TT: Whe' we go' go if they send we back?

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO is not an African State, said Erica Williams-Connell, daughter of this country’s first Prime Minister, the late Dr Eric Williams. “The Trinidad and Tobago society is living a lie and heading for trouble if it seeks to create the impression, or to allow others to act under the delusion, that the country is an African society.” Speaking at the fourth annual Emancipation dinner hosted by National Association for the Empowerment of African People (NAEAP) at the Ballroom of the Cascadia Hotel and Conference Centre in St Ann’s, on Saturday night, Williams-Connell declared this country as a multi-racial society.

Borrowing those famous words spoken by her father on the eve of our nation’s Independence in 1962, Williams-Connell said: “there can be no mother Africa, there can be no mother India.”

This is the beauty of TT; it's racial diversity which can, if only people would let it, produce a beautiful society.

Playing the race and ethnic superiority card will yield for us the ethnic strife that plagues both Africa and India. TT is too small for that kind of tension and disharmony. For TT folk, there really ought be no Mother Africa or Mother India because, we were either sold or left in the bondage of indenture. The mother whose child we were was inhospitable and regarded us as ugly step children.

Though we ought not forget India and Africa, we must not let those countries affect how we live with each other in our new home. The problems that plague Africa and India must not be allowed to repeat in TT. Let us be no hyphenated anything, Just Trinis.