As Black History Month draws to a close, Senior Education Officer in the Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development, Michael Hoyte has described the month as “an opportunity for black people to escape from the notion that to be black is to be inferior”.
Speaking at the penultimate ‘Let’s Celebrate Afrika’ presentation, at the Christ Church Foundation School, Mr. Hoyte urged students to be proud of their heritage.
‘We are the keepers of our legacy and we must guard it and pass it on to future generations. Our heritage is a strength, not a weakness. It is the key to the understanding of the African ways of life in the past and present. It is also evident in our language, dress, religion, food, dance music, traditional remedies and the names that we give our children,” he pointed out.
The Senior Education Officer also called on Barbadians to pay attention to the positive aspects of African Heritage. “Teachers, parents and the wider society must draw on the positive aspects of our African culture to instill in students, values like respect, honesty, diligence, hard work, courage, tolerance, fairness and patriotism.
These are the values on which our success depends and these are the values that have worked throughout our history. What is required is that we revisit these values and recognise that we have the responsibility to ourselves, our community and the world, to transmit those values to the next generation,” he stressed.