Enhancing the Heritage
Posted: Thursday, July 31, 2003
Newsday TT
THE 21-DAY Tobago Heritage Festival is a unique and fascinating event in the life of the Sister Isle and may well be a rare folk celebration as far as the rest of the world is concerned. We know of no other cultural event in any other island or country where different villages present dramatic re-enactments of the peculiar and picturesque customs and practices of the past, offering charming glimpses into the making of an unusual society. In our view, it is a Festival that must be preserved, indeed enhanced, since, being more than just a "spectacle" such as carnival, it is an actual and robust retelling of Tobago's social history which has also become the biggest tourist attraction on the island's annual calendar. Within recent years, however, the quality of the Festival has suffered somewhat from its ritual nature and the fact that it is purely a folk presentation, produced exclusively by the island's various villages without any kind of professional help from outside. While for the most part this ensures that the Festival is embued with the spirit and enthusiasm of Tobagonians, it also has the weakness of presentation by rote, with some acts becoming mechanical, without the benefit of studied preparation or innovative freshness.
This, we think, is what THA Chief Secretary Orville London was referring to when he expressed "mixed feelings" about the current Festival, lamenting the fact that some presentations had fallen well below expectations. Speaking to a press briefing last week, Mr London observed that the productions varied in quality. "There were some excellent productions," he noted, "and I mean the kind of productions which you could market to visitors from anywhere in the world. However, there were productions that, if we are to be honest with ourselves, fell below expectations." The THA Chief Secretary saw the need for greater consistency in the level of productions from all the communities. "Even though it is our local culture, there are certain standards that we must maintain." Mr London's candid criticism is, obviously, well meaning. It is intended to be constructive and we expect that Tobgonians to whom it applies, instead of taking it amiss, will appreciate its truth and take his advice to "do some homework" in preparing for next year's Festival. While Tobagonians, a proud and culturally self-reliant people, may not want outsiders interfering in their heritage celebrations, we believe that the time has come to put the Festival on a more organised, co-ordinated and professional footing. At the very least, they could take some tips from the presentation of Trinidad's Carnival, the preparations for which begin several months before the actual date of the big event.
Also, where each mas' band has a leader assisted by a group of experienced and skilled workers, each village should have a planning committee which would be responsible for the creative, dramatic and organisational aspects of its production. Such committees should not find it difficult, in fact, to seek technical advice from our country's leading artists and theatrical personages so that, instead of ritual presentations without preparation, they would be able to "do their homework" and produce their various acts with some degree of professionalism and creativity. The Tobago Heritage Festival has the potential of becoming an entertaining and culturally enlightening event not only for tourists visiting Tobago but also for Trinidadians vacationing at home in July. This year's event ends on Saturday August 2 with Buccoo Day featuring aspects of the culture of this scenic part of Tobago, including goat racing on the beach. This closing competition usually attracts a crowd of Trinis but the entire Festival could be a bigger crowd puller if the villages take Mr London's advice to heart.
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Take Back Communities
Posted: Wednesday, July 30, 2003
by Bukka Rennie, www.trinicenter.com/BukkaRennie
As has become typical today, everyone is screaming to the Government: "Do something about crime! Put more policemen on the beat. Organise more joint police/army manoeuvres and lock-downs. Shoot the bandits. Pass the no-bail law. Shut down the Jamaat al Muslimeen". And so on and so forth.
Clearly the posture, the attitude, is that everyone other than ourselves is responsible. It is never about us collectively taking the responsibility to deal with the problems that beset this nation.
Let the Government do it or resign if it is incapable. That is why we voted for them. Let the police deal with crime, that is why taxpayers provide their salaries and emoluments. It is never seen as a two-way street, that all institutions at all levels have to be involved in a holistic manner.
Even the just retired Commissioner of Police did not know better. He sat there for the past few years, supposedly "managing" in silence, and when he is departing he says to us that he did not wish to say anything before but the criminals are better equipped than the police.
Apparently "managing" for him never meant dealing with the technological upgrading of the force in terms of equipment and skills and removing any obstacles to such an upgrade. He sat there playing dumb and consciously allowed his "men and women" to go out into the field to be out-gunned and out-smarted by bandits and criminals.
Now that he was leaving to go into retirement he suddenly thought it best to break his golden silence and inform all and sundry including the criminals that the underworld was better equipped.
