The Minksy Moment is an investing term describing when speculative financial transactions come to a moment of crisis and suddenly collapse, which reverberates disastrously through the economy. I find it's apt to describe the actions of Prof Selwyn Cudjoe during 1997-2007, and their effect on the crisis of mental and social instability which grips the nation today.
Prof Cudjoe "called me out" as they say on Fox News, in another newspaper for referencing his saying that Indian teachers did not teach black children in schools.
He never said that, he wrote it. We'll get to that. But I'm not writing here simply to respond to that challenge; it's to give a sense of the ubiquity and character of his advocacy, and the social atmosphere it created from 1997-2007.
In the Express of March 28, 1999 (then edited by now Minister of Invisibility, Maxie Cuffie) in a column headlined "Black Solidarity Day" Prof Cudjoe wrote: "Some years ago, it was rumoured that East Indian doctors were tying the tubes of African women without consent. Some months ago...it was brought to my attention that in some of the nation's classes Africans sat on one side, Indians sat on another.
More perniciously, I understand that East Indian teachers do not expend as much energy on Africans as they do their own. In the workplace, the story goes that once an Indian gets into a position s/he actively seeks out his/her own. Even more dangerous is the notion that some of these groups possess a secret code. None of my contentions may be true."
A secret code. Uh huh.
On April 2, 2005, this newspaper published a photograph of Prof Cudjoe coaxing a child from the Torrib Trace Presbyterian School to read a letter she'd written about discrimination by Indian teachers. The Ministry of Education investigated and found no truth in the allegations.
But apart from the Indian teacher-African children issue, Prof Cudjoe appears in many similar tableaux, where he did/does not say racially objectionable things, but which seem to find ready expression around him. In the TNT Mirror of June 4, 2004, he related a conversation with his neighbour, Roy, who repeatedly told him "dem Indian go do for you" and "dem Indian and dem too deceitful." Roy said it.
But there are things the Professor did say. At a public meeting in September 2003 at the PoS City Hall, warming up to the main theme, the racial imbalances at the Trinidad & Tobago Institute of Technology, he mentioned that Africans were underrepresented in UWI's student population.
The Guardian's editorial in response on September 16, was headlined "Stick to facts Prof Cudjoe." It read: "Two professors at the Couva-based T&T Institute of Technology have called on Prof Cudjoe to retract statements he said they made in a report he did on the institute. In a T&T Guardian story yesterday, Drs Sharon and Bill Pinebrook said they never met Prof Cudjoe."
This is all verifiable.
It doesn't include what he said on the radio, which made this stuff seem like a Sweetbread cartoon. I doubt any recordings remain, except etched in the minds of those who listened.
The point is Prof Cudjoe, with his organisation, the National Association for the Empowerment of African People (NAEAP), was everywhere during the UNC term of 1996-2001, and for a few years after, enraging racial sentiment. He was tireless in pointing out that the Indian government's being in power endangered Africans via books, speeches and pamphlets. The books included Basdeo Panday and the Politics of Race, and AfroTrinbagonians: No Longer Blinded By Our Eyes.
AfroTrinbagonians (2001) was a compilation of speeches, the culmination of years of anti-UNC activities disguised as political activism, which included a "Red Day of Resistance."
The Professor wrote: "IndoTrinbagonians have always seen themselves as Indians first and Trinidadians even second or third." Unlike Africans, of course (p31). Kwado Osei Nyame Jnr, in the book's introduction, compares AfroTrinidadians' situation to blacks in South Africa.
This kind of suasion was everywhere in the period. It was echoed by calypsonians, talk show hosts, school children. It made its way, because of the volume and tireless repetition in maxi-taxis, homes and bars, into many susceptible minds–like the Black Caucus Movement, whose agenda seems to derive directly from it. The hostile, racially-enraged environment could potentially explain the drastic escalation of racial resentment and social pathology (crime), which paradoxically accompanied the prosperity of 2001-2010. (Or it might have been Patrick Manning giving gangs millions of dollars to arm themselves and war for turf.)
So the "Cudjoe moment" I'm proposing began in the collapse of racial "investments" in social capital, but spread, resulting in a general psychological/mental deformation in the nation.
The issue of mental ill-health and its silent, escalating assault pushed into national consciousness with the suicide of Abigail Ragoobar, attributable to postpartum depression. But this is only a small part of the atmosphere of mental illness.
The previous minister of health stated (Express, July 29, 2015) that 25 per cent of the population suffered from mental health issues. The CNC3 Morning Brew in the last fortnight has carried at least three features on the increase in mental health issues. Gerard Baptiste (a clinical psychologist) talked about free therapy sessions for mothers.
Kimberley Gilbert from the YMCA talked about counselling traumatised children. Dr Diane Douglas spoke of the phenomenon of increasing number of children who run away from home.
Slowly, the reality of the atmosphere of toxic stress and animus that surrounds the society is taking hold. Is this all Prof Cudjoe's fault? No. But as much as he strives to reinvent himself as a more benign personality, there's no escaping that he did what he did, and we're seeing the consequences all round us.
(n To be continued)