By Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 15, 2025

The community is the source of democracy in Trinidad and Tobago. Recently, there have been many references to its role in solving our problems. On Tuesday Shamfa Cudjoe-Lewis declared: “Grassroots sporting groups and programmes must no longer be sacrificed for the sake of national government bodies.” She obtained this wisdom seven years after she became the Minister of Sport and Community Development.

She confessed: “We need to get from focusing on one-day events to developing real programmes and academies at the community level.” (Express, February 12.)

On Thursday, Roy Mitchell, a fellow columnist, wrote: “Why can’t the TTPS (T&T Police Service) sit alongside influential business, cultural, social and youth leaders in our communities, on an ongoing basis, and benefit from their wealth of knowledge, experience, wisdom and understanding of their local communities in identifying and addressing the root causes of neighbourhood crime?” (Express, February 13.)

Community control has never been the major philosophy of any of our governments. Eric Williams recognised the importance of this concept when he initiated his Better Village programmes. However, he never gave villages the financial (ie, economic) resources to conduct their affairs. His was primarily a cultural endeavour, a necessary but not a sufficient condition to enhance our democracy.

In 1982, I delivered a lecture, “The Village Council as an Organ of Popular Democracy”, at the Tacarigua Community Centre. I wrote: “Trinidad and Tobago has reached a new stage of social and political development. At the centre of this development must be the village council, the most important and popular institution of governance in our society.” (Movement of the People)

I argued that the village council movement and the panchayat, the leading socio-political representatives of the Hindus, functioned as the fulcrum from which the economic, political and cultural life of our communities revolved. They are the only indigenous forms of governance we possess. The colonial governments of Spain and England imposed their forms of governance upon us to achieve their ends.

The words of Africa’s foremost anti-colonial leader, Amilcar Cabral, support my position. He noted: “The national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, its return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which it was subjected.” (Revolution in Guinea)

My family and I have always been members of Tacarigua village organisations. My mother was the secretary of the Tacarigua Village Council, the Garden Club, and a member of the Mothers’ Union. The districkers (that’s how we call Tacariguans) controlled village affairs. We never appealed to the colonial government to assist us in running our affairs.

With the exception of the Mothers’ Union, Joshua Stanley was a member of all these organisations. He ran the Tacarigua Friendly Society and was associated with the Arouca Friendly Society. He was the principal of Tacarigua EC and the Tacarigua Orphan Home Primary School. He was a lay reader at the St Mary’s Anglican Church from 1914 until his death in 1965. He was one of the most learned black theologians in the Caribbean.

He built his home in the 1930s at the corner of Beckles Street and Eastern Main Road, Tacarigua. It was one of the most iconic residences of the village. It can be compared with the palatial residence William Hardin Burnley built in 1822. Stanley’s home was a grassroots mansion that was built by a black man when black people were not supposed to shine.

About a month ago this residence was levelled to the ground by the new owners. The Tunapuna-Piarco Regional Corporation gave permission to put up a three-storey building on the same spot that represented the beauty, dignity and wisdom of a people.

We ought not to have been surprised. The same forces that broke down the residences of George Padmore and Sylvester Williams in Arouca and CLR James’ house in Tunapuna, from where he wrote Beyond a Boundary, are the same forces—the same government—who demolished the Stanley residence without any thought of what it might mean to the integrity of the community or the sovereignty of its spaces.

One cannot speak of community control or grassroots governance when those who are placed in authority to assist their development know nothing of “the historical personality” of the people who live there. This insult is aggravated when the authorities have no notion of why communities are so central to national development.

As long as those in authority do not recognise the importance of the past, we will continue to destroy our people, especially our youths. Those who do not overstand (a Rasta term) their people’s culture are destined to make the same mistakes again. A districker characterised this ignorance beautifully. He said: “What our Government is doing is regress; not progress. People do not destroy their monuments.”

That’s village wisdom. I couldn’t have said it better.