Good afternoon. I'm going to set my stopwatch.
We'll see how that goes.
So what I'm going to talk about this afternoon is something that other people have touched on in their papers because it's inevitable.
It's called narratives of resistance. In his book Silencing the Past, Haitian historian Musharaff Chou looks at the links between history and power.
In it, he explores, and I quote many ways in which the production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of
competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means of such production and of their production.
I would say I'd say that includes money, time, familiar and societal support, to name, but a few.
He goes on to say that although the forces that he explores in his book are less visible than gunfire,
class poverty or political crusades, they are no less powerful.
As has been noted already by previous speakers and also by trio history, writing in and of itself is a way that power is exerted in society.
And if this is the case, then writing histories which attempt to rebalance the uneven historical narratives of the past is also a form of resistance.
The emphasis that I place in this short presentation is on writing, but of course, this is steeped in a wider colonial discourse,
which encompasses many other institutions such as government and things that we don't really think much about,
like the archives, libraries and museums. Pre 1970s historiography and Bermuda leads all the way back to the 17th century.
The earliest writing by Europeans were for an a European audience.
Elsewhere, these early histories and literary texts, including Shakespeare, of course,
and his tempest informed how local historians came to understand the island's past when they began to write.
And that was mainly in the 20th century early 20th century. A narrative of resolute English settlers and their descendants,
which fit neatly within broader narratives of colonisation, form the core of locally generated discourse.
Unsurprisingly, a colonial settler narrative was also found in local textbooks and museum exhibitions.
For instance, in nineteen thirty seven four thousand copies of the early history of Bermuda for Children by
Ken and Tucker were printed for the use in junior departments of government aided schools.
It was, to my knowledge, the first textbook used in schools which concerned local history.
If anyone knows of an early one, I'd like to know. This book focus, unsurprisingly, on discovery in settlements,
and it remained the main text used for Bermuda history in primary schools for at least 20 years.
The partiality of museum curators and the silences they created were noted by American
observer Leonard C. Rennie in a 1965 lecture to the Bermuda Historical Society.
He stated that the views of history given in Bermudian museums were unbalanced. He argued for history that explored the everyday lived experience.
So part of resistance is not just thinking about what we were when things were bad, it's how did we survive every single day?
He argued for a history that explored the silences that had been left in the heritage sector in Bermuda at the time.
The absence of black comedians and the story of how they were instrumental to the development of this island, he asserted.
And I quote, You had slavery.
Yet the only way visitors would know that you ever had slavery in these islands would be if you heard of Emancipation Day.
The silencing has already been noted.
It was excused away the worst of slavery and segregation, and this was a crucial part of forming a narrative about Bermuda's past.
It was a narrative that position the descendants of settlers as benevolent patriarchs and was used
to downplay the role of persistent racial hierarchies to maintain the status quo in society.
I've got I'm running at four minutes, so yours is a bit fast.
I would use my to maintain the status quo in a society that featured a majority black population in this way.
Black comedians remained economically, politically and socially disenfranchised.
So Dr. Swann spoke about the kind of political changes that happened in the 50s.
So I will skip that part. But there was frustration at the slow pace of political change.
There was also resistance to change of the status quo, and it came not just from elites,
but also from others who profited from the system in lesser ways and also from those who actually didn't profit from it at all,
but feared change change that they felt needed to be avoided in case it brought about something worse.
In the nineteen sixties and seventies, old colonial tropes were reframed and redeployed.
The need for change was acknowledged, but it was not noted that this neat.
Sorry, but it was noted that this needed to be incremental to protect the island stability that was said
to be needed for both the tourist industry and the nascent international business industry.
The local media, of course, played its role in this tug and pull between competing narratives.
But the Royal Gazette and the Ramita Record are playing key parts.
In the 1970s is when we see a change in narrative and we've spoken about some of these,
some of the changing narratives comes before, of course, with Eva Hudson's first class citizens, second class men.
Why the 1970s, well, there's the whole the historical context, it has already been spoken about, but there's also something else that happens.
That's when the local archives came under the purview of the government for the first time, historically,
no concerted effort was made to either by the local legislator in Bermuda or the bureaucrats in
London to create an archive to conserve locally held documents concerning the colony's history.
I'm sure most of us have heard of Lefroy, so the Froy was interested.
He was governor, but he did not do that conservation under his official role.
London did not help him. He did that off his own back.
And of course, we know his transcriptions were problematic,
but he saved that archive from both the disinterest of the local legislator and the officials in London.
Access to original source material concerning the island was partially rectified when the Bermuda Historical
Monuments Trust established a small private archive that had held the colonial records at their centre,
but also included non-governmental documents. The restructuring of government in 1968 led to the disbandment of that organisation.
Its successor, the Media National Trust, was established in 1970.
Clearly responsibility for the maintenance of that archival collection passed to the newly formed government archive.
The archive brought together official papers still held by various government offices,
together with those documents that have been preserved by the Froy and the colonial records that have been collected by the MTA.
It also included personal documents of businesses, individuals and families.
In 1974, the Bermuda Archives Act was passed, creating a policy for the Bermuda Archives of Bermuda for the first time at that sink in seventy four.
That in this interest in that this interest in government records and historical documents came after the creation of
party politics and the increased participation of formerly disenfranchised comedians cannot be seen as a coincidence.
It was in this decade that Bermudian historian Sarah Packwood wrote the first comprehensive slave history of Bermuda trained on the rock.
The preface, written by Kenneth Robinson, emphasised the important gap in knowledge that Packard's text filled as information
about this part of Bermuda's past was almost non-existent when the book was written.
In this preface, Robinson identified the vital link between access to knowledge and knowledge production.
He revealed that some of the local sources Parkwood research for his work and only recently become accessible to black people,
and he took full advantage of them whenever he visited his native land.
That's Robinson's words. Other writers also noted the role of the local archive and helping them to develop their work.
In the introduction to Nellie Mason's mind, the onion seed, Bermuda's government archivist Leonard J.
MacDonald notes that Muslins archival research cover material that was not usually used.
It was there, but it had been ignored. Importantly, in these text, they were not just dependent on the archive.
They drew on a long history of oral telling within the black community.
Importantly, Pacquiao's where it could also be traced back to his own father's interest in the past.
The strength of this oral tradition was also explored in the book.
In fact, Packwood, according to his daughter Cheryl, was, I quote, an orator at heart.
Thus, this new information of history drew on both archival research. Yeah, for one minute, as well as the oral history tradition.
And that's what I've got left.
These writers wanted to ensure that black comedians understood their histories and thus were better placed themselves in the present,
confident claiming their place within society that their ancestors had a core role in developing muscle noted in mind the UN in siege.
That this the book was the outcome of her own personal search for her family roots and the roots of other black comedians.
And in the foreword to Kenneth Robinson's heritage, Dr. Norma Cox Atwood noted the text provided new insights into the previously
stereotyped versions of what slavery and other aspects of life were like then.
It is my expectation that most readers will have many of their own judgements and prejudices challenged when they read this work.
We must continue to write and read histories that shift us from the complacency that they challenge.
Thank you.