Our ‘lumpen intelligentsia’

By Raffique Shah
August 28, 2023

Raffique ShahIf Karl Marx were alive and still fighting to establish his elusive dream of a pure communist country, he might have been amused by a 21st-century phenomenon that he would have uproariously branded “the lumpen intelligentsia”. Of course, just about everyone so branded, and most who are not, will be equally lost. You see, the vocabulary nowadays has excised such words and terms as if their mere mention would leave a stain on them.

If you or I walked up to one-time die-hard communists such as Wade Mark, who was among a small band of Marxists who fought elections in 1981 but won hardly any votes, they’d likely tell you, “No, boy, ah doh do dat again.” So it’s left to a handful of us revolutionaries to at least keep the memories of another day alive, if not kicking.
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Love That Endures

By Raffique Shah
August 15, 2023

Raffique ShahA wave of emotions almost overwhelmed me. Yesterday Saturday she will have marked her seventy-sixth year on Earth. There are signs of aging, of course, but not too many that they will have diminished her beauty. Age has also come with some of the infirmities that accompany it, but none as crippling as Parkinson’s Disease that has lodged itself in me. Not that she needs reassuring, but I often profess my love to her. We smile at and with each other. Being my wife, she has been through what few women, especially the wives of public figures, endure.
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Emancipation: much more than pretty garb

By Raffique Shah
August 07, 2023

Raffique ShahIn order for someone to enslave another human being, that unconscionable sub-human must possess sinister ways, lack empathy, and compassion. In my view a human being cannot enslave another human being because all of the above are part of humanity, most of which must be missing for the enslaver to put another human being in chains—not necessarily physically but mentally, such that it compels the slave to serve the master.
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Emancipation Foibles – Part 3

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 07, 2023

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeOn Tuesday, July 18, as per usual, I was researching my present project at the National Archives when Jacqueline Charles, the permanent secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister, walked in. I presumed she was doing what every conscientious permanent secretary does: she was visiting one of the departments under her purview.
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Emancipation Foibles – Part 2

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 06, 2023

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeOn June 27, 2022, Margaret Heath, a member of William Hardin Burnley’s family who once owned the Orange Grove Sugar Estates, sent me an email. It read: “Dear Professor Cudjoe. I thought you might be interested to know that my brother, as executor of my mother’s estate, has just informed me he consigned a trunkful of exclusive family papers that belong to William Hardin Burnley and his son, Frederick Burnley, to Paul Laidlow, Auctioneers, Carlisle, to be included in their sale on July 1st/2nd.”
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Emancipation foibles

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 03, 2023

PART I

“So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.”

—Ecclesiastes 4, Verse 1

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIt’s Emancipation Day (Tuesday)and all the politicians, the proprietors and the bankers are trotting out their lies about freedom and emancipation. They may even quote the words of our prophet Bob Marley (“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/None but ourselves can free our minds”), to demonstrate how the ordinary black person has misused the opportunity to free himself/herself mentally in this country. But take it from me, “All of dat is damn lies.”
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What Emancipation still has not brought us

By Corey Gilkes
August 02, 2023

EmancipationThose of you who took god out your thoughts and were following my rants over the years know I have been saying the word “emancipation” actually means transfer ownership. And that puts into clearer perspective what dem snakes and soucouyants I was taught to celebrate as humanitarians and liberators were really thinking.
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