Dr Morgan Job was born on April 2, 1942, at Zion Hill, Belle Garden, Tobago. He died in Trinidad on May 6, 2018, losing the battle to stage four pancreatic cancer.
He was not only a lecturer (UWI: 1991-1997), a politician (Member of Parliament, Tobago East - 1997), a prolific writer, receiving his Doctorate from Purdue University, Indiana, United States, but also a student of history and unafraid of reproducing history as truthfully as possible. One of his many controversial publications, “In T&T Indians vs Africans.”
Dr Job starts: “Race to the polls exposes “Race” as our most important political topic. Corruption associated with race express the sinister emotions dividing the country into “Africans” and “Indians” to facilitate political competition, when “Indians” and “Africans” accuse each other of being “racial” or “corrupt.”
Hereunder is an excerpt from Dr Job’s publication:
“I want Sat Maharaj and dem to know dat the African man has struggled here for 500 years. Dem Indian only here for 150, Mullongo bellowed. We now have the argument of prior presence given as justification for President Robinson’s selection of Patrick Manning. The Africans must own the Government. They came with Columbus. How amazing. We were slaves, they were not. We didn’t get pay, they got. We were given no land; they got five acres each … what racist dotishness? Calypsonians, teachers and some politicians continue to teach stupidness to children.
“Dr Eric Williams said we all came here and suffered. He said Mother Trinidad and Tobago cannot discriminate among her children. Yet Afro-Trini misleaders keep talking about slavery as the only important issue in Trinidad.
“The De Vertteuils, the Urichs, Stollmeyers, De Limas, Gomes, Knoxs, Millers, they did nothing to build our country. The Spaniards brought slaves. The French came (some of them black Africans) with their slaves.
“JJ Thomas, Trinidad’s first African scholar, said black slave masters may receive up to half of the twenty million pounds donated to British owners when slavery was abolished in 1833.
“Trinidad culture did not begin in the Congo, even if the Moors influenced the culture of Spain, which the Conquistadors carried to America. Our culture began with the Native Americans, in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, as well as in Iboland and Akan territory in West Africa. The European experience is as important as the African in Trinidad before the Hindus came. Spanish language, music and culture came to the Caribbean with African influences.
“Slavery and Indentureship were not the same. True, the Hindu was free. The slave was not. But there was no way for Hindus to be taxed to give poor relief to Africans. Africans in Trinidad do not have special rights because of slavery. Many are immigrants from Grenada and St Vincent. Every citizen has the same rights in this country. It is stupid and backward for Africans to be harping on 500 years of struggle.
“It is not true that only Africans struggled here and that gives them no special privileges even if it was true.
“They claim slaves received no land and that after Emancipation, they were prevented from buying land. Nonsense! Long before emancipation, Africans were given land. They squatted on thousands of acres and were never removed. They were given land after 1812—to African soldiers who served the Crown. Former slave soldiers of the West India Regiment who served the Napoleonic wars received land. The Mandingos owned land in Port-of-Spain before the abolition of slavery. African slave owners received land on the terms set out in the Cedula of 1783.
“Governor Gordon reduced the price of crown land to one pound per acre and settled almost all the outstanding squatter claims between 1869 and 1879. In that same period, only 2,643 indentured male Indians received about 15,000 acres of land (swamp and other bad or inaccessible land). The scheme of crown land in lieu of return passage lasted only ten years. Most Indentured Indians who opted to stay in Trinidad received no land from the colonial government.
“In 1879, Africans owned thousands of acres all over Trinidad. It is time teachers stop behaving like Hitler and the Nazis, falsifying the facts to promote patriotic fiction: a racist use of history. Teachers must read about Charles Darwin, Walter Bagehot, Robert Hartmann, Gabriel de Mortilet, Josiah Royce, Salomon Reinach and Franz Boas, among the many whites who wrote against racism.
“They must abandon victimhood and their racist, ethnocentric with fullness. They are ignoring the documents, the facts, the evidence and the context. They deliberately continue to mimic the Eurocentric tradition of interpreting history as ‘We’ against ‘Them’ and the writing of history to glorify a race, or a nation or a religion.”
