill, the Walkers strove to create a thriving community of the descendants of slaves who were creating a new society in a new land still blighted by colonial rule and racial conceit.

It was blighted too by a lack of confidence by many black Bahamians who deeply internalised the racial lies and stratagems of the colonialists and the domestic oligarchs for whom individuals like the Walkers were a threat because of their intelligence, enterprise, academic training and courage.

One of the greater threats posed by the Walkers and individuals like Milo Butler, is that they never believed the grand and pernicious untruth of white superiority and black inferiority.

They articulated and preached a gospel of liberation to the mass of Bahamians. They were not accommodationists seeking a comfortable truce with the power structures.

Dr CR Walker and Mabel Walker are the only Bahamian couple who both have schools named after them. They are rightly remembered together for their shared accomplishments. They proved an extraordinary team fighting for gender, racial, and economic equality.

Still, Mabel Walker’s legacy should not be subsumed within that of her husband’s. A suffragette and master teacher, with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University, and described by some as a sort of patron saint of primary school teachers, Mrs Walker was a powerhouse in herself. She was the founding president of the Bahamas Union of Teachers.

Mabel was born an American. But she was Bahamian by choice and through acts of love and belonging poured into her family, Over-the-Hill, and her new homeland. When some of her family in the United States tried to coax her to return, she remained at home in The Bahamas.

The laudation Renaissance Man is nearly as overused as cultural icon, national hero, Constitutional Father, pioneer, and a list of other titles which are often as breezily and emptily applied or issued as are some national honors which have become increasingly less meaningful because of the number of such honors.

Moreover, few people are legends. Dr Walker was an intellectual, a medical doctor, a polyglot, a musician, an educator, a brilliant orator, a writer, a politician, a designer, an entrepreneur, an activist. He was a Renaissance man cum legend.

There has been recognition of both Walkers. This is to our national credit. However, the recognition must go further not only because they are deserving. The recognition of their legacies is equally about who we aspire to become and who we are as a people.

Many black and other Americans know of Harriet Tubman, WEB Du Bois and Frederick Douglass. Many Jamaicans know of Marcus Garvey and the 18th-century freedom fighter Nanny of the Maroons.

While the Walkers bear similarities to these historic figures who fought for equality, they bear their unique lives and contributions. For example, though Dr Walker was a cosmopolitan and intellectual like the sociologist, scholar and Pan-Africanist, Dubois, he believed in much more than the “Talented Tenth”.

Dr Walker was in significant ways like the statesman, orator, abolitionist and social reformer Frederick Douglas. Nevertheless, he was not our Douglass or Du Bois! He was our CR Walker, after whom new generations should take inspiration and courage!

Many Bahamians schooled in the US have a passing awareness of Du Bois, Garvey, Douglass and others. However, ask them for a basic knowledge or understanding of Mabel and Claudius Walker, and they draw a sad blank.

The word tragedy is also overused, abused. In this instance, the lack of awareness by the overwhelming majority of Bahamians of the legacy of the Walkers is a one of sorrow and distress.

It is a tragedy of the loss of memory, resulting in a loss of possibility and meaning, and potential loss of a certain hope.

The Walkers contradict the conceit that those colonized were heirs only to the imprint and ravages of slavery and colonialism.

They would eschew the limited worldview of VS Naipaul who saw little in the Caribbean beyond who the Europeans told the slaves and their descendants they supposedly were or could strive to become.

Before Dereck Walcott, the St Lucian-born and Trinidadian Nobel Laureate in Literature penned his address, Fragments of Epic Memory, the Walkers were helping to design and construct a new Bahamian and Caribbean collage, culture and people out of myriad fragments of epical memories and world cultures.

Walcott lyricised: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars.

“This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places.

“Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.”

Like Walcott and other Caribbean artisans, poets, liberationists, activists and decolonizers, the Walkers recognised that the treasury of the global commons and heritage belonged to them as full and equal members of the human race.

Dr Walker was as fluent in German as he was in the Pan-Africanist movement. European and African history were both his inheritance. Over-the-Hill, the headquarters for the political attainment of majority rule took up residence in a hotel with a German name and unique architecture for the colony.

The collapse of the Reinhard Hotel is in part, a loss of memory. So where do we go from here? A subsequent column will suggest some ideas to memorialise the hotel and the Walkers.

It cannot be the preserve of government alone to save and to restore every historic building. Still, there must be a priority list of what must be saved, similar to the priority list of terrestrial and marine areas within the National Park System.

Would anyone seriously argue that we should allow areas of this system and other potential reserves to collapse or fall into disrepair? Correspondingly, what essential parts of our built heritage are we prepared to allow to fall into greater disrepair?

Affirmatively, what are the structures and heritage that should populate our national heritage system, the saving of which is as essential as the preservation of our natural environment.

Guarding and restoring this natural heritage is expensive. It will require various types of public-private partnerships. The current funding model to preserve these sites, including various tax exemptions, is inadequate.

This columnist has long argued that funds from a national lottery or higher taxation on domestic gaming is necessary to provide the many millions that will be needed to conserve and promote our built and other heritage.

The UK National Lottery, which helps to fund heritage conservation, may be a template for The Bahamas.

The Antiquities Monuments and Museums Corporation (AMMC) has done good work in a number of areas, though by its own admission, there is much more that it needs and wishes to do.

To do this work the corporation will need significantly more funding and staff, both of which are inadequate to what it is being asked to do. There is also an urgent need to update the legislation under which it operates.

When the government of the day wanted to rename Woodcock Primary, Mabel Walker balked, insisting that the memory and legacy of Fr Woodcock should be preserved. She grasped the power and necessity of memory and memorialising.

The boy she helped guide home is now in his 70s. From today’s vantage point, he, like many others, knows how easily memory may be lost, along with the hope and meaning such memory offers current and future generations.

How then will we preserve this very memory that is as foundational and potentially fragile as the limestone rock upon which this heritage is built?