After the euphoria of making UNESCO’s World Heritage List the job – we are told – begins to sensitize Barbadians to protect the few buildings and spaces of cultural significance we have left in and around Bridgetown. An educated and enlightened Barbadian should possess an innate desire to safeguard our culture, to ensure who we were is passed on to our children and our children’s children. Wouldn’t this knowledge transfer serve to give truth to the cliché, ‘if you don’t know where you came from, you sure as hell will experience a problem plotting a forward course’.

Sadly there is the truth that Barbadians pay lip service to matters of culture. An example is the Crop Over Festival which was born out of a celebration of the harvesting of the sugarcane and has now been relegated to a beads, feathers and wuk-up affair. The cultural dimension has been prostituted on the altar of economic expediency.

In recent days images of the Empire Theatre floating around Facebook has reinforced BU’s position that we are a people devoid of any need to connect to our culture. How is it that we have allowed a 100 hundred year old building to slip into such a sad state of repair? What is depressing has been the silence of the people.