By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 19, 2022
On a sunny day in February of 1952 I was an eight-year-old schoolboy made to attend a memorial service for King George VI, the father of the late Elizabeth II. On that day I remembered the “Taps” played by the Police Band or the Tacarigua Orphan Home Band, as the bugles rattled through the bamboos on the banks of the Tacarigua River that flowed on the western side of the church.
Continue reading Deluded Children of Empire
By Raffique Shah
September 12, 2022
It’s incomprehensible that I, whose generation had every reason to dislike the British monarchy and wish for its early demise and for it to be replaced by something more modern, early in my life, became indifferent to the Windsors’ lingering presence as a symbol of Britain’s once inordinate prowess, and more than that, one woman’s mesmerising presence that defied all odds for almost 100 years.
Continue reading The Queen and I
By Dr. Kwame Nantambu
September 03, 2022
In 2008, President Vladimirr Putin of Russia invaded Georgia. In 2014, he repeated military history by invading Crimea. Hence, it need occasion no great surprise that on 24 February 2022, the Russian President Putin repeated military history one more time by his unprovoked, illegal invasion of Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has consistantly argued that it was “an act of self-defense” and “a special military operation” aimed at the “demilitarization ” and “denazification” of Ukraine.
Continue reading Analyzing Putin’s military aggression
By Raffique Shah
August 29, 2022
It’s not so much that we have little or nothing to celebrate on the 60th anniversary of our Independence from Britain, as so many who swear they are patriots, but whose patriotism swings with the pendulum of their political party’s fortunes, which almost always are linked to their personal fortunes.
It’s more that our democracy has been carved up into near-equal but uneven parts in such manner, to misquote Irish poet William Yeats in his near-prophetic masterpiece, “The Second Coming”, “…Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction/While the worst/Are full of passionate intensity…”
Continue reading Show me your leader
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 08, 2022
There can be no doubt about the cruelty of —Thomas Picton, the first British governor of Trinidad and Tobago (1797-1803), and the resilience of Luisa Calderon, one of the persons he tortured during his governorship.
It is important that we applaud Shabaka Kambon and other patriots who have called for the renaming of streets and monuments that carry his (and other tyrants’) names.
Continue reading Picton’s cruelty: Luisa Calderon’s resilience
A lecture by John J. Mearsheimer, streamed live on June 16, 2022
Professor John J. Mearsheimer will discuss the current Russian invasion on Ukraine whilst exploring the potential causes and consequences of the crisis.
Continue reading The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war
By Raffique Shah
June 13, 2022
Being both a product and an architect of the age of love, peace and happiness, and belonging to a generation that opposed war and promoted peace, that even as I became a soldier, a highly-trained killer—we actively and successfully hounded America out of Vietnam and Cambodia, transformed colonised Africa into a battleground for liberation, and we set the world in motion such that generations marched together in countries across the world chanting, “All we are saying, is give peace a chance…’
Continue reading Blame the ‘haters’
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 06, 2022
On the celebration of Indian Arrival Day, May 31, an Express editorial recounted: “On this day 177 years ago the Fatel Razack entered the Gulf of Paria with over 200 Indians aboard, the first of 143,939 citizens of India to be brought here under a British scheme to deal with a shortage of labour following the emancipation of enslaved Africans in 1834–38.”
Continue reading Origin of Indian indentureship in Trinidad
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 30, 2022
Haiti, I am sorry
We misunderstood you
One day we’ll turn our heads
And look inside you…—David Rudder, “Haiti”
About 22 years ago I was a part of a New England delegation that travelled to Haiti to demand that Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected president of Haiti after years of dictatorship, be allowed to assume the office he had won fairly and squarely.
We met with the United States Ambassador to Haiti, but nothing came of it. Our pleas, like so many others, were like voices crying out desperately in a wilderness of deceit and deception.
Continue reading Haiti, we are sorry