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Category Archives: Africa
GLORIOUS DAYS OF THE HAPPY AND THE FREE
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 09, 2021
PART II
“Pas de six ans, Point de six ans!” (“No to Six Years. No more six years!”)
—The chant of the ex-slaves on Emancipation Day
More apprentices came to Government House on Saturday, August 2, to assert their freedom. There was “a visible increase of insolence in the behaviour of the Negroes. The muster around Government House continued, and His Excellency again attempted to persuade them to return to their work, but his efforts were fruitless. They first laughed at, and then hooted [we would say heckled] him” (PoS Gazette, August 5, 1834).
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Kamla Persad Bissessar’s Emancipation Day Statement
By Kamla Persad Bissessar
Opposition Leader and Leader of the UNC Party
August 01, 2021 – Facebook
Today our nation celebrates Emancipation Day, a day that marks the abolition of the vile practice of chattel slavery. It is a day for both celebration of the liberation of enslaved Africans and an opportunity to reflect on, and learn from, the lessons of this dark period in our history.
The enslavement of Africans throughout the Caribbean and the Americas, via the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, is perhaps the greatest crime against humanity in the history of mankind.
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Dr Keith Rowley’s Emancipation Day Statement
By Dr Keith Rowley
Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago
August 01, 2021 – Facebook
Happy Emancipation Day to all the people of Trinidad and Tobago, from the Government, my own family and myself on the occasion of Emancipation Day 2021.
Today, we recognise not just the horrific experience of our African ancestors – but the impact it continues to have on the lives of millions of their descendants.
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PNM: Avoiding the Pitfall of Decline
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 19, 2021
Two weeks ago South Africa’s Constitutional Court sentenced Jacob Zuma to 15 months in prison for contempt of court. He refused to appear at a government enquiry committee that was looking into the corruption that took place during his nine-year rule. The party (ANC) began to run the state as though it was just another arm of the party, and therein lay its downfall.
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A Luta Continua
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 29, 2021
“Nations seldom listen to advice from individuals, however reasonable. They are taught less by theories than by facts and events.”
—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Last week I commended President Joseph Biden for signing into law a bill that made June 19 a national holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. It took two and a half years (that is, on June 19, 1865) to notify enslaved African Americans that “all slaves are free” and the 13th Amendment to free them officially on December 6, 1865.
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Getting world history right: real African history
By Dr. Kwame Nantambu
June 14, 2021
Years after the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2011 as “The International Year for People of African Descent”, it must be realized that the European enslavement of African people or the “MAAFA” (“great disaster”) only represents .01 per cent of the history of African people on this planet. Put another way, for the 99.9 per cent of their history, Africans were a free people.
Furthermore, “there were a thousand years of independent state formation and state management in inner West Africa called the western Sudan before the (European) slave trade.”
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White Brutality Against Black and Brown People
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 07, 2021
“Get the niggers,” was their slogan, / “Kill them, burn them, set the pace. / Let them know that we are white men, / Teach them how to keep their place.”
—A. J. Smitherman, “The Tulsa Race Riot and Massacre” (1922)
I had just left Harvard University as an assistant professor and was doing “Time to Talk,” a series of interviews for T&T Television. In 1982 I interviewed Sam Nujomo, the founding father of Namibia, where he had addressed the UN Decolonization Committee about his country’s independence. We talked about Namibia’s struggle for independence and the stain German genocide had left upon the consciousness of his people.
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Rwanda: Macron admits French responsibility in genocide
France had for “too long” valued “silence over the examination of the truth” when it came to its complicity in the 1994 massacre that killed around 800,000 people, President Emmanuel Macron says.
By Deutsche Welle – May 27, 2021
French President Emmanuel Macron admitted French responsibility in the Rwandan genocide, during a visit to the Rwandan capital Kigali on Thursday.
“Standing here today, with humility and respect, by your side, I have come to recognize our responsibilities,” Macron said in a speech at the Kigali Genocide Memorial where more than 250,000 Tutsi are buried.
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Germany recognises colonial ‘genocide’ in Namibia
Germany calls atrocities ‘genocide’ but omits the words ‘reparations’ or ‘compensation’ from a joint statement
By Philip Oltermann, in Berlin
May 28, 2021 – theguardian.com
Germany has to agreed to pay Namibia €1.1bn (£940m) as it officially recognised the Herero-Nama genocide at the start of the 20th century, in what Angela Merkel’s government says amounts to a gesture of reconciliation but not legally binding reparations.
Tens of thousands of men, women and children were shot, tortured or driven into the Kalahari desert to starve by German troops between 1904 and 1908 after the Herero and Nama tribes rebelled against colonial rule in what was then named German South West Africa and is now Namibia.
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