By Dr Selwyn Cudjoe
September 14, 2020
Over 6.5 million people in the United States are afflicted with the coronavirus, while 194,000 people have died from it. More Americans have died collectively from this virus than those who died in the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars and the World Trade Center bombing.
Continue reading A Cautionary Tale
By Dr Selwyn Cudjoe
September 07, 2020
Chadwick Boseman, star of Black Panther, died last week Friday. The next day, former student Olivia Funderburg wrote me the following note: “Boseman’s death feels similarly shocking to Kobe Bryant’s death, in its suddenness. I was recalling how excited I was when you took us to see Black Panther. It meant so much to everyone that they got to see the movie with their friends, and with you. The way that Boseman embodied the Black Panther character and historical figures like Jackie Robinson, makes his death feel that we have lost a real-life superhero.”
Continue reading The black superhero
By Dr Selwyn Cudjoe
August 31, 2020
It is gratifying that we are looking anew at many of the institutional arrangements and practices that we have accepted blithely over the years.
Recent articles by Reginald Dumas and Marina Salandy-Brown, the SEA discussion by The UWI scholars, and Theodore Lewis’s brilliant article on the subject have been instructive. Today’s discussion, “A Time for Healing”, sponsored by The UWI Faculty of Law in collaboration with the Catholic Commission on Social Justice, promises to be an exciting affair.
Continue reading Embracing all our history
By Dr Selwyn Cudjoe
August 24, 2020
On August 2, about eight days before the last election, I took part in a programme that was hosted by the Indo-Caribbean Cultural Centre on the absence of election observers in T&T’s election, hosted by Dr Kumar Mahabir.
The question posed was whether the Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC) could conduct a fair election in the absence of foreign electoral observers. I answered: “It’s unfortunate that there will be no foreign observers at the August 10 elections, but I do not share the view that their absence would prevent the election from being conducted in a fair manner.”
Continue reading Counting our blessings
By Dr Selwyn Cudjoe
August 12, 2020
Last Tuesday, Joseph Biden, the nominee of the Democratic Party, selected Kamala Harris to be his running mate in the next US presidential election. If she is elected, she will become the most powerful woman in the Democratic Party and a strong candidate to become the first US woman president.
Harris was not selected primarily because of her academic brilliance, political acumen or prosecutorial experience, although she possesses all these attributes. She was selected because black democrats demanded that a black woman be selected because they saved Biden’s candidacy when it was floundering.
Continue reading In defeat, defiance
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 10, 2020
I have been a political activist and newspaper columnist for the past forty-five years. I have written for many newspapers including the New York Amsterdam News, the New York Tribune, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Baltimore Sun. I have never been subjected to as many invectives that I have received over my decision to support the UNC in this election.
Continue reading A Time for Forgiveness and Rejuvenation
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 04, 2020
In 1955 when I was growing up in Tacarigua Michael Kangalee, who lived in El Dorado, a nearby village, was one of my best friends. We attended Tacarigua A. C. School and were members of the St. Mary’s Anglican Church. As soon as the People’s National Movement (PNM) and the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) came into being we were forced to take sides. I supported the PNM and Michael supported the DLP.
Continue reading Why I Support UNC This Time Around
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 28, 2020
Thirty years ago, the Jamaat-al-Muslinmeen, under the leadership of Imam Yaskim Abu Bakr, attempted to overthrow T&T’s elected government. They failed. Yesterday, President Paula-Mae Weeks called upon the group to make an “unequivocal apology” to the people of the country for its actions” (Express).
The President noted that “the assault shook the country to its core and robbed many people of their livelihoods, dignity and peace of mind….A commission of enquiry appointed in 2010 provided some chronology of the events but, without the testimony of the principal, did not offer the full understanding that the nation and, in particular, the victims rightly deserved.”
Continue reading Everybody Is Somebody
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 21, 2020
I have been following the “the polytricks” taking place in Guyana, a land that “has been a torn and tortured terrain with divisive seeds sown in the colonial waters” as Sir Hilary Beckles described it (Express, July 13.) It’s not an overreach to say we are witnessing a replay of a traumatic encounter that took place years ago.
In 1970 Forbes Burnham declared Guyana a Co-operative Republic. I visited Guyana in 1972, the year in which the first Carifesta and the Non-Aligned Nations’ conference took place under the aegis of Comrade-Leader Burnham. It was a new and exciting time.
Continue reading Making a Truce with Reality
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 13, 2020
I met Sophia Chote once but was enchanted her intellectual sophistication and emotional maturity of her columns. Her writing reminded me of the qualities that one found in the thinkers of the romantic movement of the nineteenth century: a belief in democracy and republicanism; an appreciation for the sublime and transcendence; and most of all, a belief in the power of imagination.
Continue reading The Last of the Romantics