A critic's folly

December 08, 2004

Mr Kujifi's piece critical of my column, "No guarantees," was given prominence by the editor; it was highlighted as "The Big Issue" of that day. I am therefore forced to respond. Otherwise I would not bother.

However, having read it twice I am yet to deduce Mr Kujifi's point or purpose. I have often wondered why in this country a difference of opinion, a different view, is never expressed without an accompanying commitment to ridicule, belittle, character assassination or simply discredit.

I, for one, have over the years strived to "escape this culture" as Best would describe it, even to the extent of deliberately not identifying the advocate or holder of the view or views of which I was being critical. Some have seen this as a weakness on my part, but I have opted time and time again not to personalise but to deal with the issue and only the issue at hand.

So, understanding the culture, it is not surprising to me that Mr Kujifi prefaces his piece of work by suggesting that I have suddenly within recent times lost my usual "depth and power of analysis" and sets out to provide the evidence, his "case in point," of this great loss.

The evidence, according to Mr Kujifi, lies in the fact that in my November 10 column, I outlined my involvement in the ULF in 1976 but somehow ends up on the Sunday before the 1976 elections "witnessing a motorcade of the ULF's Tunapuna candidate and hearing people (obviously Indo-Trinidadians) shouting derogatory remarks at people (Afro-Trinidadians) standing on the pavement…"

Mr Kujifi then advances the view that it is "confusing" to him that I will be so involved in the ULF; in the Cossabos (the Conference of Shop Stewards and Branch Officers) of the major trade unions; assisting in the setting up of ULF party blocks (they were called party blocks rather than party groups) on the east-west corridor; moreover provide the ULF Tunapuna candidate with office space; and not be involved in that eventful motorcade.

"It does not make sense," Mr Kujifi surmises. That is the evidence that I have lost my "depth and power of analysis."

There is a difference between being "anecdotal" and being "analytical." That column on November 10 titled "No guarantees" told a simple story of a single incident geared to make a specific point.

Mr Kujifi's misreading starts with the view that the motorcade was a localised affair of the Tunapuna candidate. That it was not. It was a motorcade that was national in scope, all the candidates of the ULF and the entire national leadership of the ULF were involved and that motorcade moved from Arima to Port-of-Spain.

How did I happen to be standing at the corner of St Vincent Street and the Eastern Main Road as the motorcade passed by? It is quite simple really. At that time I was regarded by the membership as the de facto ideological and operations leader of the New Beginning Movement (NBM), the group that agitated for the empowerment of the whole people through a new form of government based on assemblies of the people where they live and where they work.

To join the NBM one had to initiate a "collective" either where you lived or where you worked or both. The aim was to build "collectives" into "assemblies" when the situation and the right conditions happened to prevail.

There were a number of collectives; for example, the Wasa Collective was organised around the newsletter The Pipefitter; the Oil Workers Collective around the Catcracker, the Sugar Workers Action Collective around their Bulletins, the Fyzabad Collective around Combat, the Arima Collective around The Dial, the Public Service Workers Collective around Stingray, and so on.

In fact my deceased brother, Dr Kenrick Rennie, emerged out of the work done by this latter collective to join with Kenny Turner and others and eventually became president of the PSA. Our national newspaper was the New Beginning.

Regionally we linked with groups throughout with the aim to establish a Pan-Caribbean International Bureau (Pan-Carib), particularly those with the prefix "New." On the international scene there were the NBM Toronto Collective that published Caribbean Dialogue, the NBM New York and Washington DC Collectives, and most of all the Race Today Collective in England that published the Race Today magazine.

That gives an idea of how we functioned and how we were structured as a result.

The very day of that motorcade, Darcus Howe of the Race Today Collective was addressing the core of the NBM T&T on developments in England at our headquarters and business place on St Vincent Street, Tunapuna. We broke off for a while to go and look at the motorcade. The people who made the derogatory remarks were a group whose tongues may have been loosened by drink.

What Mr Kujifi may not have known is that all the then left groups functioned within the ULF. Besides NBM, there were others like URO, Namoti, Youth Forces & Working-Class Movement, NLM, etc and we had a time defending our independence as people such as Dr James Millette desired that we all submerge our identities and ideological lines into that broad amorphous political organisation called ULF.

I served on the education committee of the ULF comprised of people like the very Millette, deceased Lennox Pierre, Teddy Belgrave, Rafique Shah, etc. In 1978, George Weekes and others insisted that I take up the job as editor of the Vanguard, newspaper of the OWTU. Mr Kujifi may do well to ponder, why. I edited Vanguard from 1978 to 1983, at which point I established Eastern Specialist Printers in Tunapuna.

Mr Kujifi also finds it strange that he did not see me around the DAC-ULF talks and stranger yet that I did not mention Bloody Tuesday. I was not invited to participate in the DAC-ULF talks but I can certainly tell Mr Kujifi a whole lot about the genesis of that suggested merger and it may be mind-boggling for him to know that it had to do with an analysis then of the world situation and the international balance of forces.

As to Bloody Tuesday, I can assure you, Mr Kujifi, that the whole of NBM, including myself, was present. I saw the array of coercive forces, and I felt the same way as Mr Humphrey, they appeared to be "high," and all of them, Villafana, Sankar et al, had stripped themselves of their identification numbers.

I called the NBM people together and instructed them to go home because we could not defend ourselves against the intended onslaught. It was my call. One member of the Fyzabad Collective objected and stayed and she was almost killed when she was struck in the head by a police baton. Today that lady is my wife and the mother of my three children.

What else is there to say to you, Atta Kujifi, other than when we were first introduced, I distinctly recall you telling me that when you came across one of my books, History of the Working Class of T&T 1919-1956, you thought the name of the author to be fictitious? Maybe with you first impression is lasting.