Hamid Ghany

The rev­e­la­tion last week that the ac­tu­al medal and ci­ta­tion for the Or­der of T&T that was be­stowed, posthu­mous­ly, up­on the late labour leader Adri­an Co­la Rien­zi, was up for sale on the auc­tion site eBay caused great con­ster­na­tion in the so­ci­ety.

The han­dlers of the sale are a well-known Cana­di­an com­pa­ny that trades in coins, stamps and oth­er arte­facts. The cur­rent con­tro­ver­sy will make the item up for sale even more at­trac­tive ow­ing to the fact that the lega­cy of the man be­hind the award is so rich, yet not wide­ly known in this coun­try.

What­ev­er the mo­ti­va­tions of the fam­i­ly in Cana­da to part with the 18 carat gold award on com­mer­cial terms, there is fam­i­ly ev­i­dence to show that the lega­cy of the great leader is not very well known among his own de­scen­dants.

In a sto­ry by Mar­sha Mokool in the Guardian of Sep­tem­ber 24, 2007, the Eng­lish-born grand­son of Adri­an Co­la Rien­zi, on a vis­it to Trinidad, re­vealed his own lack of aware­ness of his grand­fa­ther's his­to­ry. Ac­cord­ing to Mokool:

"The grand­son of trade union­ist Adri­an Co­la Rien­zi didn't know about his lega­cy un­til he turned 18. And that was on­ly 13 years ago...How iron­ic is it then that his Eng­lish grand­son Paul Holmes knew noth­ing about his own her­itage, un­til re­cent­ly. Holmes, who was born and raised in Eng­land, vis­it­ed Trinidad for the first time in Au­gust, tim­ing his vis­it with the In­de­pen­dence pa­rade in Port-of-Spain."

This 2007 Guardian sto­ry may pro­vide an in­sight in­to the con­tro­ver­sy that has arisen about the sale of the ORTT that was award­ed to Rien­zi and col­lect­ed in 2012 by his son, Robert Waugh, who lives in Cana­da. The lo­cal me­dia has been un­able to con­tact Waugh to get a com­ment from him, while the 2007 Guardian sto­ry con­firms an ab­sence of fam­i­ly sto­ry­telling about the out­stand­ing lega­cy of a man whose foot­print on the labour move­ment has large­ly been sup­pressed lo­cal­ly, for what­ev­er rea­son.

As the found­ing pres­i­dent-gen­er­al of both the Oil­fields Work­ers Trade Union (OW­TU) and the All-Trinidad Sug­ar Es­tates and Fac­to­ry Work­ers Trade Union as well as oth­er unions, Rien­zi has etched for him­self a promi­nent place in the his­to­ry of this coun­try as be­ing a key per­son in the in­tel­li­gentsia of the labour move­ment of the 1930s and 1940s. If any­one em­bod­ied the uni­ty be­tween oil and sug­ar, it was Rien­zi.

He was born in 1905 and changed his name from Kr­ish­na De­onar­ine to Adri­an Co­la Rien­zi in 1927 nam­ing him­self af­ter a British mag­is­trate Adri­an Clarke and a four­teenth cen­tu­ry Ital­ian re­former by the name of Co­la di Rien­zi who led strug­gles against the Ital­ian no­bil­i­ty.

Ac­cord­ing to the Nalis bi­og­ra­phy on Rien­zi:

"Ear­li­er, in Jan­u­ary 1938, un­der the ban­ner of the trade union move­ment, Rien­zi fought and won the seat for San Fer­nan­do at the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil elec­tions that year. Speak­ing in the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil on June 16, 1939, he called for the ob­ser­vance of June 19, the an­niver­sary of the Oil­field Ri­ots, as a pub­lic hol­i­day. He was ridiculed then, and he heard Cap­tain Cipri­ani de­clare: 'All those who have the best in­ter­ests of the work­ing class­es at heart, would like to for­get for­ev­er June 19, and are not ask­ing for the mak­ing of a day for the adu­la­tion of false he­roes.'"

Whether his dif­fer­ences of opin­ion with Cipri­ani over the is­sue of the com­mem­o­ra­tion of June 19 as Labour Day in this coun­try may ac­count for his rel­a­tive­ly sup­pressed recog­ni­tion as an icon of the labour move­ment in this coun­try, one has to recog­nise that in 1973 the Er­ic Williams gov­ern­ment de­clared June 19 pub­lic hol­i­day and called it Labour Day.

The fact that two years af­ter the June 19, 1937 ri­ots at Fyz­abad it was Rien­zi, in the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil, who called for the recog­ni­tion of that day as a pub­lic hol­i­day, has large­ly been swept un­der the car­pet of his­to­ry is sig­nif­i­cant.

Per­haps, the re­al tragedy is that on that day it­self every year there is not even po­lite men­tion of his name. As the cre­ator of a news­pa­per that is well-known in union cir­cles called "The Van­guard," Rien­zi un­der­stood the na­ture of the chal­lenge in mov­ing the labour move­ment for­ward. Read­ers of the Van­guard to­day would not even know who cre­at­ed the pa­per and the lega­cy be­hind it.

The re­la­tion­ship be­tween Rien­zi and Tubal Uri­ah But­ler was very good and Rien­zi was very pro­tec­tive of But­ler dur­ing his strug­gles with the colo­nial au­thor­i­ties.

While there has been out­rage ex­pressed in many quar­ters about the ORTT and its on­line sale, it was the ANSA McAL state­ment by group Chair­man A Nor­man Sab­ga that cap­tured both is­sues (the ORTT sta­tus and the Rien­zi lega­cy) very suc­cinct­ly as fol­lows:

"It will be a shame and dis­hon­our to the coun­try's high­est award and to the lega­cy of its awardee, Adri­an Co­la Rien­zi, if the ho­n­our in­her­ent in the ORTT medal is not re­turned to our beloved coun­try."

ANSA McAL made a bid for the medal to re­turn it here.