By: Precious Mills
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts (Friday 11th March 2022) — Keeper of the Zack’s Historical Cultural Museum and well-known cultural preservationist Winston ‘Zack’ Nisbett is currently in the process of turning back the hands of time in “recreating history” for a planned exhibition at Buckley’s Estate. He is preparing a section that will feature the old time ways of life, including living quarters with the grass bed, flour bag curtains, oil stoves, personal waste pails and bottle lamp.
Other old time items that will be on display include old time radios, horse cart wheels, donkey crooks, latrine, basins, pails, cameras, photographs, goose for ironing, enamel utensils, ice cream maker, cane juicer and ice crusher. Nisbett, known as the “Doctor of Culture,” said: “It’s like back to basics, showing you what we used then in relation to what is now. Most of those elder persons, they were raised up in this sort of thing. It was more economical then. The food was sweeter — when you cook on a coal pot, the sentiment within the food, it was sweeter; it had the real taste.”
The basic foods of the old days were more indigenous to health. “The sweet potato, which has beta carotene, is very good for eyesight; green fig/banana has iron; cassava meal porridge, arrow root porridge — when you’re finished eating the arrow root porridge in the morning, you wouldn’t need anything else for the day. Today, the younger ones prefer to use the fast foods, which would have a more metropolitan way of life. But we need to stick to the basics,” Nisbett added. He expects to start his primary school tour exhibition shortly so that students can get a hands-on educational insight on the “historical value.”