“[…] No forced-labour camp in Trinidad and Tobago or anywhere in the world should celebrate enslavers while ridiculing their victims. What prevailed at Lopinot was not just inconsistent with basic human decency and the espoused values of our republic but also with the truth that the historical evidence supports …” …
Read More »Emancipating old narratives of ‘emancipation’ and examining colonials’ ‘deceitful bait-and-switch’
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 …
Read More »Kangalee: Why capitalism is the new slavery; and emancipation revolution remains unfinished
“[…] The very prosperity that slavery brought to British capital was to eventually make slavery redundant. The capital accumulated throughout slavery led to investments in science, technology and engineering, created the industrial revolution, brought into being productive forces based on machinery, speeded up the process of proletarianisation of the British …
Read More »Gilkes: Rubbish Subran; Columbus and the colonials ‘whitewashed’ history—we’re fixing it!
It ends when there is a decolonised education system so that there is no chance of a person being miseducated by a David Subran, that’s when. His 19 June letter to the editor criticising the calls for the removal of Christopher Columbus’ statue was a shameless genuflecting to the west’s …
Read More »Gilkes: Our colonial-style sex education; how the West weaponised and criminalised passion
“Dem doh need no sex eduction. Dem lil gyul hot already, yuh just making them take more man…” What you just read is not even the worst of it. The fact that the person who made this statement—which I overheard at an academic conference—is involved in social work in East …
Read More »From romance to reality (Pt 2): how Compte de Lopinot forcibly enslaved free Africans
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 …
Read More »From romance to reality: Why we deserve the truth about Compte de Lopinot and his “contented slaves”
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 »Master’s Voice: Black labour pains: By the sweat of MY brow; thou shalt eat bread
“I have […] great doubts whether the Cooly and the African are morally and mentally capable of being acted upon by the same motives in this island on their first arrival as labourers are in more civilised countries… “The only independence which they would desire is idleness, according to their …
Read More »Master’s Voice: The tumour of racism; addressing Trinbago’s ‘Nigger’ question (Pt Two)
By 1787 the English had just about constructed myths of their own about themselves where to be British was to be free and white. This despite their own history of being slaves of the Romans, at least one of whom, Cicero, wasn’t too impressed with them. They exported their notion …
Read More »Black Identity (Pt 6): How the word was made flesh; the demonisation of melanin
“The English language has its roots in a savage historical racism and pride,” (Chris Searle, White Words, Black People, 1972). The words “black” and “white” in Searle’s book-title echo the dialectic in Frantz Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (1952). Indeed, Searle acknowledges his reliance on the English edition, Black Skin, …
Read More »Claude’s Comments: The agenda behind Kamal Persad’s slander and historical distortions
I have a bit of advice for Mr Kamal Persad, coordinator of the research centre of The Indian Review: if you truly wish to defend the reputation of “the Indian-Trinidadian intelligentsia” (your description), as you claim in your latest “letter to the editor” in the Trinidad Express of 6 February, …
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 …
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