By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 07, 2024

In his address to the nation on African Emancipation Day, the Leader of our Grief called upon his distraught citizens to focus on Afro-Trinbagonians who have made outstanding contributions at home and abroad.

He urged the universities of the West Indies, of Trinidad and Tobago, and the Southern Caribbean “to research further, then highlight and promote the African heritage in the country’s art, literature, music, religion, drama, fashion, cuisine, technical and empirical skills”. (Express, August 1, 2024.)

Now, I am not too sure how a university does these things. I used to think that it was people/researchers who did these things, but I may be mistaken.

More importantly, it takes enormous sums of money to research the people and the connections that the Leader listed. I have carried on in-depth research on Eric Williams, CLR James and George Padmore. It cost money to do so.

With the possible exception of Sylvester Williams, all the people who the Leader called upon us to research lived in the twentieth century. In his thinking, nothing that happened intellectually before the twentieth century matters.

He does not seem to realise that many of the ideas of these twentieth-century scholars were derived from scholars and thinkers who lived in the nineteenth century.

The nineteenth century is a rich source of exemplary people who should be researched and studied. I think of Jean-Baptiste Philip, author of Free Mulatto, Michel Maxwell Philip, author of Emmanuel Appadocca, LB Tronchin, a pre-eminent scholar of the 19th century, JJ Thomas, author of The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar, Philip Henry Douglin, author of one of the most exemplary Emancipation Day speeches ever, Emmanuel Mzumbo Lazare, and Charles Petioni.

These patriots were writing out of the bowels of slavery and the social and political conditions that ensued thereafter. As Ludovico Silva, a Venezuelan linguist said of Karl Marx, “Material slavery did not prevent imaginative beauty from arising in its very bosom.” (Marx’s Literary Style.)

In his introduction to Thomas’s Froudacity, James observed: “I was continually struck by the fact that the attitudes of many of us who have won the attention of the great world outside were precisely those which distinguished the work of Jacob Thomas… From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro, our people have written pages on the book of history.

“Whoever and whatever they have been, [they] are West Indian, a particular social product.” That is the intellectual kernel we must seek to isolate.

The Leader of our Grief deduces without any evidence that it is “only after the embrace of these assignments that the people of this nation can fully appreciate our challenges, our failures and our many successes”.

He does not say who will write these biographies or who will undertake this mammoth task, but he is sure reading these biographies will restore our glory.

Sir Hilary Beckles seemed to be on more fertile intellectual ground when he spoke of “a younger generation of males who are struggling to be integrated into society”.

“Young people,” he said, “do not believe they are given the same treatment to be equal citizens. We have to find a way to rehabilitate these young people…to start again with a new guard to look at this problem with different eyes.” (Express, August 2.)

In other words, chastising Europe once more, as the Leader did, is not a sufficient condition for leading us out of our present social dilemma. Black boys and girls will continue to be eaten up by the system.

The Leader must demonstrate how the biographies of these people will get us out of this catastrophic situation we are in. His government has been in power for nine years. What has he done to implement the assignment that he proposes?

The address of the Leader can only be characterised as the pirouetting of an ideologue who is intent on throwing any crude backward clichés into the faces of a worn-out population, hoping something will stick.

It’s the classical case of someone who confuses the legal-political façade of a society, “forgetting or denying—like an intellectual ostrich—the real economic groundwork that sustains the whole façade”.

With his head in the ground, all he sees “is the building that holds up the foundation and not the other way around—he judges societies according to what they think about themselves, by the intellectual clothing they wear, and not by the real relations sustained by individuals who make them up”. (Marx’s Literary Style.)

Someday the Leader will realise that it takes good hard thinking—rather than ad-libbing—to attack the problems that confront black people and the necessity of seeing the people and the problems with fresh and different eyes.

Dear Mr Leader: Wake up and attune yourself to the pulse of the society.