Editorial
Newsday
WHAT UNITES all three of the eminent individuals who have been bestowed, in one case posthumously, the nation’s highest award, the Order of the Republic (ORTT), is the fact that they have all been educators. Their laurels are richly deserved.
The late Hochoy Charles, who died in December 2023, was the first-ever chief secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly from 1996 to 2001 and was the representative for the district once known as Moriah/Parlatuvier. Before that, he served as a government senator and parliamentary secretary in the NAR administration led by ANR Robinson from 1988 to 1999; he later formed his own party, the Platform for Truth. It was a fitting name. Mr Charles’ contribution exceeded the trappings of office.
“He played an important role in the political aspects of the NAR, in trying to get the people of Trinidad to better appreciate the historical uniqueness of Tobago,” Winston Dookeran once said of him.
Not only did Mr Charles teach in this manner, but his forceful personality paved the way for others to come.
There is a direct line between his firebrand status and Tobagonian politicians like Farley Augustine, Watson Duke and even Kelvin Morris.
Jearlean John, the first acting PM in the new Kamla Persad-Bissessar administration, once summed up Mr Charles, saying, “There was a name they called him, The Heavy Roller. That word ‘Heavy Roller’ described who Hochoy was.”
Equally large are the contributions of the other ORTT recipients.
Whereas Mr Charles was deeply wedded to partisan politics, Prof Ramchand’s own advocacy reached its zenith when he served memorably as an independent senator in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Republican Parliaments from 2000 to 2007.
Bravely did he sometimes go against the tide on a range of issues.
But the professor’s true passion, equally political in theory if not in practice, was our literature.
His seminal 1970 book, The West Indian Novel and its Background, was just a start.
His is a tireless, lifelong scholarly devotion to illuminating the work of writers like Sam Selvon and Earl Lovelace.
When VS Naipaul died in 2018, it was he who wrote the obituary that was reproduced widely in a number of global media outlets.
This is all matched by Prof Cudjoe’s five decades as a historian, scholar and public intellectual.
His publications range from Ramchand-adjacent works like VS Naipaul: A Materialist Reading to The Slavemaster of Trinidad: William Hardin Burnley and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. The sheer breadth of his subject matter belies a formidable flair for argument alongside a world vision that is anchored by a clear and unabating vision of what democracy and public discourse should be. That, too, is what unites all three of this year’s recipients.
