Lead Editor—Newsgathering
ryan.bachoo@cnc3.co.tt
Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has urged educational institutions across the country to focus more on outstanding Afro-Trinidadians and Afro-Tobagonians who have made contributions both home and abroad. He made the call in his African Emancipation Day message yesterday.
Rowley, who returned from the 47th Caricom Heads of Government Meeting yesterday, urged the National Library and the National Trust to focus and devise educational programmes for the national audience, particularly the nation’s youth. He singled out Afro-Trinidadians and Afro-Tobagonians such as Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), George Padmore (Malcolm Nurse), Henry Sylvester-Williams, Dr Eric Eustace Williams, Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, CLR James, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Sir Learie Constantine, Lloyd Best, Selwyn Ryan, Earl Lovelace, APT James, James Biggart, Winifred Atwell and basketball legend, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The prime minister went further in calling on the University of the West Indies, the University of Trinidad and Tobago and the University of the Southern Caribbean “to research further, then highlight and promote the African heritage in our art, literature, music, religion, drama, fashion, our cuisine, our technical and entrepreneurial skills.”
He added, “It is only after the embrace of these assignments that the people of this nation can fully appreciate our challenges, our failures, and our many successes.”
In his African Emancipation Day message, the prime minister also addressed the contentious issue of reparations. In April, his cabinet took the decision to rename the holiday, with Rowley saying, “The time has come for us to make it quite clear what emancipation means, and who’s being emancipated and from what.”
In his message released yesterday, he said much of the western world was built on the enslavement of Africans. The Caribbean has been making a case for reparations for decades, and the prime minister furthered that case, saying, “Today, whilst the glory of empire still exists, the shame of the enslavement has not caught up with the much-vaunted narratives of civilsation. It is against this background that our demand for reparation is made even as it continues to be ignored by those who pretend not to be aware of the diaspora’s claim against those who continue to benefit from Africa’s people and its continental wealth.”
Dr Rowley said Africans throughout history had suffered attempts at mental destruction, erosion of their self-esteem, and a sense of meaning, but in the 21st century, the descendants of the enslaved were rejecting stereotypical descriptions of complacency as they assert their “determination, insight, imagination and distinctiveness.”
In praising Africans’ contribution to the building of T&T, Dr Rowley said the achievements made must never be taken for granted but “be acknowledged against the wretched history of our African ancestors, their centuries in chains, the destruction of their families and their culture, unspeakable physical brutality, their suffering, their demands for freedom, their long march—all that they endured, so today we can stand as proud citizens of a progressive modern nation.”
He went further in saying that while for centuries human societies practiced slavery, when Europe in the 15th century began the capture of Africans to meet the demands for labour in the Caribbean and the Americas, the world witnessed “an elevated genocidal level of man’s inhumanity to man.”
“Today’s celebrations demonstrate that in the broad sweep of history, the experience of enslavement is not lost. The lesson today is that the descendants are going back, gathering the best of their past, to refine their understanding of their future,” Rowley said.
