By Raffique Shah
August 09, 2019
Stirring racial tensions during the run-up to major elections in Trinidad and Tobago is an appeal to primal ethnic instincts as old as when adult franchise was first granted to what was then a British crown colony back in 1946 when I was born. And I dare say it’s as ancient and decrepit as I am today, so much so that it should have long been buried or consigned to the dustbin of history.
Continue reading One step away from Hell
By Dr Kwame Nantambu
Published: August 06, 2019
This article was written before August 01, 2019
As Emancipation Day approaches, it is indeed apropos to delineate the economic and political aspects of the abolition of slavery, albeit the European enslavement of African people or MAAFA— the “great disaster.”
Continue reading Abolition of Slavery — Economic/Political Aspects
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 16, 2019
On Monday I presented a paper, “Writing the Slave Master of Trinidad,” at an important conference “Slavery and Its Afterlives: Blackness, Representation, Social Justice, Vision,” at the National Maritime Museum in London. The conference aimed “to extend our understanding of diaspora, to connect diaspora and, in the process, to forge new critical directions.”
Continue reading The Making of a Scholar…
By Raffique Shah
June 21, 2019
During the recent Venezuelan migrants registration exercise, I found myself subconsciously scanning video-clips and photographs of the hundreds of hopefuls who turned up at the three designated centres each day for, I am not ashamed to admit it, applicants of colour. “Where are the Waraos?” I kept asking aloud. “Where are the Afro-Venezuelans?” I spotted one or two of the latter during the two-week exercise, but not one of the indigenous people (Warao and other tribes), who, I am told by fisher-folks who routinely make trips across to the Main”, live closest to Trinidad and Tobago.
Continue reading Crisis next door will continue
By Stephen Kangal
May 01, 2019
It is patently clear that Prime Minister Rowley grabbed the quite innocuous, viewed from a local context, but attention-attracting Sat Statement and attempted to clothe it with the now infamous Calcutta Ship robes geared to arrest the declining support for the PNM in Tobago from the rise and rise of the Duke factor.
It was engineered to achieve the same electoral result as Sandy’s 2013 Statement and to nip the incipient electoral fortunes of Minority Leader Watson Duke in the bud.
Continue reading Calcuttising Sat’s Message To Tobagonians
By Raffique Shah
April 23, 2019
As I watched the mayhem unfold across Sri Lanka last Sunday, the death toll from multiple bombings at churches and hotels mounting from the initial count of 160 as some of the severely injured succumbed to their injuries, I thought of how fortunate we in Trinidad and Tobago have been thus far. More than that, I wondered if the purveyors of divisiveness, those who routinely stoke the fires of racial, religious and political discord in this otherwise harmonious society, realise the dangers to which they expose us all.
Continue reading Stoking the fires of racial discord
By Stephen Kangal
April 23, 2019
The comments of Sat Maharaj on poor productivity practices that stultify and retard the economic development of Tobago including its current justification for exercising greater autonomy were substantially no different from those uttered by Dr Rita Pemberton, THA Chief Secretary Kelvin Charles and Tobago East MP the Hon Ayana Webster- Roy. In fact Mr Maharaj in his well-known, call a spade a spade modus operandi was using language derived directly from the work ethic statements issued by these Tobagonian speakers recently.
Continue reading Vilifying the Messenger of Tobago Productivity Message
By Peter Christopher
April 16, 2019 – guardian.co.tt
Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha secretary general Sat Maharaj remained defiant yesterday in the face of a furore over his contentious comments about the people of Tobago and a call from Minority Leader Watson Duke to apologise or face a hate campaign.
“I have intentions to respond to Watson Duke and the critics, I will reply at a time of my own choosing and the medium of my own choosing,” Maharaj said when contacted for comment hours after Duke called for an apology.
Continue reading Sat’s nasty attack on Tobagonians slammed
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 25, 2019
“Until all races see each other as brothers and sisters and not as competitors or enemies Trinidad and Tobago is not going to move forward.”
—Kamla Persad-Bissessar
I congratulate the Hon. Kamla Persad-Bissessar for the brave speech on race relations in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) that she delivered on Monday, February 11. While I do not agree totally with the accuracy of her “short history lesson,” thinking in and of the future is much more important than being mired in the commess of the present. Demeaning Persad-Bissessar’s important insights by castigating the probity of her having Malone Hughes, a brother who was charged and fined several times , on her platform does a disservice to a brilliant analysis of our present condition. It reduces a pressing existentialist issue to a misguided rant about non-sense.
Continue reading While I Am Here!
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 30, 2019
“It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital…without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic.”
—V. I. Lenin quoted in C. L. R. James, Notes on Dialectics
On Monday the Sugar and Slavery Gallery of London Museum Docklands invited me to be a panelist in a seminar, “London’s Debt to and Involvement with Slavery.” The other panelist, Dr. Kate Donington, Co-Curator of the Slavery, Culture and Collecting display at the Museum, spoke about George Hibbert, a slave owner in Jamaica and a hugely influential presence in eighteenth-century Jamaica and London.
Continue reading Thinking Dialectically About Slavery