By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 02, 2025
I was reminded of EH Carr’s What Is History? when I read Kevin Baldeosingh’s letter, “Teach fact-based African history”.
He excoriated the Emancipation Support Committee (ESC) for not spending “a single cent from the millions given to them by [the] government to commission such a [history] book” which he wanted them to write from a Euro-centric point of view (Express, August 4).
Continue reading Facts never speak for themselves
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 02, 2025
PART II
Ulric “Buggy” Haynes was not only a sports figure but a social activist as well. He led the charge to save the Tacarigua Savannah, the largest green space area in the northeastern part of the island, from becoming a concrete and asphalt jungle. The Green Space Committee raised almost $100,000 to challenge the government’s violation of our community’s well-being.
Buggy led the charge with Dr Carol James and Peter Burke to oppose the government’s action. He gave the first $20,000 to hire lawyers to fight the case, money that he borrowed from one of his sons, Verron Ulric Haynes, the first and only Trinbagonian to win a Super Bowl for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Continue reading Ulric ‘Buggy’ Haynes: our black prince
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 26, 2025
Today, we have come to bury our black prince in this place where he was born, lived, and died. In gathering here, in St Mary’s Anglican Church, Tacarigua, the second oldest Anglican church in the island, we come to honour the life, legacy, and work of Ulric “Buggy” Haynes. I can think of no better description of our beloved brother than the words Ossie Davis delivered at Malcolm X’s home-going in 1965.
Continue reading Ulric ‘Buggy’ Haynes: our black prince
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 19, 2025
One wonders if Penny Beckles, her happy band of warriors, and Marvin Gonzales, her re-engineered rottweiler, understand the essence of democracy and the implications of an anticipated redistribution of our country’s population numbers in 2030. They promise to wage a gallant battle on behalf of the CEPEP workers, but all I see is “hate, bitterness, acrimony, animosity,…[people] out of control …[and] acting as raging bulls”. (Express, October 21, 2009).
Continue reading The Rottweiler’s Revenge
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 12, 2025
SOONER OR LATER “de chupid” talk was bound to happen. “Cudjoe singing for his supper” and he’s “being paid off with a board appointment”. A PNM sycophant sent me a note: “Singing for your supper. You are no longer a [sic] advocate for poor black people director Cudjoe….Sing, boy, sing. It was never about true [sic] to power but to secure opportunities for yourself. Cudjoe my shame. Africans for sale.”
Continue reading Singing for one’s supper
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 05, 2025
The tears flowed copiously. A United National Congress Government had broken its key promise, “When UNC wins everybody wins”; some people, it seems, have lost. In the seven weeks of its administration the Government suspended CEPEP contractors, and by extension 10,000 workers who made $120 a day or $28,000 working 48 weeks a year.
Continue reading Crocodile tears
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 28, 2025
I arrived in New York on Thursday. The cooling breeze was welcomed. It was not as hot as Tuesday when New York City’s JFK airport reached 102 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest temperature recorded since 2013, while Central Park “broke a record set all the way back in 1888”. (June 23, New York Daily News.)
However, the weather on Tuesday did not prepare New Yorkers for the political tsunami that disrupted the city that day. Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a Muslim of Uganda heritage, defeated Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York State and a scion of a prominent New York political family, in the Democratic primary for mayor.
Continue reading Demonising Mamdani
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 21, 2025
In his Youth Rally address on August 30, 1962, one day before Independence Day, Eric Williams declared: “I have given to the nation as its watchwords, Discipline, Production, Tolerance.”
These words were delivered to the youths but they applied equally to every citizen of the nation. It would have been better if citizens had devised their own watchwords.
Continue reading An indisciplined nation
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 14, 2025
This evening Lewis Gordon, a world-renowned scholar on Frantz Fanon and a major international philosopher, will deliver a lecture, “Frantz Fanon and the Caribbean”, the inaugural event of the Kwame Ture Memorial Lecture Series. It will be held at the UTT Theatre1, NAPA, at 5 p.m. This lecture will be carried online. No one should miss it.
Continue reading Black excellence personified
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 07, 2025
Last week’s column, “Kamla’s second coming: a blessing”, elicited the following response from my dear friend Oscar D (not his real name): “Dear Pandit Cudjoe: This article has only elicited ambivalence. Your continued provocation by calling Kamla the mother of the nation is superfluous and disrespectful at best. I agree that we must learn about each other’s culture, but is it that Kamla’s ‘progression’ cannot be analysed within any other religious context? [Perhaps in] the context of African religious thought and philosophy?”
Continue reading Kamla’s place in T&T’s political landscape