By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
March 13, 2023
PART III
Walton Look Lai has written an indispensable book about the life of Eugene Chen and the important role he played in Chinese history between the 1920s and 1940s, the full flowering of Chen’s career. Chen, a shrewd diplomat, possessed a superior command of the English language which he used as a weapon against his internal antagonists within the party and external foes.
Continue reading Eugene Chen: a forgotten Trinidadian
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
March 06, 2023
PART II
Between 1921 and 1925, the year of Sun Yat-sen’s death, Eugene Chen was on top of his game. He was described as “Sun Yat-sen’s personal representative and spokesman in Shanghai” while the US Consul General in Shanghai described him as “one of the ablest, if not the most able, of Chinese political writers”. (Look Lai, West Meets East.)
Continue reading Eugene Chen: a forgotten Trinidadian
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 27, 2023
PART I
In 1944, when news reached Trinidad that Eugene Chen had died from neurasthenia in China, Chien Chiao (the Chinese homonym for Trinidad), a Trinidad Chinese community journal, made the following announcement: “Eugene Chen (1879(sic)-1944), Trinidad’s greatest son and for many years Chinese Foreign Minister, died from a heart attack in Shanghai this year. Born of humble parentage in San Fernando, he practiced as a solicitor in the courts of the colony before going abroad.” (December 1944).
Continue reading Eugene Chen: a forgotten Trinidadian
By Raffique Shah
January 30, 2023
I suppose Trinidad and Tobago, being a small-island-state, very literally, has to be thankful for small mercies dished out by the super-powers of the world. In this case, big, bad USA, has finally agreed to issue a waiver on the sanctions it has imposed on Venezuela that will allow TT and Caracas to monetise an estimated 4.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from the Dragon field, which lies close to the international boundary between the two countries, but which belongs to Venezuela.
Continue reading Thanks, USA – for nothing
By Dr Kwame Nantambu
December 22, 2022
As a new year approaches, it is indeed a sine qua non to delve deeper into history in order to ascertain what it really takes to be a real national hero of T&T. At the outset, a review of the literature indicates that one of the most fundamental, basic inherent qualities/criteria of any nation’s hero is that person’s overt ability to be a dynamic, forceful agent for radical, structural, even violent change in an imposed oppressive system.
Continue reading To be or not to be a national hero
By Dr Kwame Nantambu
December 10, 2022
Now that England has ushered in its first modern-day, non-European Prime Minister in Rishi Sunak of Asian-Indian descent and the country’s first Hindu to hold that top office, indeed, it is a sine qua non to reveal and recount the role and presence of Africans in England’s early history.
In his treatise History of the Africans in Europe (1971), Dr. G.K. Osei postulates that “when Saint Patrick went to Ireland to convert the people he took one (African) with him. The (African) used to sing at the various meetings. Ireland had an African Bishop called Diman. He died in Ulster in 658 A.D. and is now a Saint.”
Continue reading African presence in early England
By Raffique Shah
November 28, 2022
As the football World Cup tournament kicked off last week, igniting a global epidemic of “football fever” which strikes once every four years, your humble scribe duly fell in line with the billion-plus people viewing via their local television networks.
Now, I must declare that I am no “football peong”, a fanatic who cannot miss a crucial game in any of the many league matches, especially those played in Europe, where giants of the sport, from owners of clubs who eat, drink and sleep football, to star players who are traded like commodities, many of them valued at millions of dollars, which tells me that this “beautiful sport” is more about money than sport, which I bear in mind as I watch the games.
Continue reading Enjoying the World Cup
By Stephen Kangal
November 21, 2022
Guyana, by the internationally accepted law and principle of state succession today and as an independent state member of the UN/OAS has total authority, sovereignty and exclusive jurisdiction and control above (air space), beyond (maritime) and below (subsoil) the current state of Guyana formerly British Guiana by an Independence Agreement concluded by GB/UK and British Guiana effective from the date of the latter’s independence in 1966.
Continue reading Venezuela Clinging at Legal Straws to Delay the ICJ Arbitration with Guyana
By Stephen Kangal
November 11, 2022
The Indian performance last night at the Adelaide Oval was a monumental anti-climax breaking the hearts of more than a billion devotees and 45m in the diaspora by their lack-luster approach to batting and hanging their bats to dry outside the off stump and unable to attack the English quite ordinary bowling.
Honestly from the very first over I thought India would have been a walk over for the Brits on a pitch that held no horrors for the pulverising pair of Hales and Butler who scored freely and indeed majestically as if they were playing against an English County pick up side.
Continue reading The British Re-Conquest of India