By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 19, 2022
On a sunny day in February of 1952 I was an eight-year-old schoolboy made to attend a memorial service for King George VI, the father of the late Elizabeth II. On that day I remembered the “Taps” played by the Police Band or the Tacarigua Orphan Home Band, as the bugles rattled through the bamboos on the banks of the Tacarigua River that flowed on the western side of the church.
Continue reading Deluded Children of Empire
By Raffique Shah
September 05, 2022
I was scanning the local television channels last Tuesday for any Independence-related special programming they might feature on the eve of the 60th anniversary, when I realised CCN TV6 was about to run live coverage of the formal opening of the Dr Eric Williams Memorial Library and museum in Port of Spain.
As the cameras panned the guests arriving for what was likely to be one of the feature events of the anniversary, I experienced a wave of nostalgia, memories of what seemed to have been many years ago when Erica Williams, daughter of the late prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, first communicated with me about her project.
Continue reading Academic oasis
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 22, 2022
A call to my grandnephew, Devon La Touche, a library assistant at the Beetham Gardens Community Library (BGCL) and the Joint Community Service Centre in Gonzales, on Wednesday and Thursday respectively, led to two instructive days.
Devon attends to the young pupils who visit the library to use the Internet and play games on the Internet. Before they do so, they are required to read for half an hour. Such is their anxiety to get to the computers that they joyously do their reading just to get to the computers. Adults hardly attend the library.
Continue reading Winning hearts and minds
By Raffique Shah
August 22, 2022
A few weeks ago, my cousin Susheela forwarded to me an interesting piece of Internet trivia that was anything but trivial. The author had given that generations in recorded history had lived through the most exciting period, based on facts cited, that people now in their 60s and 70s, having been born in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, had enjoyed some of the most dramatic developments man has ever experienced.
Continue reading Ten thousand-gun salute
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 25, 2022
PART I — PART II
The Hatter asks Alice: “Why is a bird like a desk?”
Alice was pleased. She enjoyed playing word games, so she said, “That’s an easy question.”
“Do you mean you know the answer?” said the March Hare.
“Yes,” said Alice.
“Then you must say what you mean,” the March Hare said.
“I do,” Alice said quickly. “Well, I mean what I say. And that’s the same thing, you know.”
“No, it isn’t!” said the Hatter.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
On April 21, 2022, the prime minister commented on the close to 20 murders that took place while he was in Barbados. Asked if T&T was losing its fight against crime, the PM responded: “I don’t notice anybody running away from the fact that we are a violent society and in recent years a number of persons have gotten their hands on firearms, handguns in particular.” (Express, April 22.)
Continue reading Keith Rowley’s Failed Leadership
Raffique Shah
July 18, 2022
For many readers, my recollections of “Shanty Town” and the “La Basse” in the 1950s-’60s stirred memories of another day, an era from which the society ought to have long evolved.
Others thought I exaggerated wildly in my description of corbeaux and half-naked boys wrestling over discarded meat. I wonder if I had added to creatures I saw foraging for food the biggest hogs I had lain eyes on among the “gladiators” in that putrid “gayelle” that was the “La Basse”, what they might have thought of me: a writer whose imagination had gone wild?
Continue reading Fight…or die like cowards
By Raffique Shah
July 11, 2022
Many moons ago, when I was young, idealistic and very much a utopian dreamer, I had a vision for a new Beetham community. It will have formed in the early 1960s when I first travelled to Port of Spain frequently.
The route the taxis used from Chaguanas was the relatively new Princess Margaret Highway (commissioned in 1954, I think), turning west onto the Churchill-Roosevelt (built by the US armed forces in 1941 to service the largest air force base in this part of the world, Fort Read in Wallerfield, and used exclusively by military vehicles until it was handed over to the local authorities in 1949). The CRH ended at Barataria. From that point, before the Beetham Highway was opened in ’56, all traffic to PoS had to return to the Eastern Main Road to access PoS.
Continue reading Beetham: man vs corbeaux
By Raffique Shah
July 04, 2022
We are not the most crime-ridden country in the world, notwithstanding claims to that effect by organisations and individuals that manipulate raw data from dubious sources so that they can support whatever theory or argument their authors wish to pursue.
For example, there are academics and criminologists who rely on official police numbers that could be quite misleading. To support my argument, I ask: can the police or other government agency in many densely-populated, slum-infested countries and cities (think India, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines…) accurately account for every living or dead soul in such human-jungles? Hell, in the comparatively minuscule Beetham Estate or Sea Lots in Trinidad and Tobago, people live and die and never appear on records, so wheel and come back if you expect me to buy “official” data as being accurate.
Continue reading Power of the gun
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 24, 2022
Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility. Even the restraints imposed in the training of men and children are restraints that will in the end make greater freedom possible.
—WEB Du Bois, John Brown
When we voted for the PNM in 2015, we felt that we were voting to end corruption and to bring to justice those who had stolen from the State. Unfortunately, we were wrong. Seven long years after PNM’s ascendancy to power, no one has been found guilty of any major crime of corruption, but then again, all those allegations may have been a mirage in our collective imagination.
Continue reading If the priest could play…
By Raffique Shah
May 16, 2022
It was the lure of the rifle that probably made up my mind for me. I enlisted in the Trinidad and Tobago Cadet Corps established at Presentation College, Chaguanas, in 1959. I was all of 13 years old, and I was eager to get on with “the gun”. It would take several months’ training—drills, map reading, more drills—before we eager beavers were allowed to touch the weapon.
Continue reading Full force for merchants of death