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Cudjoe Inflaming Ethnic Tension
Posted: Tuesday, August 2, 2005
By Stephen Kangal
The national community must now seriously come to terms with and reject as out of hand the penchant of Professor Selwyn Cudjoe to derive his racist hallucinations from the most tenuous and neutral of events. His covert agenda is to fan and incite ethnic tension geared merely to draw attention to himself. He does not want us to relegate him to permanent oblivion even though he is irrelevant to our development as a people. In fact he is a hindrance to our aspirations of enjoying our traditional peaceful co-existence as a cosmopolitan people.
Although he is an original signatory to the Principles of Fairness document the mere holding of a Conference on the subject during emancipation provides fodder for Dr. Cudjoe to prematurely not only discredit the Principles of Fairness initiative but to also utter a vacuous cry of racism. The half-day duration of the UWI Conference did not clash with any event on the Emancipation Programme. In fact the Conference with its focus on achieving consensus on the principles and practices of fairness, equality, justice and ethnic harmony would appear to synchronise with and reinforce those very ideals that underpin and drive the annual Emancipation Celebrations. The visiting President Obasanjo and Prime Minister Manning focussed on it during their addresses Accordingly Cudjoe failed to demonstrate to us Trinbagonians the basis on which the holding of the Conference was racist, constituted an insult to the African community and also diminished the thrust of Emancipation celebrations.
Is Dr. Cudjoe conducting a vendetta against UWI Principal Dr. B. Tiwari and used the Conference/Emancipation celebrations to foster and promote his hate agenda? We must be on our guard to insulate ourselves from his fruitless attempt to generate ethnic turbulence during his occasional visit to T&T from America to whom he seems to owe his loyalty.
Professor Cudjoe even had the gall to try to embarrass His Excellency The President who gave the outstanding Opening Address. By now Cudjoe should have realised that President Richards is nobody's poodle. He is a man of steel and gifted insight who goes and has indeed gone where no other President has gone before. I will not mess with this independent-minded President.
It is regrettable that artist Leroy Clarke fell for Cudjoe's ravings and allowed a NAEAP Award to cloud his erstwhile mature judgment. Clarke could have spent his allotted five minutes at the Conference, done his reading as scheduled at 9.00 a.m. and left in ample time to keep his 8 p.m. NAEAP Dinner with Nigerian President Obasanjo.
I pay tribute to author Merle Hodge, Dr. O. Kuboni, Dr. J. Agard, Dr. J Campbell and the many African brothers and sisters who participated actively in the event and contributed to the dialogue Cudjoe's puerile objections notwithstanding.
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