Tag Archives: Selwyn R. Cudjoe

Gender, General T&T, People's Partnership, Politics, Race and Identity, Security

Playing the Race Card

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 23, 2011

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeJack Warner is the last person I thought would play the race card but then as my mother says, “You never know.” Here is Kamla and the PP getting their licks because they don’t know their ears from their navels but all Jack could say when workers use the democratic tools to protect their interests is they are targeting Kamla because she is an “East Indian woman.” It is strange that Kamla’s East Indianness never came up when she was running for the election nor, for that matter, was her gender seen in a negative light. In fact her being a Hindu woman seemed an asset given the place that women hold in the hierarchical structure of Hinduism.
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Culture, General T&T, People's Partnership, Politics, Race and Identity

The Limitations of Multiculturalism – Part II

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By Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 16, 2011

Part I – Part II – Part III

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeSome of us, including yours truly, have been speaking about a national cultural policy long before Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar announced her preference for a multicultural approach to the issue. In 1962 Dr. Eric Williams set the ball rolling with his “Mother Trinidad and Tobago Speech” which could be interpreted as a response to Lord Harris’s 1848 declaration that “a race has been freed, but a society has not been formed.”
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General T&T, India, People's Partnership, Politics, Race and Identity

Cudjoe and His Careless Thinking

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By Stephen Kangal
February 15, 2011

Stephen KangalProfessor Selwyn Cudjoe in his article wrote:

“In his ‘Mother Trinidad and Tobago Speech’ Dr. Williams intimated that we owe our primary allegiance to T&T rather than the various countries from which our ancestors came. In 2010, angered by the seemingly preferential treatment that Africans enjoyed under the People’s National Movement, the People’s Partnership (PP) decided to emphasize our difference rather than our commonalities thereby tearing away at the common cultural bond that holds us together as a nation”. (Selwyn Cudjoe in “Mother Trinidad and Tobago” Article – trinicenter.com – 16 January 2011).
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Culture, General T&T, People's Partnership, Politics

The Limitations of Multiculturalism in Trinidad and Tobago

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By Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 09, 2011

Part I – Part II – Part III

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIt was an amazing thing. One week after I offered my reservations about the Government’s multiculturalism initiative, David Cameron, Prime Minister of Britain, made a scathing attack against his country’s approach to what he called “state multiculturalism” at the Munich Security Conference. In doing so, he echoed Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor who, in October 2010, called for “the end of multiculturalism” in her country.
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Crime in T&T, General T&T, Media, Opposition Party, Parliament, People's Partnership, PNM, Politics, Security

Kamla’s Casual Carelessness

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 27, 2011

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeOne year ago Kamla Persad-Bissessar was elevated to the leadership of her party. In May of last year she was elected prime minister of the country. Since then she has shown herself to be incompetent; of questionable intellectual maturity, and deficient in judgment. As we enter 2011, I wonder how many persons feel she is steering the ship of state in a positive direction.
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Culture, General T&T, Politics, Race and Identity

Mother Trinidad and Tobago

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 17, 2011

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeA few days after Kamla Persad Bissessar became the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago she dropped in at the headquarters of the Maha Sabha and announced blithely that the nation will adopt a multicultural rather than a transcendent cultural policy that served our nation well during its first fifty years of its existence. Such an announcement constituted a repudiation or reversal of Dr. Eric Williams’s vision that was contained in his “Mother Trinidad and Tobago Speech” that emphasized our commonalities rather than our differences. Dr. Williams envisioned a nation in which we should consider ourselves Trinidadians and Tobagonians first, anything after that.
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Features, General T&T, Passed on, Politics, Race and Identity

On Afro-Saxons and Trinbagonianism

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 12, 2011

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeI regret I was not in Trinidad to share in the national grief when Sir Ellis Clarke died. My visit to Ghana over the past two weeks prevented me from attending his funeral. Michael Harris described Sir Ellis and those of similar ilk as Afro-Saxons. I disagree with such a characterization since it neither captures the essence of those gallant men and their contribution to our society nor does it tell us much about their location within the national landscape. Even in our grief we should resist a tendency to mischaracterize our patriots and set up false notions of who they were or what they ought to be.
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General T&T, India, International, People's Partnership, Politics

Conceiving the Inconceivable

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 10, 2011

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeAh never hear Becky vex so yet. “Uncle Selwyn,” she said, you know Rambachan and dem people (meaning the Foreign Affairs Minister and the People’s Partnership) just letting dem Indian people and dem come into Trinidad jus’ so. Dey ah even need a visa to come into the country now.”

She was referring to the unilateral decision of the People’s Partnership to allow Indians and Russians to enter the country without visas.
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Culture, General T&T, India, PNM, Race and Identity

Home Bound

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 30, 2010

Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe[This essay was written by Joy Clarke, a student at Wellesley College. I thought I would share it with my readers. It has been edited for purposes of length]

If literature is a signification of the emotional conscious of a people then V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas is a literary masterpiece. It traces the life of Mohun Biswas, a man of East Indian descent living in Trinidad following the end of Indian indentured servitude. Mr. Biswas’ life is one of struggle, pain and his longing to find a place to call home. The reader is taken on a journey to locate home on several levels. On the surface is Mr. Biswas’s profound desire to own a home while the subtext suggests that a search for a national homeland for a people who were removed from their natal homeland of India.
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General T&T, India, People's Partnership, PNM, Politics, Race and Identity, Religion

Standing Firm in Our Nation’s Faith

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 22, 2010

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeThe steeple of St. Mary’s Anglican Church is the first landmark that greets anyone who enters the village of Tacarigua from its western side. Although the present building was constructed in 1901, this architectural splendor has been a part of the village landscape since 1843. On August 22, 1901, the Mirror reported that “the old parish Church of St. Mary’s is now leveled to the ground with the exception of the western wall, which it is believed will form part of the new St. Mary’s.” Directly across the Eastern Main Road is the St. Mary’s Children Home. Its first building was constructed in 1857 to accommodate East Indian children whose parents were lost during the long crossing from India to Trinidad.
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