Very de­serv­ing­ly and time­ly is the ho­n­our­ing by the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly of cit­i­zens who have achieved at the lo­cal, na­tion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al lev­els, as cit­i­zens of the is­land so­ci­ety and the na­tion.

Plac­ing the names of the eight on parts of the road net­work of the is­land to tell the sto­ries of these na­tion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al achiev­ers, makes a point of recog­nis­ing qual­i­ty cit­i­zen­ship.

None more so than so­ci­ol­o­gist, Prof. J.D. El­der, “J.D.” as he was pop­u­lar­ly known, who re­searched and wrote sem­i­nal works on as­pects of the cul­tur­al-re­li­gious prac­tices which link the Caribbean with Africa.

The name of for­mer Man­ches­ter Unit­ed and T&T strik­er Dwight Yorke will al­ways be con­nect­ed to coach Bertille St Clair, who was the one who ground­ed him in the el­e­ments of the game.

Al­lan Richards has done yeo­man ser­vice to the is­land as an ad­min­is­tra­tor; the More­an hus­band and wife ed­u­ca­tors were renowned on the is­land for their ser­vice to at least a gen­er­a­tion of stu­dents.

Lit­tle needs to be said here on Mc Cartha Lin­da "Ca­lyp­so Rose" Lewis' dura­bil­i­ty and her break­through, as she did in a male-dom­i­nat­ed world of ca­lyp­so. So pow­er­ful was her in­ter­ven­tion in­to ca­lyp­sodom in 1978, when she won the na­tion­al ca­lyp­so ti­tle, that the au­thor­i­ties had to change the “King of Ca­lyp­so” ti­tle to that of a Monarch to recog­nise the many fe­males in ca­lyp­so. Since then, Ca­lyp­so Rose has gone in­ter­na­tion­al in the USA and in France, where she com­mands, even at this se­nior stage of her life, au­di­ences with sweet melodies and thrilling and provoca­tive lyrics.

James Big­gart crossed over from the 19th to the 20th cen­tu­ry be­ing a qual­i­fied black drug­gist and To­ba­go’s first elect­ed mem­ber of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil in 1925.

Ho­n­our­ing the for­mi­da­ble Win­ston "Mighty Shad­ow" Bai­ley, from Les Coteaux, as be­ing amongst the great­est bards who have rep­re­sent­ed the cre­ation by Trinidad and To­ba­go of the ca­lyp­so, is al­so most fit­ting.

The ho­n­our­ing of the To­ba­go and Trinidad cit­i­zens clos­es the gap on the per­cep­tion of a “Big Is­land” “Small Is­land” di­vide - the think­ing that those who were born and/or had their ini­ti­a­tion to life in To­ba­go, were some­how in­fe­ri­or as “small is­land” peo­ple; the ab­sur­di­ty of which is that all the is­lands of the re­gion are con­sid­ered mi­cro-states.

To bal­ance our out­look on the world, it must be known that while coun­tries, al­most con­ti­nen­tal in size, re­sources phys­i­cal and hu­man, have great ad­van­tages over small-is­land so­ci­eties such as To­ba­go and Trinidad, such small­er states have pro­duced in­di­vid­u­als of in­ter­na­tion­al stature.

As ar­gued in the book of Ger­man eco­nom­ic thinker E.F. Schu­mach­er, the ap­pre­ci­a­tion of “small­ness” is that it teach­es us to un­der­stand and ho­n­our hu­man achieve­ment and the hu­man things which re­al­ly mat­ter be­yond mas­sive in­dus­tri­al so­ci­ety.

But the adding of in­di­vid­ual names to our road­ways must go be­yond a sign. The THA must now take on the project of telling all of To­ba­go and Trinidad about these achiev­ers and what they did in their life­times; and in­stances they are still do­ing to de­serve the ho­n­our be­stowed on them by the As­sem­bly. In this re­spect, em­pha­sis must be placed on in­form­ing the young about their an­ces­tors and their con­tri­bu­tions to na­tion­hood.