Tag Archives: Selwyn R. Cudjoe

Crime in T&T, General T&T, Politics, Racism Watch

“The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.”

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 15, 2018

“Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods, I am no idle votarist!…Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.”

—William Shakespeare,”Timon of Athens”

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeTwo weeks ago, I made a case for “reparative justice.” Drawing on “Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow,” a report that was coauthored by Dr. Stephen Mullen, a well-respected scholar, I challenged the national community to think about this concept. I did not chastise anyone. I simply stated facts as I saw them.

Mullen’s report was important because it drew on my work, The Slave Master of Trinidad, to demonstrate how Burnley’s profits and the capital he bequeathed to his son, William Frederick, subsidized the development of the University of Glasgow (UG). UG launched a program for reparative justice because of Mullen’s report. (See “Glasgow University to make amends over slavery profits,” London Guardian, September 11, 2018).
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General T&T, International, USA

America’s Angry White Men

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 08, 2018

“An increasingly diverse society no longer accepts the God-given right of white males from the right families to run things, and a society with many empowered, educated women is finally rejecting the droit de seigneur once granted to powerful men.”

—Paul Krugman, New York Times

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeYesterday the U.S. Senate elected Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court by the narrowest of margins despite the objections of 2,400+ law professors and Justice John Paul Stevens, former justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Stevens noted: “He’s a fine federal judge, and he should have been confirmed when he was nominated. But I think that his performance during the hearings caused me to change my mind” (New York Times, October 5).
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General T&T, Race and Identity, Racism Watch

Reparative Justice

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 01, 2018

When we think of restorative justice we must think of who was harmed and how we make them whole again.

—Marc Lamont Hill, 2018

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeOn November 23, 1850, the San Fernando Gazette announced the death of John Lamont, the second-largest slave owner in the island. It noted: “Mr. Lamont had arrived at the age of 65, the largest part of which he passed in this island [or Trinidad] where he had accumulated a very large fortune, by care, perseverance, and intelligence, accompanied by the strictest integrity, and marked by humor in all his transactions.”
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England, General T&T, International

Independence Child/Pan Africanist Vision

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 24, 2018

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeSeveral years ago Glenda Morean, Trinidad and Tobago’s High Commissioner in London, invited me to attend an intimate luncheon with Ulric Cross and four other people. It was the first time I met Cross, this distinguished man. Although I knew Cross’s reputation as a combat bomber navigator during World War II, my most indelible image of him was that of an ageless being playing a good game of tennis in his eighties.
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General T&T, Labour, Oil and Gas, PNM, Politics, Trade Unions

Missing Their Mark

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 17, 2018

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeDr. Keith Rowley and the PNM came through the Petrotrin debate looking much better than Ancil Roget and the OWTU. Moreover, Rowley’s rationality and levelheadedness triumphed over Roget’s tentativeness and impulsiveness. Initially, I thought Rowley and the PNM would have won the battle and lost the war. I am not sure this prediction still holds. It’s a pity though Roget did not outline his refinery-saving proposal before (Express, September 14).

My neighbor, a shop steward of OWTU, has another view of things. He believes the strike was “partially successful. It was supposed to demonstrate to the political leaders that we need to change how we do things and to remind them that the people are still in charge.” “The union,” he said, “used the day to protest the selling of our national assets to foreigners.”
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General T&T, Oil and Gas, PNM

The Tricky Ways of Democracy

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 11, 2018

“Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts.”
—Thomas Piketty, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeI want to compliment Dr. Keith Rowley for the informative and well-argued address he made to the nation on Sunday about his government’s intention to get rid of the refinery operations of PetroTrin. One may not agree with everything he said or the conclusions he arrived at, but it was courageous of him to share his thinking with the nation.
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General T&T, Oil and Gas, PNM, Politics

Killing the Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 03, 2018

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeAesop, an enslaved man from Ethiopia, once told a fable, “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg.” It goes like this:

“A man and his wife owned a very special goose. Every day the goose would lay a golden egg, which made the couple very rich.

“‘Just think,’ said the man’s wife, ‘If we could have all the golden eggs that are inside the goose, we could be richer much faster.'”
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General T&T

A Wounded Animal – Pt 2

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 26, 2018

PART 2

Reporting the world and its past, the past as a wound, the present as loss, has been Naipaul’s dedication and business, a sort of unillusioned mourning” (Frank Kermode, London Review of Books, 4 May 1989).

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIt was a Saturday evening in the fall of 1988. I had just arrived at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and was having dinner with a colleague when my nephew shouted from the first-floor bedroom: “Uncle Selwyn, Mr. Naipaul on the phone.” You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone became silent.

I went upstairs to answer the phone. In my best Trinidadianese, I intoned: “Good evening, Mr. Naipaul. This is Selwyn Cudjoe.”
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General T&T, Passed on

A Wounded Animal

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 20, 2018

PART 1

“If being afflicted with asthma [as Naipaul was as a child] shaped personality and character, then, perhaps it made him [Naipaul] a wounded animal. —Savi Naipaul Akal”

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeOn May 13, 1979, Irving Howe reviewed V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River in the New York Times. Although Howe praised the novel effusively, he knew little about the man or the society that produced such a talented writer.

On June 24, 1979, Michael Thelwell responded to Shiva and Vidia’s comments about Africa and asked the Times: “Had the brothers Naipaul not existed, would you have had to invent them? One suspects so. For how else would it have been possible for little brother Shiva to pontificate in your columns that the African soul is a blank slate on which anything can be written, onto which any fantasy can be transposed.…
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General T&T, PNM, Police, Politics

“Don’t Talk About It; Be About It!”

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 12, 2018

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeMy first impulse was to congratulate the government for voting to appoint Gary Griffith Commissioner of Police (CoP). Whatever Griffith’s weaknesses, his appointment promised to give the police force the stability it deserves and the country the space it needs to breathe easier; that is, until Stuart Young, “Ad-minister of everything but master of nothing,” was recycled into the Ministry of National Security.

Without even being confirmed, Griffith hit the airways telling the population what he would and would not do although prudence dictated that he meet with the leadership of the police force, learn from their experiences, and tell them of his plans to make the force a more efficient unit. After such discussions, he could have determined how best to attack the monster called crime.
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