He even seemed to want to suggest that he did not speak out before because he desired to protect his men and women. Imagine the absurdity: is it that policemen and women "could now dead" since he has retired?
It is my strong view that such a manager making such a statement upon retiring should be jailed immediately for irresponsibility or for his or her failure to be responsible.
Similarly the businessmen have been screaming for the Government to reduce crime. They have met and developed a common position on crime which they presented to the Prime Minister.
It is amusing how all these wise people have answers, as long as these answers do not involve them. Everyone knows that the most significant cause of crime, outside of the passion nurtured in domestic relationships and love affairs, is the drug trade.
To finance the trade of kilos of cocaine requires millions of dollars. Such financing is not available in the poverty-stricken areas such as Laventille/Morvant where all the murders relative to the drug trade take place. Such financing emanates from places like Valsayn, Chaguanas, Bayshore, Fairways and Westmoorings, etc, the communities of rich businessmen.
How serious and responsible can they be in taking anti-crime plans to the Prime Minister if they are not prepared to expose the culprits among themselves and within their communities who finance the importation of drugs and manage the big "laundromats" scattered across the landscape? It is nothing but a huge, sick joke.
The point is that we must take back control of our communities and control of all the affairs therein. Whatever the problem, the solution begins the moment we assert our collective control of community.
Some people are of the view that we are impotent to deal even with the question of crime because we are yet to "plumb the depths" of our systemic predicament, ie governorship as opposed to community responsibility.
Yet others say we are unable to implement anything because we are a "constipated" society. And though there are great truths underlying both views, I am hard-pressed to concede that these represent the whole truth or that they present the entire picture.
I grew up here in this place and space and have experienced too much to ever hold the view that the people have never known what it is to take responsibility for community well-being. We worked the concepts of pooled resources and collective decision-making such as "gayap", "len-hand", "sou-sou" and "panchayat" to the hilt to provide the wherewithal and infrastructure to build our communities.
One cannot help but be anecdotal to make the point. I grew up in Ramdial Lane in Monte Grande, Tunapuna and I can recall the work of leaders like Olive Rawlins who managed the community's "sou-sou", Lester Woods and company who led the Syncopators steelband to a particular pride of place, the Toolsie brothers in the Circular Sports Club that promoted sport, moreso cricket and volleyball and how we the children defended Ramdial Lane against all comers.
Later in the teenage years at Mount Hope I was to experience first hand the operations of three key institutions — the political party group, the village council and the youth group.
The community was always alive with local, regional and international issues, be it the Independence of Kenya or the objectivity of the nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, usually spearheaded by one of those three institutions.
Thieves were not tolerated in Mount Hope and there were the occasional broken bones to attest to that fact. There were no humps in the roadway to minimise excessive speed, so dangerous drivers were warned on two occasions then dealt with appropriately thereafter. On a few occasions we were forced to lock-down Mount Hope to rid the community of undesirable outsiders.
However, that sense of community responsibility, that sense of acting on our own behalf in our own interest has since then never been fostered by official society. Why are we running away from admitting that we are a dependent capitalist society, and that the capitalist path of development fosters the constantly increasing concentration and centralisation of social capital in the hands of a few with the ever-widening pole of poverty at the other extremity?
With all these mergers of economic units and various transnational corporations, and with social capital being therefore controlled by a few, all politics cannot help but reflect this tendency and be some form or some variance of governorship, ie concentrated political power. That's the nature of the beast. Why are we not admitting this?
One needs not be a rocket scientist to see that it is this particular form of modern capitalist development which, despite its great positives and achievements, has on the other hand fostered community impotence and constipation. Modern development has destroyed our sense of community. Radical politics that seek to empower communities is the only vehicle forward. That is the demand of the times.
In the mean, the more we embrace that kind of "modernity" is the more we will see people relinquish all responsibility and continue to bewail and lament and cry and scream for government to do this, that and the other.
We have sunken so low that today when a pet dog dies, people no longer bury it in the backyard but bags the dead animal and drive their shiny automobiles to some secluded corner or to the remote bank of some water-course to dump the carcass there without a single thought for the health and well-being of their community.
How then are we to discern what is, and what is not, crime?
