“[…] ‘Pegasus’ was formed by Brother Makandal Daaga after a life-changing event at an Independence night party, on 31 August 1962. He was shocked when persons protested noisily, when the DJ put on the very first calypso for the night, shouting that it was not Carnival and for him to …
Read More »Daaga make we do it! Black Power stories of the Q and the 1970 Coup
“Power alone,” the poet Syl Lowhar wrote in Tapia’s “Black Power in Human Song” special somewhere in the 1970’s, “will never make us strong. The heart must also sing the human song.” Almost half a century after Geddes Granger’s NJAC empowered Black people in Trinidad and Tobago, the politically most …
Read More »Black identity (Pt 8): The redemption of blackness through the rubric of Black Power
The Black Power movement of the 1960’s and ‘70’s was not spawned by a spontaneous determination to destroy white supremacism and undo the psychological damage of European enslavement, colonialism and Jim Crowism. Rather, it was a much longer and more complex historical process, a process which this column is dedicated to …
Read More »People power and a new, just society! NJAC celebrates 48th anniversary of historic 1970 march
“The desire for a new and just society, therefore, could only be achieved by replacing the old institutions with new ones. The generation of the 1970s thus saw its mission as the removal of these alien impositions and the mobilisation of our population for the building of a new foundation …
Read More »T&T’s 1970 revolution: the rise of people’s politics and the State’s draconic response
The following Letter to the Editor was submitted by ex-PP Minister and NJAC member Embau Moheni on the rise of the 1970 Revolution, People’s Politics and the State’s fightback, which included the controversial Public Order Act and the ban of the ‘Black Power Salute’: In its booklet entitled ‘Slavery to …
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