The ghosts who walk the earth are many. And not all of them walk easy. For ‘history is trapped in them, and them in history’.
After their empire was destroyed and their capital city of Tenochtitlan burned down by the Spanish in 1521, the Aztec not only lost their lives and homes, they also saw their culture being obliterated. The Spanish colonisers ordered the Aztec gods in the temples to be torn down, and replaced with icons of Christianity. Today, all that remains of Aztec culture and history is bits of archaeological evidence found in the excavation of old temples in Mexico City, bark paper codices and descriptions written by Spanish clergymen and literate Aztecs.
On the Dark Continent, the San Bushman rues the lost world of the Kalahari. Driven out of his natural habitat, he can no longer practise his art, make mystical music, pray with the parents by his ancestors’ graves or share water pans with lions.
When it comes to destruction, geography is history. No place, no one is sacrosanct. If we have seen the Buddhist lamp being extinguished in Mongolia on our east, we have witnessed the history of Iraq, on our west, being looted from its museums. Through time, citizens across the world have seen tracts of their cultural life being torn asunder, paved over, crushed. It’s not always the hand of man that wreaks the damage. In 2004, a fire devastated the Anna-Amalia Library, part of the World Heritage site of Classical Weimar in Germany, which contained notably the world’s largest Faust collection by Goethe, about 2,000 Middle-Age manuscripts and 8,400 historic maps. About 50,000 volumes were burnt and another 62,000 damaged by the water used to extinguish the fire. Nor are they just material goods that are under threat. UNESCO says, according to its team of specialists, around 2,500 languages are currently at risk, 500 of them ‘critically endangered’ and 199 with fewer than 10 native speakers.
With so much of our past slipping away from us every day, it’s no wonder that the battle for preservation rages everywhere. Consider the scene in Mes Aynak, Afghanistan, where archaeologists are toiling night and day to preserve as possible of ancient Buddhist monasteries, before miners come in to blast open the area and ferret copper out of the soil. The Buddhist monasteries, located next to ancient copper mines, are reported to date from the third to the seventh centuries. The site, which used to be the training camp of Osama bin Laden, has been leased to a Chinese mining company for copper production. Mes Aynak, which lies south-east of Kabul, is currently the world’s largest archaeological dig with a thousand workers struggling to unearth artefacts from the country’s second-most important Buddhist site, after Bamiyan.
And yet it’s just a stanza in the poetry of history.
