As the country continues to celebrate the Season of Emancipation, Government is pledging its commitment to the preservation and development of the nation’s heritage.
At a recently held ceremony, which saw the first cohort of graduates receiving Barbados Landship Teacher’s Certifications, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office responsible for Culture Senator Dr Shantal Munro-Knight reiterated government’s commitment and outlined its strategic decision-making in preserving the island’s cultural heritage.
“It is not an accident that the government made a very conscious and deliberate decision to increase its investment, attention and commitment to the Landship. There was a clear recognition that the journey and the contention with nationhood need to be able to confront those things that made us who we are, that is part of the very tapestry of our nation. We need to make decisions about what we value, what needs attention and what is important;” she stated.
Continuing, she added: “As a government we clearly understood, that the Landship in itself was not just about the entertainment, it was not just about the story and the history of it but we understood the Landship…was important to Barbados [and] to Barbadians. It is like an ancestral pull, because of our understanding of how the Landship was formed and what it meant, for the resilience for our people.”
The Minister went on to divulge how government’s deliberate intent had manifested itself in several ways to “future-proof” the Landship movement.
“The Division of Culture just recently has put forward the nomination for the safeguarding of the Landship to UNESCO. What that does is signal internationally that the government is committed to a programme where we will, as a government and as a people, continue for the foreseeable future, to make sure that we are intentional about how we walk, how we protect, how we preserve and how we are intentional to safeguard the Landship. We can talk about protecting our cultural heritage and it can come across as very nice [and] very important but unless you are intentional in terms of your policy, unless you are intentional about where you put resources and attention, then you can have meaning without anything being produced,” the Minister stated.
In addition to taking action to inscribe the Landship internationally, the Minister revealed that a number of school ‘docks’ were also established, an initiative undertaken in conjunction with the National Cultural Foundation (NCF). The work of these docks would be on display during the Crop Over launch ceremony.
“For the first time this year at the Ceremonial Delivery of the Last Canes, you will have a competition of schools across the island, at the primary and the secondary level, engaged on the stage, being judged on a number of different areas on the Landship,” Minister Munro-Knight revealed.
She insisted that future generations needed to be understand the Landship beyond its entertainment value as its survival was intricately linked to a deeper understanding of the artform.
“The notion of protecting our cultural heritage has to mean something not only for us in the now; it has to mean something for us in the future, and for it to mean something and for us again to be intentional, it means that we need to make sure that the generation that is coming understands it in a real and fundamental way, that they are infused with as much passion and enthusiasm for the artform. That is the only way it will survive,” the Minister stated.
