The following is a short excerpt from Nick Ward’s article “Reclaiming the Caribbean’s Historical Truth: History Professor confronts distorted colonial narratives in textbooks and the classroom.”
“History may be about the past, but it is contested in the present, in a fight for a particular vision of the future,” says Audra Diptée, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University.
To reclaim the historical truth of the Caribbean, Diptée’s latest research project drags into public light a systematic scheme by white colonists to erase the violent records of British rule.
The programme, titled ‘Operation Legacy’, was executed by the British Colonial Office from the 1950s until the 1970s in an effort to save the British Government from embarrassment and incrimination.
Through Operation Legacy, government employees were instructed to destroy and hide official documents to ensure “that any histories that were written would serve them as they moved from a colonial power dynamic to a neocolonial power dynamic,” explains Diptée.
The result of this destructive action is a completely distorted historical narrative penned by the colonists – a fable wrought with colonial biases and self-interests.
“Operation Legacy is one of those cases when you cannot help but say ‘truth is stranger than fiction,’” says Diptée.