Barbados is set to acquire a huge collection of Caribbean arts and culture archives, its owner, a Trinidadian film and television programme maker, said on Friday, in a move touted as transformative for the region’s cultural preservation.
The purchase of the archives is to be formally completed on Monday, Christopher Laird, managing director of the Trinidadian television production company Banyan Limited, told Barbados TODAY.
The TV production company head said the archives contain 15 000 records of visuals gathered over the last half a century from across the Caribbean.
The decision to buy the archives was announced by Prime Minister Mia Mottley at the opening of CARIFESTA XV last Friday and follows discussions with Laird days earlier, when he was in Barbados to be inducted into the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) Hall of Fame.
“The deal is due to be completed on September 1,” Laird told Barbados TODAY in a telephone interview from his Port of Spain home.
Asked what the purchase would involve, he replied: “I am reluctant to say too much about it since it is confidential. We do not want to announce too many things prematurely and to give confidential information. But what is involved is the handing over of the archives and the payment of whatever was agreed on between us and the Barbados government.”
The CBU Hall of Famer, 79, also disclosed that the archives are now in Barbados.
He said: “The archives have been handed over. Three distinguished people from Barbados, the director of the National Archives and two other experts, came to Trinidad yesterday, and we handed over the archives. They are now in Barbados.
“What Prime Minister Mottley was very impressed by was our records on George Lamming and the fact that we have complete coverage of the CARIFESTA in Barbados in 1981. That’s just two. Apart from six hours of interviews with CLR James, six hours of interviews with Derek Walcott and long interviews with all sorts of intellectuals, creatives, artists, writers, painters, musicians and visuals of festivals in the Caribbean and I could go on and on.
“The Banyan archives are the largest digitised visual archives of culture that exist, as far as we know. We finished digitising 10 years ago. We have been trying for 10 years to have a responsible institution acquire the archives and ensure its preservation and access to the region. We had been unsuccessful thus far…but it was your visionary prime minister and her decisiveness that seem to have helped us to complete the task in very short order.”
Laird continued: “I feel much more confident in the archives being in Barbados to accomplish this than ourselves. We have lost one of our directors during the past 10 years – there are three directors – one has passed, the other is retired, and I myself am nearing my 80th year. It was very important to me and to Banyan that the archives be acquired by a responsible institution that would guarantee its preservation and sharing with the region, if possible. And that was our dream and I think we are close to it.”
“And I anticipate that there is a way in which we can help the Banyan National Archives or wherever they are placed, help them facilitate the sharing of the archives for our viewing by regional institutions.”
“I am excited, we are excited, as you can imagine. The combination of our work over half a century…as I told you we have had 10 years trying to interest various institutions – the University of the West Indies, national libraries here, the ministry of culture here [in TT], and so on, without success.”
Lairder has produced 300 documentaries, dramas and other video productions over a 40-year career. He is perhaps best known for his landmark 1992 documentary, And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon, about the domination of Caribbean television received on satellite dishes by programmes from the North, beamed primarily from the US.
In 2003, he co-founded Gayelle Television, the first all-Caribbean free-to-air television station, in Trinidad.
emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb
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