By Raffique Shah
August 17, 2013
The ten leading stories in last Friday’s online Express related to Jehue Gordon’s golden performance at the IAAF World Championships in Moscow. While that was a welcome respite from the daily fare of murder and mayhem, it told a sad story of just how starved this country is for good news.
Continue reading Plea for Gordon
By Raffique Shah
August 10, 2013
I sense a wave of panic among leaders and frontline members of both the PNM and the UNC/COP Partnership. With Jack Warner on a roll following his by-election victory, and the UNC losing senior members like Lyndira Oudit to the newly formed ILP, a meeting of what can be best described as the ruling party’s general council pleaded with the Prime Minister to postpone local government elections for fear of another routing at the polls.
Continue reading Politicians panic
By Suzanne Mills
August 09, 2013 – newsday.co.tt
I’m beginning to believe that President Anthony Carmona thinks he is still a judge, that Trinidad and Tobago is his courtroom and that we are all before him on a charge.
“Madam,” he chided Opposition Whip, Marlene McDonald last Friday as he addressed the opening of Parliament, “I am speaking about conduct!”
Continue reading All hail king Carmona
By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 09, 2013 – trinicenter.com
Tacarigua, one of the oldest villages in Trinidad, has always been a peaceful village. In fact, it has been so peaceful that there has never been a police station in that village.(1) One suspects that the presence of its savannah, the second largest in the country after Queen’s Park Savannah in Port of Spain-that is, until the construction of homes on those magnificent grounds in the 1950s,-the gentle-flowing waters of its river to which all repaired on a Sunday, and the peaceful mixture of its peoples-Hindus in Paradise, Muslims in Dinsley, and Africans in St. Mary’s-all added to the attractiveness of the place and mutual respect each accorded to the other. In a way, it could be said that the Tacarigua Savannah held the village together. It certainly was the central spot where everyone gathered.
Continue reading Preserving the Tacarigua Savannah
By Ras Tyehimba
August 07, 2013
There was a picture recently of Pope Francis playing the Steelpan next to T&T president Anthony Thomas Aquinas Carmona who presented it to him as a gift. This picture was published by the media, several Steelpan websites and has made its way around various social media platforms. One website exclaimed: “Truly a great day for our nation and our national instrument! The pope is a Trini now!” Another Steelpan website expressed, “Steelpan is the sweetest!! Just ask the Pope.”
Continue reading The Pope and the Pan: Challenging Caribbean Inferiority and Cultural Prostitution
By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 06, 2013
In responding to my article of her representation as to who was the first black legislator in Trinidad (see the Trinidad Express, July 26), Professor Bridget Brereton, one of our most distinguished historians, raised more questions than she answered even as she sought refuge in the philosophical theory called solipsism. Professor Brereton is unwilling to concede that St. Luce Philip possessed any blackness (or did he possess just a little bit?) because, as she says, he was of mixed race; light-complexioned; married a white wife and would not have considered himself black, nor would he have been so considered by Trinidad society in the 1830s.
Continue reading The Blackness of Black or, How Black is Really Black?
By Raffique Shah
August 04, 2013
There is no tectonic shift in voting patterns coming out of the Chaguanas West by-election last Monday, as some politicians and political analysts posit.
What happened was simply this: the constituents, who are predominantly Indians and supporters of the UNC, used the ballot to tell the party’s leadership that it could not foist any “crapaud” on them. They wanted Jack Warner to represent them, and they were prepared to defy the party’s directives to make their point.
Continue reading Jack’s shelf life
By Andre Bagoo
Tuesday, July 30 2013 – newsday.co.tt
JACK WARNER, 70, has been re-elected as the Member of Parliament for Chaguanas West, after provisional results from the Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC) last night projected him as the winner of the bye-election. It was a crushing victory.
Up until press time, Warner provisionally received 12,631 votes while the United National Congress’s (UNC) Khadijah Ameen, 32 – his nearest rival – received less than half that amount or 5,126 votes.
Continue reading JACK WINS
By Raffique Shah
July 28, 2013
The tragedy of tomorrow’s by-election in Chaguanas West is that all of us—politicians, commentators, journalists, publicists and people—treated the exercise, more so the campaign, as a big joke, a comedy festival of sorts. In other words, we have all helped to perpetuate the unholy mess that passes for politics in a country where buffoonery triumphs over rationale, in a land where crapaud is king – or queen.
Continue reading Buffoonery reigns
By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 25, 2013
On July 17, Professor Bridget Brereton wrote in the Trinidad Express that Cyrus Prudhomme David was the first black legislator to sit in the Trinidad and Tobago Legislative Council. This is not true. It is the repetition of a position that Brinsley Samaroo articulated in his pamphlet, “Cyrus Prudhomme David: A Case Study on the Emergence of the Black Man” (1970). It needs to be laid to rest for the fiction it is.
Continue reading Dr. St. Luce Philip: The First Black Legislator of Trinidad and Tobago
