Tag Archives: Selwyn Cudjoe

How to save the PNM

By Dr Selwyn Cudjoe
March 18, 2010

Part I

Prime Minister Patrick ManningOver the last two weeks the media have been merciless in their attacks against the PNM, the Prime Minister and the Government. When it was not about the Prime Minister’s ‘Prophetess’ it was about Calder Hart’s presumed deception and alleged financial indiscretions. When it was not about the vindication of Keith Rowley, it was about the wonders of a revivified Kamla and prediction of UNC’s inevitable victory in the 2012 election, without the faintest acknowledgment that in politics, a week is like a year, and a year is like a decade. In political terms, 2012 might be 20 years in the future.
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William Hardin Burnley and the Glorious Revolution

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 24, 2009

www.trinidadandtobagonews.com

EmancipationIn an interesting article, “The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of August 1, 1838” (Express, August 2nd 2009), Selwyn Ryan presents William Hardin Burnley (1780-1850), the largest slaveholder in Trinidad and Tobago, as one of the “more forward-looking” planters in terms of human resource management strategy. He suggests that after the emancipation of the enslaved Africans Burnley felt that “the extinction of slavery has created a mighty revolution, in that, in this island, the master was now the slave and the former slave the master.” He quotes Burnley as saying that “God and nature were conspiring to render the island of Trinidad ‘a little Terrestrial Paradise for the African race.’ He insisted that he was not guilty of hyperbole when he said that the African was like the ‘Midas of Greek Mythology.'”
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