By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe February 20, 2024 After my column “Rowley cannot fix the crime problem” appeared in the Sunday Express a few weeks ago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Jearlean John, leader and deputy leader of the United National Congress (UNC), respectively, invited me to share my views on the crime situation in Trinidad and … Continue reading Dem people
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe December 31, 2023 On Saturday of last weekend, I drove from Boston to Harlem to hear my daughter’s sermon at Rev Al Sharpton’s Action Network Committee (ANC) located on West 145th Street. Her sermon, “A Visit from Your Future”, traced “the life of a wealthy and ruthless businessman named Ebenezer … Continue reading A visit from my future
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe November 14, 2023 Last Sunday, several local groups — including the Concerned Muslims of T&T, the Joint Trade Union Movement, the Movement for Social Justice, the Emancipation Support Committee and the Non-Governmental Organisations of T&T for the Advancement of Women — called upon the Government to cut diplomatic relations with … Continue reading A quagmire of death and despair
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe October 23, 2023 The following is a lecture delivered at the Pa Gya! A Literary Festival in Accra, Ghana. First of all, I wish to thank the hosts of this marvelous festival for inviting me to participate in it and for allowing me to share my ideas of how literature, … Continue reading Art and culture in West Africa and the Caribbean
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe September 11, 2023 Two weeks ago I was invited to be a panel member of a conference, “The March on Washington: Its Legacy and Impact in the Americas”, that was organised by the US Permanent Mission to the Organisation of American States (OAS) in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of … Continue reading Coming black on board
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe April 24, 2023 PART II Philip Henry Douglin, grandfather of Bishop Rawle Douglin, took up his clerical duties at the St Clement’s Parish, St Madeleine, in 1887. Coming out of a slave past, having done missionary work in Africa and having been associated with some of the distinguished scholar missionaries … Continue reading The esteemed ancestry of Bishop Rawle Douglin
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe Submitted: December 25, 2022 Posted: December 27, 2022 Today is Christmas Day. Let us give thanks and praise to the birth of a wonderfully well-researched book, Via the Round About, written by Beverly Scobie. It traces one part of Scobie’s family, beginning with Joseph Arthur, the patriarch, who was “enslaved … Continue reading Landscape, family and memory
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe November 07, 2022 PART VI On June 27 I received the following e-mail from Margaret Heath, a relative of William Hardin Burnley (WHB). It read: “I thought you might be interested to know that my brother, as executor of my mother’s estate, has just informed me he has consigned a … Continue reading Out of the cane fields of Tacarigua
By Raffique Shah August 15, 2022 It pains me whenever I feel it necessary to confront the race issue in my column. I see it as a waste of valuable column centimetres where those of us who have been selected by the managers and editors of newspapers to highlight and comment on matters of national … Continue reading Finding African farmers
By Stephen Kangal June 14, 2022 Indians were recruited by ” arkatias” and transported to work on the cane-fields of Caroni in Trinidad because after a period of keen observation and analysis by the occupying British and based on their experience in sugar cultivation in India (UP and Bihar) and taking into account the extreme … Continue reading The Indentures Did Not Affect the Wages of the “Apprentices”