In a heartfelt appeal for respect for our national heritage resources, Prof Kenneth Ramchand is calling for funding for a digitisation project of the Evening News, published by the T&T Guardian from 1935 to 1989. Prof Ramchand said there was need for “urgent digitisation of what is a literally crumbling heritage,” referring to the old print copies of the Evening News in the National Archives.
Prof Ramchand made the call at last Friday’s lecture by eminent US biographer Prof Arnold Rampersad, professor emeritus in the Humanities at Stanford University, California, held at the National Library, Port-of-Spain.
The Evening News is “a major sociological and cultural heritage document” because it has content “that was more Trinidad and Caribbean than the established daily organs, and the perspective of the writers like Thomasos, Giuseppi, Mathurin, O’Neil Lewis, Canon Ramkeeson, to name only a few, was strongly cultural nationalist. In this sense, it was, in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the most culturally significant and wide-ranging local paper.
I believe it was the paper most read by the ordinary people of the island,” the official web site of The Friends of Mr Biswas quotes Ramchand as saying.
On Friday evening, he added names like Sam Selvon, Eric Williams, Seepersad Naipaul, Patrick Solomon, Alfred Mendes and several others to the long list of luminaries who had contributed to the Evening News. “Journalism today has a lot to learn from the spirit and skills of the early practitioners, especially the way they related to readers and to authority,” said Prof Ramchand.
Of the Evening News issues in the National Archives, Ramchand has noted: “Some of the bound volumes are in such bad condition that you are not allowed to look at them; some are so fragile that you know they too will be withdrawn before long.”
“I am willing to supervise at no cost to any person or institution any researcher or a team of researchers committed to doing a two-year project on the Evening News and the Trinidad Guardian Weekly,” Prof Ramchand posted on the Friends of Mr Biswas website. At last Friday’s event, the award-winning Prof Rampersad was inducted as a Distinguished Friend of Mr Biswas by Dr Rodger Samuel, Minister of National Diversity and Social Integration.
Prof Rampersad’s talk was the third in a lecture series on historical figures in T&T journalism since the 1940s, hosted by the Friends of Mr Biswas, a group founded in 2000 to develop the Naipaul House at 26 Nepal Street, St James, as a museum, library, literary research centre and cultural tourism venue.
Previous lectures in the ongoing journalism series have been about Seepersad Naipaul and Patrick Chokolingo. The lectures led up to a three-day conference on September 6–8 at UWI called Seepersad and Sons: Naipaulian Creative Synergies.
Prof Kenneth Ramchand (who chairs the Friends of Mr Biswas) also updated the public on the state of the Naipaul House, saying the multipurpose space is “in an advanced state of preparation, and our schools outreach and adult education programmes will be launched in about six weeks.”
According to the Friends of Mr Biswas web site, by 2010, the Naipaul House was completely renovated. There are two apartments to be rented to visiting scholars working on any aspect of T&T culture. On the ground floor the living room is being recreated exactly as it was when world-renowned Nobel Prize-winning writer VS Naipaul lived there.