epic fail

There are Africans living in Sri Lanka.

(Blame colonialism.)

But really, it's all very interesting. There is a small community of people who have descended from African slaves and their Portuguese owners who probably brought them over during the era in which they cherished hopes of taking over the world. (Seems to me that everyone has cherished that hope at some point in history.) Colonialism is the reason for the Dutch forts in Galle, and the Portuguese words in the Sinhala language.

But even if no one had ever thought to take advantage of our small size and close proximity to India (ha! unlikely, that!) one finds that even amicable interaction between nations has led to the rubbing off of many cultures on this island's skin. Sea-merchants taking the ancient Silk Route stopped at our natural harbours to fill up on food and fuel, and to attempt to do some trading mid-journey. They left behind coins, pottery and probably their genes. They bequeathed us with wool and with words, with coins and with culture. We exchanged rice and we exchanged religion. And all these rich and varied interactions took place well before the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English planted themselves and their coffee, rubber and tea on the isle.

It is strange, then, that in a country that should be so used to this intermingling, intermixing of cultures and worldviews should ever have had issues with ethnicity. It is odd that we, as a nation whose roots are pretty dicey-sounding, should talk about the notion of purity. Racial purity has been an impossibility since tectonic plates scratched their backs in such a manner that Sri Lanka is the island that it is in the geographic location in which it is placed. If it was impossible then, how can it be so now? And why should it be a problem?

I suspect we are taught all the wrong things in school for history. We are taught about King Dutugemunu and his ten giants (yes, giants) and all the wonders they created. We are taught about the time when Sri Lanka was a self-sufficient isle, exporting rice to Asia (the Granary of the East, we were called...so we are told). We are taught about all the times when things went right for this island. What we are not taught is when things went wrong, and why they went wrong. We gloss over the World Wars, and we barely touch on all the revolutions that have exploded all over the world at numerous junctures in history. We are not taught about when injustice and oppression turned humans into both gods and monsters.

We are not taught about the ugliness and blight in our own history, our own recent past. We hear it from our parents who lived through it, but never from our history class. We are never taught, in a single history lesson, about July 1983. About the JVP insurrections of 1971 and 1987. If the Berlin Wall is history, then so is this. Oh yes, we know about these things, but we are never given the opportunity to look at our mistakes academically. How, then, do we learn?

Learning about a history of one and a half millennia into the past has its problems. We cannot discard it thoughtlessly; not everyone has so many rich and colourful stories stored in their country's historical treasure-trove. But history is always colourful, always coloured by our perspectives. The further back in time, the easier to fill in the lines with the daub of speculation. Admittedly, we can learn a great deal from technology used so far back, because the waterways and structures they created are still around, and often functioning. (Clearly, they took to heart the fact that these were to be Built To Last.) But should we take a leaf out of our ancestors' books and strive to be self-sufficient in this age of the global village? But that's what they tried to do in the 70's. And with how big a pinch of salt should we take stories of giants? We were never taught to think critically about our history. We were only taught to think with pride, even if some of our records are often perhaps a little fantastical-sounding. Is it not a danger to blindly accept as truth a written record that an ancient king may have ordered his scribes to write as a form of propaganda?

And what about the history we are not taught? Why should we not be taught about the atrocities that take place when there is dissatisfaction, for economic reasons and for ethnic reasons? Why should we not be taught how to avoid that? Why should we not be taught more about the mistakes the rest of the world has made, to ensure that we do not put on a repeat performance? And indeed, had we taken to heart what can happen when a small group of people think they are descended from Aryans and that it's kind of a big deal, some of us may not have been in such a hurry to preach the exact same thing about the Sinhalese (for a seemingly elitist group, there seem to be a lot of Aryans all over the world). And much nastiness could have been avoided.

I think it is a mistake not to teach of mistakes. Why have a written record of how humankind has come this far, of how we have soared, and how we have fallen, if it is used only for story-telling?