By Dr Keith Rowley
Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago
August 01, 2021 – Facebook
Happy Emancipation Day to all the people of Trinidad and Tobago, from the Government, my own family and myself on the occasion of Emancipation Day 2021.
Today, we recognise not just the horrific experience of our African ancestors – but the impact it continues to have on the lives of millions of their descendants.
Continue reading Dr Keith Rowley’s Emancipation Day Statement
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 19, 2021
Two weeks ago South Africa’s Constitutional Court sentenced Jacob Zuma to 15 months in prison for contempt of court. He refused to appear at a government enquiry committee that was looking into the corruption that took place during his nine-year rule. The party (ANC) began to run the state as though it was just another arm of the party, and therein lay its downfall.
Continue reading PNM: Avoiding the Pitfall of Decline
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 29, 2021
“Nations seldom listen to advice from individuals, however reasonable. They are taught less by theories than by facts and events.”
—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Last week I commended President Joseph Biden for signing into law a bill that made June 19 a national holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. It took two and a half years (that is, on June 19, 1865) to notify enslaved African Americans that “all slaves are free” and the 13th Amendment to free them officially on December 6, 1865.
Continue reading A Luta Continua
By Dr. Kwame Nantambu
June 14, 2021
Years after the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2011 as “The International Year for People of African Descent”, it must be realized that the European enslavement of African people or the “MAAFA” (“great disaster”) only represents .01 per cent of the history of African people on this planet. Put another way, for the 99.9 per cent of their history, Africans were a free people.
Furthermore, “there were a thousand years of independent state formation and state management in inner West Africa called the western Sudan before the (European) slave trade.”
Continue reading Getting world history right: real African history
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 07, 2021
“Get the niggers,” was their slogan, / “Kill them, burn them, set the pace. / Let them know that we are white men, / Teach them how to keep their place.”
—A. J. Smitherman, “The Tulsa Race Riot and Massacre” (1922)
I had just left Harvard University as an assistant professor and was doing “Time to Talk,” a series of interviews for T&T Television. In 1982 I interviewed Sam Nujomo, the founding father of Namibia, where he had addressed the UN Decolonization Committee about his country’s independence. We talked about Namibia’s struggle for independence and the stain German genocide had left upon the consciousness of his people.
Continue reading White Brutality Against Black and Brown People
France had for “too long” valued “silence over the examination of the truth” when it came to its complicity in the 1994 massacre that killed around 800,000 people, President Emmanuel Macron says.
By Deutsche Welle – May 27, 2021
French President Emmanuel Macron admitted French responsibility in the Rwandan genocide, during a visit to the Rwandan capital Kigali on Thursday.
“Standing here today, with humility and respect, by your side, I have come to recognize our responsibilities,” Macron said in a speech at the Kigali Genocide Memorial where more than 250,000 Tutsi are buried.
Continue reading Rwanda: Macron admits French responsibility in genocide
Germany calls atrocities ‘genocide’ but omits the words ‘reparations’ or ‘compensation’ from a joint statement
By Philip Oltermann, in Berlin
May 28, 2021 – theguardian.com
Germany has to agreed to pay Namibia €1.1bn (£940m) as it officially recognised the Herero-Nama genocide at the start of the 20th century, in what Angela Merkel’s government says amounts to a gesture of reconciliation but not legally binding reparations.
Tens of thousands of men, women and children were shot, tortured or driven into the Kalahari desert to starve by German troops between 1904 and 1908 after the Herero and Nama tribes rebelled against colonial rule in what was then named German South West Africa and is now Namibia.
Continue reading Germany recognises colonial ‘genocide’ in Namibia
By Raffique Shah
April 26, 2021
I round off my intervention on the many possibilities we might find in a new post-Covid economy by reminding readers the pandemic has hammered economies across the world, irrespective of their sizes, in ways never before seen.
Oil was rocked to unimaginably low prices. Stock markets swayed as if in stupor, major commodity prices collapsed to uneconomic levels, and the virus disrupted world production of essential industries, goods and services, leaving governments confused, powerless, defeated.
Continue reading Of dollars and sense
…and examining colonials’ ‘deceitful bait-and-switch’
By Claudius Fergus
August 16, 2020 – wired868.com
In defiance of the rapid community spread of Covid-19, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, kept the promise he made on Emancipation Day 2019 to unveil T&T’s first emancipation monument—the only live public event on Emancipation Day 2020.
Like many thousands of other Trinbagonians, I missed the commemorative spectacles of the longest day in the Pan-African Festival’s calendar. But instead of regrets, the occasion motivated me to reexamine the intellectual underpinnings and contradictions of Britain’s 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act.
Continue reading Emancipating old narratives of ‘emancipation’
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 06, 2020
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, early on Sunday mornings, we would hear the bells ringing out loudly in the street as a band of women, dressed immaculately in white with varied colored head ties proceeded to the Tacarigua River to conduct their religious rituals. At the tender age of six or seven I did not know what such celebrations (I saw it as a celebration) were about. All I knew was that my Tantie Lenora was among that band of women. Somehow, I felt embarrassed or even ashamed.
Continue reading My Spiritual Inheritance