By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 21, 2025
In his Youth Rally address on August 30, 1962, one day before Independence Day, Eric Williams declared: “I have given to the nation as its watchwords, Discipline, Production, Tolerance.”
These words were delivered to the youths but they applied equally to every citizen of the nation. It would have been better if citizens had devised their own watchwords.
Continue reading An indisciplined nation
By Raffique Shah
June 21, 2025
Simon and Garfunkel sang: Old Friends, Sat on their park bench like bookends; Winter companions, the old men, Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset; Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly. How terribly strange to be seventy; Old Friends.
I lost an old friend last week. A comrade in arms. An old soldier with a philosophical soul. One whom I could spend hours chatting with on the phone and never get tired because there was always something to talk about. David Brizan, whom I fondly called Obi, passed on after ailing for some time.
Continue reading The fourth mutineer
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 14, 2025
This evening Lewis Gordon, a world-renowned scholar on Frantz Fanon and a major international philosopher, will deliver a lecture, “Frantz Fanon and the Caribbean”, the inaugural event of the Kwame Ture Memorial Lecture Series. It will be held at the UTT Theatre1, NAPA, at 5 p.m. This lecture will be carried online. No one should miss it.
Continue reading Black excellence personified
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 07, 2025
Last week’s column, “Kamla’s second coming: a blessing”, elicited the following response from my dear friend Oscar D (not his real name): “Dear Pandit Cudjoe: This article has only elicited ambivalence. Your continued provocation by calling Kamla the mother of the nation is superfluous and disrespectful at best. I agree that we must learn about each other’s culture, but is it that Kamla’s ‘progression’ cannot be analysed within any other religious context? [Perhaps in] the context of African religious thought and philosophy?”
Continue reading Kamla’s place in T&T’s political landscape
By Raffique Shah
June 07, 2025
I hope and expect those in authority who have the powers, to act, if the need arises, to remove a sitting prime minister and government by whatever means it takes to save our country from what appears to be a spark of madness which is threatening to engulf us even as I write (Friday night). Because after I listened to Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar a few nights ago, when I heard what she said, I scrutinised her image on television to see if I could discern any signs of insanity or dementia. I leave that for the experts to work on.
Continue reading PM playing with fire
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 31, 2025
SOMETHING extraordinary happened two Fridays ago. Kamla Persad-Bissessar—the Mother of our Nation, as I call her—went to Woodford Square to thank her supporters. Her supporters from Tobago chanted: “Thank you, Kamla, the Mother of our Nation. We love you, Mother.”
Such adulation signalled that Trinidad and Tobago is evolving to another stage of social development. It reminds me of “The Chambered Nautilus”, a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Snr, that explores themes of growth and change. The last stanza reads: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul /As the swift seasons roll! / Leave thy low-vaulted past! / Let each new temple, nobler than the last, / Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, / Till thou at length art free, / Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!”
Continue reading Kamla’s second coming: a blessing
By Raffique Shah
May 31, 2025
I have said this—what I’m about to write here—a hundred times over the past 20 years or so that we have marked and celebrated Indian Arrival Day.
First, I was among a vocal minority who expressed the strong view that the holiday in recognition of the arrival of Indian immigrants on the Fatel Razack in 1845 bringing the first indentured immigrants to Trinidad and Tobago, be named Arrival Day.
Continue reading Is this what we want?
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 24, 2025
The cracks in the PNM’s hegemony became more prominent after its defeat in the last general election. Power and cowardice hid these fissures for a long time. All one sees within the PNM now is “vaulting ambition, which o’er-leaps itself/ And falls on th’ other”. (Macbeth) This reckless ambition will lead the party into an abyss.
After the PNM’s political disaster, the former Leader of Our Grief and Sorrow accused Dr Amery Browne of ingratitude after Browne suggested they could “rig the game but can’t fake authenticity”. Robert Le Hunte says of the Leader’s imposition of Stuart Young on the party: “It wasn’t just cynical. It was obscene. It was perverse.” (Express, May 10.)
Continue reading Vaulting ambition & PNM’s reincarnation
By Raffique Shah
May 24, 2025
There was almost unison in the plaintive cry in the appeals for national unity by a significant section of the population. This festival of nation building and patriotic songs and music, that was a treat by itself. I know this country is gifted with a prolific compilation of rich ballads, lyrics and music that can “make mih pores raise”, as Trinidadians and Tobagonians are wont to say.
The occasion was the inaugural meeting of the 13th Parliament of the Republic. Time was when this was a routine parade for the military and other top brass who paraded. When Independence Day coincided with such sitting, pomp and ceremony oozed out of the uniforms of service officers and other ranks.
Continue reading No easy road to national unity
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 17, 2025
Last Thursday morning, I left Boston to attend the graduation of my second grandson from Morehouse College, “the storied Atlanta school” (The New York Times, May 13). This was a change in the institutions of higher education my immediate family attended.
I attended Fordham University, received my doctorate from Cornell University, and taught at Harvard University. My first daughter did her undergraduate work at Stanford University and got her law degree from Harvard; my second daughter attended Hampton College, received a Master’s from Yale University and a doctorate in theology from Duke University. Tomorrow she will deliver remarks on behalf of the Yale Divinity School Alumni Board, of which she is the president. My son-in-law received his undergraduate degree from Columbia and law degree from Harvard Law School.
Continue reading Defending black excellence against Trump’s academic assault