By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 05, 2026

When the Hon Kamla Persad-Bissessar invited me to be the executive chairman of UTT, she counselled: “Go and educate the young men and women of Trinidad and Tobago about their culture and their history and put UTT’s financial house in order.”

Within a year, the Board of Governors and Prof Rean Maharaj, our acting president, decided to offer a course in the history and culture of T&T. We reduced our operating deficit from $21.2 to $6 million; recovered $36.2 million in outstanding student receivables; and strengthened UTT’s research and commercialisation agenda.

We also decided that UTT should have a public presence in the commemoration of Emancipation Day. We anchored our discussion around Canon Philip Henry Douglin’s address, “Jubilee of Emancipation” (1888), which he wrote at the 50th anniversary of Emancipation.

On July 12, Express Vibes captured our vision. It said: “Freedom is often told through a single story, but the UTT wants audiences to see a much bigger picture…We can recognise and acknowledge that there are certain common sufferings that took place in slavery and indentureship. Rather than focusing solely on African Emancipation, Cudjoe said the university wanted to present a broader national conversation.” (July 24.)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian author, warned us about “the danger of a single story”.

I delivered the feature address at our UHURU celebration. Although Douglin offered remarkable insights into emancipation, he was mistaken about the primary role white humanitarians (William Wilberforce, Thomas Claxton, et al) played in our freedom.

In 2022, an African scholar, José Lingna Nafafé, authored Lourenco da Silva Mendonca and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century. He writes:

“In 1684, Lourenco da Silva de Mendonca from the kingdom of Kongo in the Indies arrived in Rome to take up an important role for Black peoples. That role was to bring an ethical and criminal case before the Vatican court. He accused the nations involved in Atlantic slavery, including the Vatican, Italy, Spain and Portugal, of committing crimes against humanity. It detailed the ‘tyrannical sale of human beings…the diabolical abuse of this kind of slavery…which they committed against any Divine or Human Law’.”

Slavery was abolished formally in 1834 and fully in 1838. The first Emancipation Dinner took place on August 1, 1839. By 1888 African radicals (such as Douglin, Edgar Maresse-Smith, Mzumbo Lazare, and Charles Edgar Petioni) demanded that August 1 be declared “a public hol[y]day” and be celebrated appropriately. Governor William Robinson’s letter to Maresse-Smith and the latter’s reply to the governor captures the essence of that debate. (San Fernando Gazette, June 30, 1888.)

In 1938, 100 years after abolition and 50 years after Douglin’s Jubilee Address, a Trinidadian student, Eric Williams, defended his thesis, “The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery”, at Oxford University. He argued that Britain ended slavery because of economic reasons rather than humanitarian ideals. He enlarged his thesis to Capitalism and Slavery in 1944 after further research.

Williams took this important idea from his intellectual mentor, CLR James. When Williams completed Capitalism and Slavery, he inscribed one of the first copies of his book: “Dear Jimmy. Your godchild! In appreciation.”

Before James and Williams wrote their books, Douglin, a pastor from St Clements in St Madeline, was preaching about the deleterious effect slavery had on our minds. He wrote in his “Emancipation Address”:

“Oh! It is not the smiting of the back, until the earth is crimsoned with streams of blood—it is not the pursuing of human beings with blood hounds—it is not the branding of the person, or the amputation of the limbs—it is not the killing of the body—it is not these that are the keenest sufferings that a people can undergo.

“These affect only the outward man, and may leave the majestic mind untouched. But those inflictions which tend to contract and destroy the mind—those cruelties which benumb the sensibility of the soul—those influences which chill and arrest the currency of the heart’s affection—these are the awful instruments of real suffering and degradation; and these have been made to operate on the Negro.”

East Indians were brought to this land in 1845. As dreadful as slavery was—a crime unsurpassed in human history—Indo-Trinbagonians suffered as badly as Afro-Trinbagonians during indentureship. Each system (“estranged labor”, as Marx described it in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,) prevents a man, in his work, from affirming himself. “[He] denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.”

Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly, former minister of education, has argued that the inclusion of East Indian culture in a function for African Emancipation Day was “disrespectful” and “disappointing” (Express, August 2). I wonder if she held a similar view when UTT held its “Indian Arrival Day: Round Table Discussion and Cultural Programme” at NAPA on May 20, 2023, under her watch. It featured “African drums alongside East Indian instruments”.

UTT believes we must strive to liberate each group within our population from mental slavery and what Marx calls “alienation”. Such goals are neither “disrespectful” nor “dismissive” of what African people went through.

Indo-Trinbagonians consist of about 40% of our population; Afro-Trinbagonians, about 32%. Sunday’s Guardian noted: “A noticeably smaller crowd gathered on Independence Square in Port of Spain to mark the 188th anniversary of the full emancipation of slavery.” (August 2.)

Some Afro-Trinbagonians may wish to embalm our sufferings and boast about which group suffered more. We may also wish to dictate how other Afro-Trinbagonians speak about our pain.

UTT is a national university. Our responsibility is to remind the world what black and brown people in this country underwent to emancipate ourselves through rigorous study and purposeful discourse.

We continue to take our educational mandate seriously at UTT.