Category Archives: Africa

Africa, General T&T, Race and Identity

Getting world history right: real African history

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By Dr. Kwame Nantambu
June 14, 2021

Dr. Kwame NantambuYears after the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2011 as “The International Year for People of African Descent”, it must be realized that the European enslavement of African people or the “MAAFA” (“great disaster”) only represents .01 per cent of the history of African people on this planet. Put another way, for the 99.9 per cent of their history, Africans were a free people.

Furthermore, “there were a thousand years of independent state formation and state management in inner West Africa called the western Sudan before the (European) slave trade.”
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Africa, General T&T, Germany, International, Namibia, Racism Watch, USA

White Brutality Against Black and Brown People

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 07, 2021

“Get the niggers,” was their slogan, / “Kill them, burn them, set the pace. / Let them know that we are white men, / Teach them how to keep their place.”

—A. J. Smitherman, “The Tulsa Race Riot and Massacre” (1922)

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeI had just left Harvard University as an assistant professor and was doing “Time to Talk,” a series of interviews for T&T Television. In 1982 I interviewed Sam Nujomo, the founding father of Namibia, where he had addressed the UN Decolonization Committee about his country’s independence. We talked about Namibia’s struggle for independence and the stain German genocide had left upon the consciousness of his people.
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Africa, France, General T&T, International, Rwanda

Rwanda: Macron admits French responsibility in genocide

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France had for “too long” valued “silence over the examination of the truth” when it came to its complicity in the 1994 massacre that killed around 800,000 people, President Emmanuel Macron says.

By Deutsche Welle – May 27, 2021

Human skulls at the Nyamata Genocide Memorial CentreFrench President Emmanuel Macron admitted French responsibility in the Rwandan genocide, during a visit to the Rwandan capital Kigali on Thursday.

“Standing here today, with humility and respect, by your side, I have come to recognize our responsibilities,” Macron said in a speech at the Kigali Genocide Memorial where more than 250,000 Tutsi are buried.
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Africa, General T&T, Germany, International, Namibia, Race and Identity, Racism Watch

Germany recognises colonial ‘genocide’ in Namibia

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Germany calls atrocities ‘genocide’ but omits the words ‘reparations’ or ‘compensation’ from a joint statement

By Philip Oltermann, in Berlin
May 28, 2021 – theguardian.com

The Forgotten Genocide: Herero and Nama, 1904Germany has to agreed to pay Namibia €1.1bn (£940m) as it officially recognised the Herero-Nama genocide at the start of the 20th century, in what Angela Merkel’s government says amounts to a gesture of reconciliation but not legally binding reparations.

Tens of thousands of men, women and children were shot, tortured or driven into the Kalahari desert to starve by German troops between 1904 and 1908 after the Herero and Nama tribes rebelled against colonial rule in what was then named German South West Africa and is now Namibia.
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Africa, COVID-19, Finance, General T&T, Health, International, Politics, Recession

Of dollars and sense

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By Raffique Shah
April 26, 2021

Raffique ShahI round off my intervention on the many possibilities we might find in a new post-­Covid economy by reminding readers the pandemic has hammered economies across the world, irrespective of their sizes, in ways never before seen.

Oil was rocked to unimaginably low prices. Stock markets swayed as if in stupor, major commodity prices collapsed to uneconomic levels, and the virus disrupted world production of essential industries, goods and services, leaving governments confused, powerless, defeated.
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Africa, Caribbean, England, France, General T&T, Haiti, International, Racism Watch

Emancipating old narratives of ‘emancipation’

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…and examining colonials’ ‘deceitful bait-and-switch’

By Claudius Fergus
August 16, 2020 – wired868.com

Photo: ESC director of regional and African affairs Khafra Kambon (right) poses with the Emancipation monument.In defiance of the rapid community spread of Covid-19, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, kept the promise he made on Emancipation Day 2019 to unveil T&T’s first emancipation monument—the only live public event on Emancipation Day 2020.

Like many thousands of other Trinbagonians, I missed the commemorative spectacles of the longest day in the Pan-African Festival’s calendar. But instead of regrets, the occasion motivated me to reexamine the intellectual underpinnings and contradictions of Britain’s 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act.
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Africa, General T&T, Race and Identity, Religion

My Spiritual Inheritance

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 06, 2020

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeDuring the late 1940s and early 1950s, early on Sunday mornings, we would hear the bells ringing out loudly in the street as a band of women, dressed immaculately in white with varied colored head ties proceeded to the Tacarigua River to conduct their religious rituals. At the tender age of six or seven I did not know what such celebrations (I saw it as a celebration) were about. All I knew was that my Tantie Lenora was among that band of women. Somehow, I felt embarrassed or even ashamed.
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Africa, General T&T, International, Racism Watch

Slavery, Education, Social Justice

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 16, 2019

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoePart of the excitement of being an educator is my having spoken in many places (such as Canada, the United States, Central America, South America, the West Indies, Japan, Africa and the Fiji Islands) about slavery, education and social justice. I am always excited to share my thoughts about these issues and learn what others have to say about their conditions.
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Africa, Education, General T&T, Racism Watch

Public Enquiry needed into the Education System

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By Dr Tye Salandy
October 09, 2019

Dr Tye SalandyTwenty years ago, in 1999, young Clivia Jones went to school with a modest cornrow hairstyle only to be told by the Corpus Christi principal to fix her hair or stay home. This incident came to mind when I read of two recent incidents that have been highlighted recently within T&T’s education system. The first incident was the teacher in a POS school spewing racist and classist statements. The second incident is the issue of the student at the south Anglican school who complained about being harassed for wearing her natural hair in Bantu knots, twists and cornrows. From my own experience in the education system as a student, educator and researcher, issues of discrimination, abuse and damaging approaches to differences are deeply entrenched across the education system. This is so despite the actions of some dedicated and fairminded teachers and administrators to do better.
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Africa, Gender, General T&T, Politics, Sex

Turning the Clock Backward

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 09, 2019

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeTrinidad and Tobago is a difficult, contradictory society. Every time we take one step forward, we also take two steps backward. Imagine a progressive leader saying that she won’t invite a man or woman to a government function unless he/she is accompanied by his/her married partner. One would have thought our foremothers had solved that problem two hundred years ago but one of her great granddaughters is doing her best to turn the clock back to even darker days.
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