Canada Newsletter

CELEBRATING OUR HERITAGE,
DEVISING OUR FUTURE
OPENING ADDRESS BY DR. BOBBY MOORE
ICQC Annual Meeting, August 1, 1999

Mr. Chairman,

I am among you, not as one who was raised by Queen’s, but as one in whom Queen's refined the delicate balance between feeling and reflection, authority and audacity, perspicacity and play. And my gratitude to the school grows with the years. I am equally grateful to you for making me part of this occasion, and by implication adopting me into the convivial fraternity of Queen's "old students".

I think you know you belong to that unusual breed of characters who enjoy standing at a peculiar angle to the universe. Healthiest of the traits which puts you in that company is your talent for fondly parodying the institutions you most revere and the conventions you most esteem.

There is wisdom in that art. For it encourages both attachment and detachment. It nourishes a freshness of perspective. In confusing times, it enables you to change your angle of vision. Those who can change their angle of vision get stuck neither in a past beyond recall nor in a present beyond comprehension. They are the ones most active in inventing the future.

You have come together to celebrate Queen's as it was. Good. But more important you are here to think and talk about Queen's as it is and Queen's as it should be. Put it another way: as representatives of the school's diaspora you are committed to devising ways of strengthening your influence with the government of Guyana. Committed also to supporting the government's efforts to restore the physical fabric of the school. And, most important of all, you are concerned to help the government to design a role for Queen's as a flagship in the process of reinvigorating secondary education throughout the country.

But let's begin with our celebrations. What's the point of celebrating the past?

We celebrate to appreciate, that is to say, to be both grateful for and inspired by people and institutions that have enhanced our humanity. We celebrate in order to turn memory into energy and energy into creativity. We celebrate to link practical imagination to pressing concerns. And when we have girded ourselves with those threefold strengths we should be ready to get down to the business of deciding what we shall do and how we shall do it. As Guyanese we grew up talking about the hinterland the place of mystery and memory, of demanding challenges and possibilities that were enormous. But each of us carries a hinterland within ourselves and that hinterland is our personal and collective history. The more we look at it the better we see ourselves. The more we know of it the better we understand ourselves. The more we think on it, the more we realise it is experience to draw on when we are working to map out a future. Let us draw on our hinterland now and see what it is we celebrate. First, we celebrate the vision that lay behind the foundation of the school and the man behind the vision. Bishop Austin created Queen's as an answer to some of the challenges of his own day. He wanted an institution in which black and white boys would assemble in the same classrooms and on the same playing fields, on the same footing, a common environment in which mutual respect could germinate. The first black boy to enter Queen’s was Lambert Mackenzie. He was born a slave, was adopted by the Bishop and he walked into the school on its first day. So at the very beginning there was a non-white presence; an early hint of things to come. Lambert Mackenzie went on to become the first black Guyanese Anglican priest and later the first black Queen's graduate to reverse the middle passage by returning to the Africa of his forefathers to serve it. The Bishop saw his school as a soil in which loyalty to Guyana could grow. He had a robust faith in the country, which he used to call the “magnificent province”, and he wanted that loyalty to be fortified by a grasp of its economic possibilities. So he sought to have a curriculum figuring agriculture, a premonition of the days when Queen's would be renowned for its science teaching and its science graduates. Second, we celebrate achievement. Queen's was conceived in vision, brought forth in optimism and dedicated to excellence.

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