Permit me to congratulate Raymond Ramcharitar for his brutally frank and razor-sharp, accurate analysis of race relations in T&T. I thoroughly endorse and support every point which he emphasised. My only critique is that he failed to date the rapid deterioration in the true ethnic harmony and mutual respect which was once T&T and he fell short of identifying the individual who single-handedly must accept responsibility for the hollow charade which has since 1956 been its replacement. Perhaps he is too young to have witnessed either, as did I.
Had Eric Eustace Williams not, after losing his job at the Caribbean Commission, elected in 1955 to "let his bucket down" in his native land, it is debatable whether Ramcharitar would have found it necessary to pen his "Race Monster," or I would be living in voluntary exile away from my beloved homeland, because of those very hypocrisies which the author exposes. "Race Monster" should be mandatory reading for those claiming any real love for our native land, whatever their ethnicity or political persuasion. A frank and open debate on race, if it is ever ignited, will be a litmus test which will reveal in stark relief the real racists among us. In his revealing treatise on interracial solidarity, or the absence of same, is a stinging indictment of the party which has for political expediency exploited the ethnic divisions among us in order to fulfil its illusion of a divine right to misrule, as it did for far too many years.
Ramcharitar could not have been more accurate when he posited as follows, "thus Laventille will always be there once the PNM exists." What other than the bogey of race could explain that overlong and shameful neglect of its ever faithful support base by any but a political dispensation dependent upon race to retain or obtain power? Further, for so long as the PNM retains a following in T&T, Ramcharitar's "Race Monster" will remain the soundest argument for the retention of the Privy Council as our court of final appeal. The spirit of Williams would not rest easy if the party he founded failed, for political expediency, to influence or manipulate a locally based and majority funded CCJ, just as the Williams legacy still blights the thinking and value systems of so many, both within and outside the PNM. For a recent example of the latter, one needs but review the fate of Nizam Mohammed, at whose hands he suffered it and why?
TG Mendes
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