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Guyana breaks ranks under US pressure
Posted: Wednesday, July 23, 2003
by George Alleyne, Newsday/TT
Guyana's agreeing to the demand of the United States not to hold any US soldiers for turning over to the International Criminal Court for trial for war crimes, while a betrayal of Caricom ideals, is an example not merely of Guyana's weakness, but one of the bullying tactics of Uncle Sam.
Guyana, a relatively poor Caribbean country, is on the one hand hoping that its action will bring accelerated US private sector investment and US Government aid, while on the other cringingly repaying the US for having saved it in the late nineties from being declared in default. This had happened when the Paris Club, a group of creditor nations mainly West European and including Japan, demanded payment of outstanding loans made to Guyana, had been asked by the US, not only to stay their hands, but to actually forgive two-thirds of the Guyanese debt. I have dealt with this in earlier columns. And understandably, should the United States, with its literal sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the South American country, lift its mantle of protection, Guyana would be once again open to relevant Paris Club nations demanding monies owed them, and risk being declared in default. This would mean that Guyana's overseas investments and shipments to the value of monies owed, could be seized until the debt is discharged. Guyana's is a difficult situation. In turn, any lifting of protection by the United States could mean that Venezuela may not only reopen the issue of its claims to a substantial part of the Caricom country, but actually send troops in should it believe that the US would not intervene militarily. Admittedly, this is an extreme position.
The United States' coercing of Guyana on the International Criminal Court issue is plain bullying. Theoretically, Trinidad and Tobago could exert some pressure of its own on Guyana, which today owes this country somewhat in excess of US$160 million, and may never be able to repay this sum. What if Trinidad and Tobago should give Guyana a time within which to start liquidating the debt or face action leading to its being declared in default? Guyana would be placed in an extremely difficult position. Unfortunately, however, the United States, which sees itself as a ‘friend' of Guyana, if only to maintain a convenient foothold in South America, and at at the same time keep Venezuela ‘in its place,' may then move against this country. The US has several options, one of which is to pressure those Paris Club nations to which Trinidad and Tobago owes money, to call in their debts! It can also exert pressure through the Inter-American Development Bank, and through the International Monetary Fund.
I shift gears. Any Iraqis, who are understandably relieved to be rid of their former dictator, Saddam Hussein, and perhaps see the American and British armed forces as liberators, may discover, as the Filipinos did after the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898, that they are there as colonisers and/or exploiters. Emilio Aguinaldo, the famous Filipino patriot, who had at first welcomed the Americans in 1898, hoping that they had come to liberate them from brutal Spanish rule, would later lead the battle for Filipino Independence from 1899 to March of 2001. US President William McKinley's remark in 1898 that the US was in the Philipines merely "to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise and Christianise them," would later be criticised by Mark Twain, whom I quoted in an earlier column, and by the industrialist-philanthroper, Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie, who is best known in this country for his establishing and funding of the Carnegie Free Library in San Fernando, which bears his name, would say with bitterness to the US Government after some 100,000 Filipinos had been killed fighting for their freedom, and effectively subdued: "You seem to have about finished civilising the Filipinos."
Saddam Hussein's rule of Iraq was brutal and corrupt, but this is no excuse for the United States and the United Kingdom, which invaded Iraq on the basis of misleading their countrymen/women, and an incredibly large number of other people, to remain on in that country. Iraq, in 2003, is the same as the Philippines in 1898 et sequitur. The US had invaded the Philippines in 1898, not to free the island chain from Spanish rule, but rather to establish a protected gateway to the then rapidly expanding markets of the Far East. Its military intervention in Iraq was not designed to free Iraqis from Saddam, that was incidental. It was primarily to control Iraq's massive oil reserves and to stop Hussein's tactic, developed in 1999, of not only having his crude exports to Europe paid for in Euros, but that of encouraging other Middle Eastern nations to trump and follow suit. And with Iraq's and Kuwait's oil under control, the aim was clearly to make Israel irrelevant! Meanwhile, the Iraqis appear to have in place a calculating strategy of not killing many American troops at any given time, but rather at an average of one a day. They appear to work on the assumption that killing one US soldier a day would generate a groundswell of parental and otherwise family opinion demanding the return of American troops. The Iraqis seem to accept however, that any large scale slaughter of US servicemen would have the opposite effect, and see a call for tougher measures against any rebellion.
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