Letting the voiceless tell their stories

Using oral sources for Caribbean history writing:

yet more biased accounts?
By Milton A. GEORGE
KU Leuven, Belgium
milgeorge@yahoo.com

1. Writing history
How do we write history? Furthermore, what is history? History can refer to different things. At a
personal level, it is a construction of the mind: the way people remember and reconstruct past
events. It can also be a collective enterprise whereby a group recalls things gone by. In academic
circles, it refers mostly to the (Western) discipline which records facts that took place in time and
space and offers interpretations about the more or less intentional links between them, for example,
in terms of causal relationships and/or correlations.
Events that make up human life have meaning because they are understood and explained as being
part of unfolding stories. The past is past, and of itself it has no voice. We are the ones who knit the
traces of the past into a tapestry of stories, placing individual events within general frameworks,
suggesting causes, effects, and correlations. History is something that we do. We tell stories and
write histories.
Whichever way history is understood, it has to do with past events and the way they are used and
explained. Different peoples have told and retold their past in a myriad of ways. Communities that
have privileged the spoken word have used oral narrations as the channel of their historical
consciousness. Others that give priority to the written word have favoured written documents and
sources. However, history writers, as much as story tellers, have been selective in whatever and
whomever they considered worth being remembered.
When attempting to write the history of education, one always runs the risk of giving the false
impression that historians always have access to how things were. History writing always remains
storytelling and, as such, it cannot escape being perspectival. There is not merely one story to be told
or history to be written, but many.
Given that whatever we write or tell depends on our vantage point, it is necessary while writing
history for academic purposes that we provide others the tools to assess and critique our story. We
need a methodology aimed at transparency.
History and historiography are not identical. While the former is about telling a story about the past
or letting the past tell some of its stories, the latter has to do with the history of history writing.
Historiography is often used to cover the history of historical knowledge and interpretation,
surrounding non-written accounts of the past and the broader issues of methodology. Higman speaks
of a focus on the written products of historical thinking but with constant reference to the larger
sphere of social memory and the way in which knowledge of the past has changed over time, the

social recognition and status of historians, changes in subject matter and source materials, the
philosophies and assumptions of historians, and the ever-changing relationship between historical
interpretation and contemporary social and political contexts (Higman, 1999:1).
For Higman, methodology is therefore concerned with the technical concerns of historians and the
theoretical frameworks they employ to interpret and communicate their findings. The technical
concerns relate to the means by which historians identify and access historical evidence, the means
they use to interrogate these data, and the tools applied to analyze them (Higman, 1999: 1).
2. Postcolonial history writing
Is our writing history or thinking about history western-styled or Eurocentric, or neither? Chakrabarty
states that it is insofar as the academic discourse of history that is, history as a discourse
produced in universities is concerned, Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all
histories, including the ones we call Indian, Chinese, Kenyan, and so on (Chakrabarty, 2000:
27).
If the perspective of the writer conditions the result of his or her findings, we may ask: What
elements of the European analytical criteria can and must be adapted to the St. Maarten reality?
Must the way European history of education has been written be taken as the standard for writing
St. Maarten educational history in academically acceptable ways? Would the globalization of the
European historiographical method not amount to a case of intellectual colonialism insofar as
Europe would pretend to tell us what is academically acceptable and what not?
It is not uncommon for citizens of postcolonial countries to accuse North Americans and Europeans
of practicing a form of neo-colonialism, criticizing the claim that their ways of writing history are
normative.1 However, if all writing and narrating is done from the point of view of the writer and/or
narrator, then post-colonial history writing will also have its own bias. In such a case, academic
acceptability will lie much more in the degree to which scholars can justify their method, i.e. the
ways in which their data were collected, pieced together, and interpreted. The methodological
question thus becomes of paramount importance.
3. Written and Oral histories
As said above, some communities have favoured the written transmission of data and stories about
history over the oral one. Alleyne views the written modality as corresponding with European,
modern, urban, and the latter to African, folk, rural (Alleyne, 1988:20). This duality has
important implications for Caribbean history writing.
The written and the oral traditions are well developed and used in the Caribbean. Yet, while the
written tradition or the evidence/documentation theory based on written documents providing the
exclusive source of knowledge of the past can be arguably described as having ignored the lives and
institutions of the average people, the oral modality has not been granted its due importance.
Given that most of the written documentation was under the control or supervision of the colonial
masters, the Caribbean written tradition can be seen as a history from above. This history was
1

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/anglophone/postcolonial.html

more often than not written from the perspective of outsiders, or at least of people who had
problems identifying themselves completely with their geo-social surroundings. The colonized
peoples had their stories, poems, and songs by means of which they voiced their own outlook on
their historical predicament. This was an oral history, a history from below.
4. Use of oral sources for writing histories
So-called oral history refers to the history writers search for and tapping into the spoken word as
source of relevant information for historical reconstruction. The historian can use:
-

culturally-sanctioned oral traditions,

more or less rehearsed interviews, and

printed compilations of stories told about the past.

