Tag Archives: Ottobah Cugoano

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 …

In defiance of the rapid community spread of Covid-19, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, kept the promise he made on Emancipation Day 2019 to unveil T&T’s first emancipation monument—the only live public event on Emancipation Day 2020. Like many thousands of other Trinbagonians, I missed the commemorative spectacles of the …

The well known, formerly enslaved, black abolitionist, Mary Prince, cogently argued in her autobiography in 1831: “How can slaves be happy when they have the halter round their neck and the whip upon their back?” Prince was directly confronting the lie of slave owners and other apologists for slavery that …

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 …