Tag Archives: Gerard Besson

General T&T, PNM, Politics, Race and Identity, Racism Watch

Love a Donkey: Besson’s Independence Fables – Pt 3

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 18, 2017

PART 1 – PART 2 – PART 3

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeBesson argues that Trinidad and Tobago’s independence venture failed because more than 30 percent of the African population left the country since1962. “These emigrants,” he says, “were mostly urban, secondary school educated, more or less middle class….At the same time, about the same amount of people or more than that of those who left, have come from the islands of the Caribbean.” He elaborates: “Those immigrants’ background were mostly rural and primary school educated. This unique demographic transformation has impacted on Trinidad and Tobago politically, socially and culturally, and has significantly diminished the identity of the AfroCreole [read black] sector.”
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Culture, England, France, General T&T, International

Love A Donkey: Besson’s Independence Fables – Pt 2

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 10, 2017

PART 1 – PART 2 – PART 3

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIn “Independence Legacies,” Gerard Besson offers his reading of Trinidad’s modern history. He says: “From 1783, Europeans and Black people who were not enslaved… arrived mostly from French islands. Many were refugees, political enemies and strangers to each other.… After the British conquest of 1797 to this milieu were added Chinese, Portuguese, and African freedmen. Then after much miscegenation, some decades later, Indian indentureship commenced, and latterly [sic] the Lebanese and Syrians arrived” (my emphasis).
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Crime in T&T, Culture, Finance, PNM, Politics

Love a Donkey: Besson’s Independence Fables – Pt 1

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 03, 2017

PART 1 – PART 2 – PART 3

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeI always marvel when relatively intelligent people say silly things about Africans and our past because of their color or class position. In “Independence Legacies” Gerard Besson offers a mishmash of information, which suffers from factual, interpretive, and definitional flaws. Besson is more concerned with trotting out an ideological position rather than with offering an analytical argument to support his contentions. It’s almost as though his “Creoleness” exempts him from treating his subject matter with the academic rigor it deserves.
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Books, Culture, General T&T, Race and Identity

Besson’s Cruel Accusations

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 23, 2010

Part I

Abu BakrGerard Besson’s The Cult of the Will seeks to challenge the historical orthodoxy that undergirds Dr. Eric Williams’s analysis of the causes of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade and the cruelty he perpetuated against the entire society although whites seems to come out worse in the bargain. According to Besson, Williams sought “to facilitate the stigmatization of Caribbean people of European descent, or those who appear so, through the projection of negative concepts of ‘slave master’ or ‘colonial master,’ to modern-day individuals for political and ideological purposes.”
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