Ian Ramjohn's blog

I began my UWI experience knowing a little more about the place than the average undergrad. My sister, two years into her time there, saw to it that I knew the general layout of the place, such that I was able to easily win the Orientation Week treasure hunt (and the $50 prize, which was more than a little money back in 1989).

According to Harvard's Project Implicit I have a slight preference for Arab/Muslim names over "others", a slight preference for darker skin colour over light skin colour, and a moderate preference for white faces over African faces.  OK...so tell me something I don't know.  Most of the people I grew up around were Indo-Trinis, many of them Muslim.  And while we were not Muslim, the extended family was, and there was clear subtext that south Trinidadian Indian Muslims were good people (and mostly were "pumpkin vine" relatives of some sort).

Had I simply taken the black-white face test, I might have been a bit less impressed.  Despite the fact that both my mother and my wife are white, white people - at least American and European ones - are still less familiar to me than are darker-skinned people.

My grandmother grew up on a cocoa estate in Piparo.  Even today, Piparo is still distant - in the second and third decade of the twentieth century, it was truly remote.  Her father had come from India as a child, worked as an indentured labourer, and eventually bought a cocoa estate from a Spanish family.  He was well enough off that he sent at least three of his sons to attend Howard University.  Her mother, his third wife, was Trinidadian-born, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants.

As the story goes, she was sitting in the gallery with her baby brother when an older Indian woman, all dressed in white with bangles to her elbows, came up to her and asked to have the baby.  My grandmother refused to give her the baby, but she was insistenty, and even tried to take the baby away from her.  There was no one else in the house - the nearest adults were in the kitchen, which was a separate buliding, detached from the main house.

Eventually the woman relented, and left.  I'm not too clear about that part of the story.  But when she later related the story, the woman fit the description of a childless aunt* to whom my great-grandmother had always promised "the next baby".  The aunt had died, and the story was that she had come to claim "her" baby.

That night, my grandmother related, she came down with a high fever.  She may have imagined the whole thing.  But that's really the key to a good ghost story - not a bold claim, but rather, a story that asks the question "what is imagination?"

I have voted only four times in my life¹ - one local government and three national elections.  And 100% of my voting pattern can be explained by a single factor - I voted for the Muslim candidate.²  Combine that bit of information with my surname and it's easy to conclude that my vote is driven simply by identity politics.³

In the Sunday Express, Selwyn Ryan wrote

...Mr Panday is also correct when he notes that corruption, on its own, does not decide elections in Trinidad: Race does...

Taran questioned whether this assumption about Trinidadian politics remains valid, pointing out that

Trinidadians have a habit of going abroad for a little while, taking in the outside world, turning around and coming home with the belief that they now know more than all the poor people who stayed behind. In their return they became the new colonialists, taking upon themselves the “white man's burden” to educate and civilise the the ignorant natives.