Tag Archives: black power

In August 1962, the first Common Entrance group entered secondary schools and heard Prime Minister Dr Eric Williams say: “… you carry the future of Trinidad and Tobago in your school bag.” At QRC, there was a boy from Rio Claro, another from Princes Town (now president of the Old …

“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 …

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 …

In England, the word black (originally spelt “blæk”), from its Germanic/Dutch root “blah”/“blaken,” first appears in Old English around 1210, meaning “absolutely dark, absorbing all light, the colour of soot or coal” [www.etymonline.com]. Interestingly, “blac” from the same root, meant: “bright, shining, glittering, pale.” Linked to fire, the two meanings …

Black Power was primarily a revolution of the mind: the continuation of the revolution of Marcus Garvey. It first aimed to free “black” people who embraced it from seeing themselves and their past through the lens and language of those who trampled on their humanity, denied them the dignity of …

I ended my “Comments” of 21 February with anthropologist Kumar Mahabir’s opinion that a re-scripting of the “Black Power” label might have seen more Indo-Trinbagonians eagerly embracing the movement. This will remain an open question. But if his reactions to other aspects of Afro-Trinidadian cultural engineering without the “black” label …

Superhero comics were created to boost the image of whites as the world’s progenitors and purveyors of justice, peace and security. Likewise, Hollywood has earned its reputation as the quintessential flagbearer of American cultural imperialism for well over a century. The two cultural agencies have had a long, intimate relationship. …

Someday in the future, when Trinbago nationalism becomes a common experience across our multifaceted demographic, February 1970 will surely be memorialised collectively as the month that precipitated the most significant events in the history of the two-island state since Emancipation. I am motivated to write this piece not only because …

“The great Karl Marx, for example, declared the Haitian Revolution ‘the most significant victory toward the advancement of universal freedom’. Without excluding the contribution of every ethnic constituency, the fact remains that, in the 20th century, African peoples maintained that leadership role. “According to [Dool] Hanomansingh and other like-minded activists, to include …

Today, 21 April, 2017, marks the 47th anniversary of the Trinidad and Tobago Revolution of 1970, led by the National Joint Action Committee for a New and Just Society in Trinidad and Tobago. Under the astute leadership of the late Chief Servant Makandal Daaga, the people’s movement emphasised the absolute …

The following letter, to commemorate the NJAC-led “March to Caroni” for racial unity on 12 March 1970, was sent to Wired868 by NJAC executive member and former People’s Partnership minister Embau Moheni: The period of February 26 to April 21 in 1970 marks one of the most momentous periods in …

The findings of a Commission of Inquiry into the murder of Guyanese intellectual and political activist Dr Walter Rodney, 36 years ago, are an indictment not only against the Forbes Burnham dictatorship that ruled Guyana for 21 horrible years, but also other Caricom governments and countries that never condemned Burnham’s …