Responding to the National Trust’s declaration to elevate the Lopinot Historical Complex to a heritage site, a Trinidad Guardian article in 2013 commended the villagers for preserving vital elements of the built landscape of early nineteenth century. Presumably, the “colourful history” to which the writer alluded is the abstract on …
Read More »Gilkes: Happy In-Dependence: reviewing 56 years of cynicism and self-hate
Happy birthday Iere; yuh tun 56… which means yuh mature, and with maturity comes reasoning and a clearer understanding of who you are and what you still need to do to reach where you want to go. But that’s when yuh mature, not when yuh eh sure of yuhself, confused as to …
Read More »CARICOM is two-faced on Haiti; Baldeosingh slams Beckles’ flawed logic in “s**hole” response
“Haiti is the only member of CARICOM whose citizens require a visa to travel to any other CARICOM nation. In other words, although CARICOM leaders pay lip service to Haiti, they also know that Haitians might leave their failed state—which is the diplomatic way of calling a country a ‘shithole’—and settle …
Read More »Balderdash and intellectual acrobatics; Fergus responds to Baldeosingh on race and Afro-history
“[Kevin] Baldeosingh […] uncritically regurgitates the defunct racist hypothesis that ‘darker-skinned people’ are judged less intelligent and ‘more primitive’ than ‘fairer-skinned people’. “[…] During the first century of this era, Ethiopians were the majority in the town of Barygasa (now Baruch) in western India. By the time of the Mughal …
Read More »Dear Editor: UWI’s Milner Hall an enduring monument to post-colonial mindlessness
“Built in 1927, The UWI’s oldest hall of residence on the St Augustine Campus still pays tribute to a man who was in the vanguard of the genocidal late 19th Century European imperialist project in Africa, which brutally wiped out large numbers of many ethnic groups while using forced labour to plunder the …
Read More »Master’s Voice: The defeatist class and the history that’s never taught in our schools
In many societies such as ours, there’s a class of people many—though not necessarily all—of whom have university backgrounds. I call them the “Defeatist Class” (DC). Whenever anything remotely progressive comes up, they surface to challenge ideas, customs and models that hold us to a period or paradigm meant to …
Read More »Dear Editor: A ‘one-off holiday’ for First Peoples? Are they children of a lesser god?
“Is it really proper that, when the list of 14 public holidays includes Indian Arrival Day and Emancipation Day, Eid-ul-Fitr and Divali, there should be no annual national celebration of the autochthonous group? “Is it really proper that, when the list of 14 public holidays includes Good Friday, Easter Monday, …
Read More »Protect Chaguaramas! CDA’s interest in new hotel meets lack of public interest
Vicki Assevero, founder of the Green Market, Santa Cruz, makes an important distinction between different types of interest in her Letter to the Editor about the Chaguaramas peninsula: The Chaguaramas Development Authority (CDA) has requested expressions of interest for “planning, design, construction and commissioning of a full service hotel at …
Read More »An inspired passion: Tribute to virtual museum curator Angelo Bissessarsingh
Trinidad and Tobago author and historian, Angelo Bissessarsingh, passed away this morning—according to a Trinidad Guardian report—after battling for two years with pancreatic cancer. The following column on Bissessarsingh and his value to the two island republic was written by columnist Sunity Maharaj on 27 December 2015: That he is still …
Read More »The Whole Truth About Us: Sunity ponders T&T’s historical shortcomings
So thorough has been the brain-washing that it is virtually impossible for many to connect our present dysfunctions to their obvious origins in the past. The social values and taste patterns that drive the high import bill, the historic fear that inhibits the productive sector and ostracises risk-takers, the power-seeking …
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