Gypsy laments no Afro-TT day

Winston
Winston "Gypsy" Peters

Winston “Gypsy” Peters laments there is no established holiday for Afro-Trinidadians and Tobagonians during the recently concluded Emancipation festivities.

He said: “The Indian people have the Nagar, Chinese have a day that is called Chinese Double-Ten, and I am happy for it.

"But the African people who are here 200 and something years before them don’t have a place of their own. Even this day that we are celebrating, it is not even called African Emancipation Day. You have Indian Arrival Day but you don’t have African Liberation Day. This is crazy!”

Peters, who is chairman of the National Carnval Commission, also said he just doesn’t understand why there isn’t a permanent place where African people can have an emancipation village all year round. He said when he was a minister in the People’s Partnership government he told the organiser of the village, Khafra Kambon of the Emancipation Support Committee (ESC), to go and look for 25 or 30 acres of land somewhere and he would lobby for it.

But now, he said, all he could doas a calypsonian is continue to sing songs to try to help liberate black people.

“That’s what I do. The songs that I sing are for exactly that reason. But when I sing it, the very black people I try to help to emancipate themselves are the very ones who write and say I don’t like black people. Because I sang Little Black Boy...damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

He lauded the emancipation village, however, saying that in itself was great.

He liked that fact that included in the village was an exhibition of things that TT entrepreneurs of African descent have made.

“But where the hell are they after this?” he asked.

He added that he wasn’t sure it was the ESC’s job to make sure that all black people become entrepreneurs, but noted black people had been entrepreneurs in this country already.

“It’s not like we have divest ourselves and emancipated ourselves from our own liberation, and we have become dependent on URP and CEPEP and all the other make-work programmes they have and all the other things like that. We have divested ourselves of the independence that we had and what we are supposed to have.”

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