Oral sources of information are sought not only to fill in the lacunae in the written sources, but also
to arrive at knowledge which would otherwise not be available. Information may or may not be
available due to the state of the written sources or their nature. It can therefore not be expected of
official school archives, for instance, that they should provide researchers into the history of
education with information about the thoughts and feelings of the students while they were seated
in their classroom during a lesson of Maths. For a history writer wanting to reconstruct the unofficial
story of colonial classroom practice, oral interviews of people whose stories have not made it into
the written archives can open new vistas.2
However, oral interviews are not free of problems. Michael Frisch has criticized the overvaluation of
oral history as Anti-History. He views oral historical evidence because of its immediacy and
emotional resonance, as something almost beyond interpretation or accountability, as a direct
window on the feelings and (...) on the meaning of past experience (Frisch, 1990). Furthermore, it
seems that people seem to remember different aspects of the past. Tonkin has pointed out that one
cannot detach the oral representation of pastness from the relationship of narrator and audience in
which it was occasioned (Tonkin 1992:2).
History writers using oral sources must therefore never relinquish the onus of critical analysis. They
need to assess the reliability of the narrator and of their narration. It is at this point that the
researchers must resort to triangulation to limit the arbitrariness and possible biases contained in the
account of their informant(s). Thus, it will be necessary not only to interview someone who
possesses relevant knowledge, but also to interview more than one person. Furthermore, the
interviewees should ideally be people who represent different angles of the story.
The above means that the researchers into oral history face the question how to choose whom to
listen to. History has meaning for people and that is why history still exists today. As underlined by
Thompson, the voice of the past matters to the present. But whose voice or voices- are to be
heard? (Thompson, 1988:viii) On whose authority is the interviewees (re-)construction of the past

This is one of the strategies that are being followed at the K.U.Leuven Research Center in the History of Pedagogy

in the Belgian Congo.

based? Whom is it intended for? And which of the voices interviewed fairly conveys the voice of the
past (especially considering that the past has many voices)?
Thus, the issue of objectivity and subjectivity enters the stage. In the case of oral history, the most
subjective accounts could be described as objective source if and when we are interested in a
persons feelings, evaluation, or reflection of past events. However, even when the informants are
being interviewed about the more factual components of an event, their subjective retellings of it
will presuppose a certain degree of objectivity. Dates and places are relative; they depend on the
measures being used. Events are not dated, nor are they mapped. As Kant indicated, things and
events have an existence in themselves which escapes us. However, we understand them and assign
them their place according to our human frame of mind. Still, within the realm of human subjectivity,
dates and places can be in ascertained in ways which are relatively objective to us humans, for
instance, by agreeing on a dating or measuring system. By using this conventional measuring
systems, we can assess whether the information which our informants hold about past events are
only true for them or also true for others.
In short, it is the research question that will determine whether the researcher employing oral
sources must zoom in on the more subjective content (true for him/her) or whether he or she
ought to navigate between the subjective lines and go in search of the more objective details that
may transpire out of the accounts (true for him/her and true for others).
Much of history writing is based on interpretations of data. This is particularly true when oral sources
are used. Not only does the history writer interpret what he or she hears, the oral informants do,
too. The role of memory in the act of looking back and retelling the past can never be stressed
enough (Hodgson, 1975:5; Trillin, 1977:85; Cliff, 1997:594; Portellie, 1991:2). For Portellie, the telling
of a story preserves the teller from oblivion (Portellie, 1981:162). The tale itself creates a special
time, a time outside time (Tonkin 1992:3). The characteristic of narrations is that the narrators
need to connect with their own memories and with their audiences, and both of them have to tap
into the structure of the narration.
Oral accounts are therefore not merely an information-giving exercise, but also an interpretive
account during which the informants try to recall the past as much as they attempt to explain how
they were involved in it. During his or her research, the history writer using oral sources will
therefore have to ask questions such as the following:
-

Were the different interviewees differently situated in relationship to the events under
discussion?

Might they have different agendas, leading them to tell different versions of the same story?

Might intervening events for example, ideological shifts between the time of the events
under discussion and the time of the interview, or subsequent popular cultural accounts of
these events have influenced later memories?3

