By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 01, 2025

Lately we have been obsessed about the elimination of colonialism in our society, the coat of arms discussion being the latest manifestation of this obsession. Only a rigorous study of and a confrontation with our historical past (and present) can release us from this debilitating condition.

Our progressive workers and thinkers have worked to mitigate this condition for over 100 years. Canon Philip Douglin came to Trinidad as the pastor of St Clement’s Anglican Church, St Madeleine, in 1887. That year he delivered a lecture, —The Rio Pongo Mission”, about his missionary work in West Africa.

He described how Europeans stole Africans from their homeland: —They found out the weak points in the character of the natives—namely cupidity; fondness of getting things easily; fondness for strong drinks, gaudy things, and so on. They set themselves to exciting this cupidity, and sharpening this love of money. When they got their feelings intensified, he said to them, ‘We will give you all that you want, and more that you know of, if you will let us have some people’.” (San Fernando Gazette, August 6, 1887).

In A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, Walter Rodney described how some Africans participated in their own enslavement. In 1980 Forbes Burnham and his regime assassinated Rodney when he challenged their thuggish behaviour. On June 10, 2021, the Guyanese government announced —its historic decision to acknowledge responsibility for Rodney’s assassination” (Walter Rodney Foundation.)

In 1969 Jamaica named George William Gordon and Paul Bogle, leaders of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, as its first national heroes. These heroes kept up the resistance struggle that began when the maroons in Cudjoe’s Town (Trelawny Town) went to war with Britain in 1796 and won.

Bogle, Gordon and Rodney fought against colonial and neocolonial injustices. Each suffered the consequence of his convictions: physical death. However, they laid the foundation of democracy by speaking truth to power and physically fighting to create a better state.

The Leader of Our Grief and Sorrow responded to my charge that PNM sold out to the rich by calling my article —horse manure”. However, Dr Patrick Watson, Emeritus Professor of Economics (The UWI), placed the article on his Facebook page. He described it as an illustration of Rowley’s —failed and debunked theory of trickle-down economics, which is what has guided his policy”.

Rodney drew on Tamas Szentes’ path-breaking The Political Economy of Underdevelopment when he wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

Szentes, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, —stressed the responsibility of the rich developed countries for the underdevelopment of the poor”. (Roape, A Review of African Political Economy, 2018). Rodney, Szentes’ colleague in Tanzania, argued that Africa’s underdevelopment was necessary for Europe’s development.

Last week I argued that a UNC victory is an important precursor to PNM reconstruction. The PNM’s Women League responded: —Dr Cudjoe’s column is nothing more than a weak attempt to discredit the PNM’s achievements and its leadership.” Reconstruction, I remind them, —is sometimes less about materials available than about power—who controls, who benefits, and whose version of history prevails”. (Financial Times, January 25).

Martial was a Roman poet. His poem —True Liberty” captures the dilemma of PNM’s members. He wrote: —I have bought the cap of freedom by the sale of all my movables. He who has no control over himself, but longs for what kings and lords desire, ought to have kings and lords. If you can do without a slave, alas, you can do without a king.”

Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley published a translation of —True Liberty” in Classical Translations. Prof Michele Ronnick called it —the first book of translations taken from the literature of ancient Greece and Rome that was written and published by a person of African descent in the western hemisphere”.

Hartley, a black Trinidadian, studied at Queen’s Royal College, University of Paris and Meharry Medical School in Tennessee. He lectured in the US and Canada, and visited Europe and South America. Antigua’s Daily Sun called him —a tireless and indefatigable worker”. (November 9, 1889). He died in Port of Spain on September 21, 1934.

Hartley was an intellectual predecessor of George Padmore, CLR James and Eric Williams. Like Williams and James, he associated himself with —the dusky brethren of mystic tie”, meaning members of the Black Masonic lodges and fraternal orders in North America and the Caribbean.

I believe in the power of the intellect. I prefer to die a free man, bereft of the colonial shackles that adorn the necks of those less-than-educated pretenders who say they follow the teachings of Williams, James and, by extension, the example of Hartley and our other heroes.

The old Negro Spirituals say it best: —Before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave/And go home to my Lord and be saved.”