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Monday, July 7, 2025

Not all narratives have equal value

by

20160210

Kevin Baldeosingh

A book about an aca­d­e­m­ic con­tro­ver­sy might seem es­o­teric and ir­rel­e­vant to even the in­tel­li­gent lay read­er in T&T, but this ac­count by Mary Lefkowitz, a his­to­ri­an spe­cial­is­ing on an­cient Greece, is rel­e­vant to us in two ways: first, two of her pro­tag­o­nists are Trinida­di­an and, sec­ond­ly, the is­sues she ad­dress­es have al­ready tak­en root here.

In a nut­shell then, Lefkowitz found her­self be­ing tar­get­ed as a racist in the 1990s for con­tra­dict­ing the Afro­cen­trist the­sis that Greeks stole their phi­los­o­phy from the an­cient Egyp­tians.

From a pure­ly his­tor­i­cal point of view, this is not a con­tro­ver­sial state­ment, be­cause the ba­sis of the Afro­cen­trist claim is that Aris­to­tle got his ideas from the li­brary at Alexan­dria but, as Lefkowitz points out, that li­brary was built long af­ter Aris­to­tle died.

One man who was spread­ing this his­tor­i­cal ca­nard was the late An­tho­ny Mar­tin, who was born in Trinidad and who a few years be­fore his death pub­lished a book on Caribbean his­to­ry. "It was not his­tor­i­cal re­al­i­ty that mat­tered to Tony Mar­tin or his fac­tion. What mat­tered to them was sim­ply race," Lefkowitz notes.

One or­gan­i­sa­tion which prop­a­gates such his­tor­i­cal false­hoods is the Na­tion of Is­lam, which is rep­re­sent­ed in Trinidad and To­ba­go by David Muham­mad who has a ra­dio show and pro­motes his CDs and writ­ings. Rewrit­ing his­to­ry is a nec­es­sary task for Black Mus­lims, says Lefkowitz, in or­der to "to keep peo­ple's at­ten­tion away from the slave trad­ing that con­tin­ued long af­ter the out­come of the Amer­i­can Civ­il War put a stop to the transat­lantic slave trade. The traders in this case were not Eu­ro­peans or Jews but Arabs, and this is a bit of em­bar­rass­ment for an or­ga­ni­za­tion that calls it­self the Na­tion of Is­lam."

At Welles­ley Col­lege, Mar­tin was joined in his at­tack on Lefkowitz by an­oth­er Trinida­di­an, lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor Sel­wyn Cud­joe, who is best known here as a PNM apol­o­gist. "Iron­i­cal­ly, in their quest to find racism in every­thing they dis­ap­prove of, race pro­fes­sion­als like Cud­joe, Mar­tin, and (Je­re­mi­ah) Wil­son too eas­i­ly turn them­selves in­to pro­fes­sion­al racists," Lefkowitz writes.

"Of­ten the charges the race pros make against their op­po­nents could be more fair­ly used to char­ac­terise them­selves. They are the dem­a­gogues, the seek­ers for pub­lic in­tel­lec­tu­al sta­tus, the ones who are con­cerned with the present rather than the past." (Cud­joe, for ex­am­ple, has at­tacked In­do-Trinida­di­ans with claims like In­di­an teach­ers re­fus­ing to teach black chil­dren.)

These ideas, as well as such at­ti­tudes, have al­ready pen­e­trat­ed the na­tion's class­rooms, with sec­ondary school stu­dents be­ing taught, for ex­am­ple, that Africans came to the New World be­fore Colum­bus. And that has hap­pened be­cause there are his­to­ri­ans at UWI who pro­mote such non­sense. Nor is the prop­a­ga­tion of false­hoods con­fined to the His­to­ry De­part­ment: even in UWI's Fac­ul­ty of Nat­ur­al Sci­ences, there are lec­tur­ers who de­ny that bi­o­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion is sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly valid, while lec­tur­ers out­side this Fac­ul­ty are now claim­ing that vac­ci­nat­ing chil­dren is harm­ful.

"All nar­ra­tives do not have equal val­ue, be­cause there are such things as facts. Nar­ra­tives are on­ly 'equal' in the sense that all nar­ra­tives are equal­ly de­serv­ing of a hear­ing," says Lefkowitz.

This is a prin­ci­ple that we would do well to heed, if on­ly for the prag­mat­ic rea­son that eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment is im­pos­si­ble with­out in­tel­li­gent cit­i­zens.


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