5. Writing histories of education

http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/oral/interpret.html

Our interest is not only in history writing, but more specifically in writing the history of primary
education in St. Maarten, with special reference to the unwritten stories of those involved. When
researching the history of education, phenomena and processes of education and schooling are
being studied in their historical dimension. While the methodology used is that of history writing as
a scientific discipline, the contents of the research are fairly diverse and relate to all fields of
education (e.g. history of family education and child abuse, history of school realities and innovation
processes, history of youth care and special institutions for handicapped children, history of
Educational Sciences, etc.).
In most cases, the research focus is limited to the understanding of the evolution of the educational
mentality and practice, and does not intend to contribute to new theoretical-pedagogical insights, let
alone the construction of a new pedagogical theory. However, the history of education can indirectly
give direction to and be critical of the research being conducted in other educational areas; it can
explain and change phenomena. History shows, for instance, that things do not necessarily have to
be the way they are, simply because people are always keeping and changing things. Progress has its
continuities, as well as its discontinuities. True historical research can indirectly offer liberating
insights for educational theory and praxis.
Following the international trends in the field, the history of education is understood as part of
the new social and cultural history. Historical events are envisaged as cultural phenomena within a
long duration of time. The history writer, too, finds him or herself within cultural processes which
colour his or her analysis, for instance, by imposing present concerns and preoccupations upon the
past.
Caribbean history and historiography are very complex. Caribbean societies are generally multiethnic and multicultural, although the African- and European-derived modalities predominate in
most cases (Alleyne, 1988:19). This means that the various segments of the population often harbour
their own separate concerns. Each social layer making up the Caribbean has received a different
appraisal from the old colonial masters and continues polarizing society in different ways and at
different levels.
It is against the backdrop of these developments that I must raise the following methodological
questions: For whom is my history of education on St. Maarten being written? Whose concerns am I
serving? Will St. Maarteners recognize their past experiences in my account and analysis of the past
development of education on St. Maarten? Furthermore, will they accept my explanation of the links
between the events, especially considering that I wasnt born there?

6. Suggestion for future research

In order to give an example of how the use of oral sources could nuance the input obtained from
written sources, I shall now present a hypothetical research project which could be conducted in St.
Maarten.
6.1. The official written story

The Methodist Agogic Center (MAC) was established in 1976 by a letter from the Lt. Governor on
behalf of the Executive Council granting permission for the start of three Kindergartens and four first
grade classes.4 Currently, there are two campuses and one main office with early stimulation classes.
The Mission Statement of the MAC of 1976 states that it is the schools aim to develop and
implement a programme of Foundation Education that will provide for the Total Development of
any child in St. Maarten, creating a learning environment with many opportunities for self-fulfillment
by means of instruction in the Mother Tongue. Mother tongue means English as language of
instruction.
6.2. The unofficial oral stories
If future history writers took the MACs Mission Statement of 1976 at face value and combined it
with current official and unofficial written information about instruction, they might conclude that
the schools presupposition that the pupils mother tongue is English was still accurate in, say, 2000.
After all, St. Maarten is an English-speaking territory.
However, if our hypothetical researchers wrote a history from below (an oral history), paying heed
to the voice of the parents, they would certainly be in a better position to reconstruct what is actually
happening in the field. They would be made aware that in todays St. Maarten, mother tongue can
refer to more than one language (e.g. Spanish and Haitian Patois). Conclusions of this type would also
direct the researchers attention to other issues related to the language of instruction, such as
classroom climate, teaching effectiveness, social prejudices, the polarization of citizenship and
nationhood in terms of St. Maarteners and foreigners, etc. In this hypothetical case, the use of
oral sources would show that the responses of the parents interviewed would have nuanced the
impression given by the official written sources that English was every pupils mother tongue.
7. Conclusion
If the writing of Caribbean history better still histories is based solely on the word of written
primary and/or secondary sources, we might be misrepresenting the context within which the events
under study took place. By doing this, we might end up reducing some segments of reality to
muteness, while we attribute to others more representativeness than they actually had. Used
critically and methodically, oral sources can lend a voice to the countless voiceless protagonists of
our local and regional Caribbean histories.

References and/or complementary bibliography

Alleyne (1988). Linguistics and the oral tradition, in B.W. Higman (ed.) (1999), General History of
the Caribbean. Vol. VI: Methodology and Historiography of the Caribbean, pp. 19-45. Unesco
Publishing/Macmillan Education Ltd., London.

Taken from MAC general information folder. Material received from Mr. Clinton Spring, executive director of the

MAC while collecting data.

Chakrabarty (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. New
Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Frisch, Michael (1990). A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public
History, pp. 159-160. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Higman (ed.) (1999),General History of the Caribbean Vol. VI: Methodology and Historiography of the
Caribbean. London: Unesco Publishing/Macmillan Education Ltd.
Hodgson, Godfrey (1976). America in Our Time. New York: Random House.
Kuhn, Cliff (1997). Theres a Footnote to History! Memory and the History of Martin Luther Kings
October 1960 Arrest and Its Aftermath, in Journal of American History 84:2 (September).
Portellie, Alessandro (1981). The time of my life: functions of time in oral history, in International
Journal of Oral History 2.3, pp. 162-180.
Portellie, Alessandro (1991). The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Memory and the Event, in The Death of
Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, pp. 1-26. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Thompson, Paul (1988). The voice of the past: Oral history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tonkin, Elizabeth (1992). Narrating our pasts: The social construction of oral history. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Trillin, Calvin (1977). Remembrance of Moderate Past, in New Yorker (March 21).