The National Gas Company’s decision to acquire the Banyan archives is to be applauded as a bold step towards the protection and preservation of a significant cultural resource.
In acquiring the archive, State-owned NGC is demonstrating an all-too-rare appreciation of the value of cultural documentation as a critical resource for research, education, creation of new content and self-knowledge.
As a member of the One Caribbean Media group, which is also involved in video production, this newspaper has an intimate understanding of the value and critical importance of video archives and what it would have taken for Banyan, a small enterprise with limited resources, to have secured and maintained its collection of over 2,500 searchable and digitised video files, painstakingly built up over a period of 40 years. Today it is believed to be the world’s single largest collection of Caribbean culture on video, thanks to the combined efforts of founder and film director Bruce Paddington, filmmaker and in-house archivist Christopher Laird, and late playwright and man of the arts Tony Hall.
When it came on the scene in 1974, Banyan revolutionised video production by bringing a Caribbean and, more specifically, Trinbagonian aesthetic to its work, very much in tune with the 1970s post-colonial assertion of cultural identity and the validation of cultures marginalised by colonising cultures. In an environment then heavily dominated by foreign television programming, Banyan set itself the mandate to enable Caribbean people to see themselves and the world through their own eyes.
Its archive collection reflects its commitment to finding non-mainstream voices considered radical and different, and to document and highlight communities and cultures excluded from official narratives. Today, this is the source of the wealth of the Banyan archive with its unvarnished images of people, places and events presented in their realities long before reality TV became a thing.
As almost every producer of local audio-visual content would know, this is a hard road to hoe. It has taken almost five decades, but Banyan’s investment in recording and preserving the culture of T&T and the Caribbean is finally paying off, not simply with NGC’s purchase of its archive but in its grand ambition of bequeathing to future generations a national information resource about themselves, their society and its many cultures during the important first decades of the Independence period.
Laird has expressed the hope that the archives would be easily and widely accessible to schools and the general public, and we note the comment by NGC president Mark Loquan that the company considers the archive a “national heirloom” on behalf of the people of Trinidad and Tobago as “joint custodians of this massive vault of Caribbean memory and history”.
Our hope is that NGC’s acquisition will spark a new, more progressive and entrepreneurial attitude towards investments in archives, including towards the National Archives. Too many valuable materials have already been lost to the future as a result of a general under-appreciation of materials of historical and cultural value. Hopefully, its bold initiative will be the game changer
