Tag Archives: colonialism

I first noticed the candlestick tree at the back of Garden with Wings in the Royal Botanic Gardens. It was one of those trees that seem to be quietly at work without asking to be explained. Its flowers and fruit hang directly from the trunk and branches: long waxy “candles”, …

In 1818, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Trinidad were established under British colonial administration. That same year, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein: the story of a scientist who assembles a living being and then abandons it. Nearly eighty years later, HG Wells wrote The Island of Doctor Moreau, where natural life …

In the rhythm of life in Trinidad and Tobago, and across the wider Caribbean, we know the power of a good “bacchanal.” One moment, a public figure—or perhaps a private citizen caught in the crosshairs—commits a transgression; the next, the digital hive mind descends. On Facebook, X (Twitter), and Instagram, …

On most maps, Trinidad and Tobago is a small smudge near the mouth of the Orinoco River. In real life, it is a place of astonishing biodiversity, and a place that bigger powers have long treated as useful. Empires, oil routes and warships have passed along this coast, rearranging both …

Iron shackles bound the African enslaved people together as they journeyed across the Atlantic. They were bound tightly. These shackles created physical scars, but the emotional ones begun long before. The Africans were taken from their homes on various pretexts, never sure when and if they would return. Their pain …

“[…] The official Ministry of Education press release announcing the hair code […] works to trivialise the issue and divorce it from its substantive context. “[….] An interview with former principal of Fatima Collage, Father Gregory Augustine two weeks after the press release illuminates the point. On 20 July he …

“The mere fact that a man could be, under the law, the actual master of the mind and body of human beings had to have disastrous effects. It tended to inflate the ego of most planters beyond all reason. “They became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets; they issued commands; they made …

“I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. “There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself […] Because they don’t grow it …

We are already far down the road where even if we can string words together, we cannot process ideas. There was a time when our oppressed peoples fully embraced the concept that the way to shake off their shackles was through education, and they went at it with great commitment …

Those of you who took god out your thoughts and were following my rants over the years know I have been saying the word “emancipation” actually means transfer ownership. And that puts into clearer perspective what dem snakes and soucouyants I was taught to celebrate as humanitarians and liberators were …

I am sure you would remember this truism: “Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder!” I accepted this aphorism as a means of teaching that persons could have divergent views about the same incident. Professor Richard Drayton at King’s College, London, in 2011, wrote: “History is not merely reflection; …

“[…] In what could have been a ground-breaking and historic repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, the Vatican instead released a series of political statements that sought to rewrite history, shield the Catholic Church from legal liability and shift the blame for the Doctrine of Discovery to governmental and colonial …