Goldson Bust will be Installed in Two Weeks

Everyone remembers when the Philip Goldson bust at the northern entrance to Belize City was knocked off its base during the start of the J’ouvert motorcade around four on the morning of September ninth, 2023. It’s been a little over three months with some delays after the repair material had to be sourced abroad. But the work is complete and the sculptor who was commissioned to do the repairs, Stephen Okeke, told News Five that he has already delivered the bust to the Ministry of Infrastructure Development. Okeke said the structure was broken and cracked in several places and aside from that, there were weathering issues that had taken their toll on the work of art.

Via Phone: Stephen Okeke, Sculptor

“The structure itself was made from a certain type of material, so after such a long time, of course, weathering and things, you have to take time to reconstitute the material you need for repair. You can’t  just take a new cement and put it on an old cement building because you want to make it better repair. You need to make some engineering and scientific considerations when we’re doing so, and that is what we did, and some of the material took a little longer to come in. I had to import them myself to compound them for what I need to use. We had to do – flip the structure from where it broke up and do some pressure testing to find out if there are fissures, you know, like somebody have an accident, the person might wake up and walk away, but experience and science will tell us that the person may have internal bleeding or stuff like that. So that’s what we had to do, do some pressure testing to make sure there are no fissures or cracks where it’s not visible. And there were some, and we had to do the repair, and did some work on the body because of the fall, the cracks, and then some other work due to weathering that weren’t visible even without the fall due to weathering, so we had to work on that also before putting it together, and then doing the final finishing. If nobody comes to knock it down again, sure it will be there for the next 10, 20 years.”