Save our stories before they disappear

Sep 17, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

(Kaieteur News) – I asked a middle-aged woman if she knew Rabbi Washington. She vaguely recalled the name but nothing more. This is exactly how most of our collective memory works these days. When I mentioned other Guyanese public figures from the 1970s and 1980s, she drew a blank on most of them. It was then that I realised that we are losing an entire generation’s lived experience simply because nobody thought to write it down.

The 1970s and 1980s were two of the toughest decades in Guyana’s history. It was a period filled with hardship, discrimination, victimisation, political harassment and public terror for many ordinary citizens. Yet most of what we know of that period comes from the speeches and memoirs of political leaders. Those leaders wrote their own versions of events. They naturally painted themselves in a favourable light, while the daily struggles of common people—the mother who couldn’t find cooking oil, the father who lost his job for no good reason, the family forced to flee Guyana —remain largely unrecorded.