Activity: Reading
Host: Moray House Trust
Date: Thursday 20 February 2014
Professor Clem Seecharan is a writer and historian of the Indo-Caribbean experience as well as a historian of West Indies cricket. He was born at Palmyra, East Canje, Berbice, attended the Sheet Anchor Anglican School, Berbice Educational Institute and Queen’sCollege. He taught Caribbean Studies at the University of Guyana before completing his doctorate in History in the UKin 1990. He is now Emeritus Professor of History at the London Metropolitan University. He is the only person to teach a course, in the UK, on the History of Indians in the Caribbean and the History of West Indies Cricket. ‘To Write was to Learn’: Finding Myself through History will be published later this year by Peepal Tree Press.
Video Clips:
Part 1: A life of the mind: a tribute to David de Caires
Doreen de Caires, Trustee of Moray House Trust introduced Professor Clem Seecharan. Professor Seecharan outlined the inspiration for his forthcoming work and paid tribute to David de Caires. “He was committed to the open word, to challenge ideas and to challenge institutions and to make sure that you have that kind of freedom.”
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/OKtb0VMNc8c
Part 2: Dr Robert Love, Early West Indian Intellectuals and their focus on a Free Press and Civil Liberties.
“You can’t understand where Garveyism came from, where the struggle for constitutional rights in the 1930s and trade union rights in the 1930s and the kind of politics of anti-colonialism that people like Norman Manley, people like Cheddi Jagan and Grantley Adams fought for, you can’t understand that unless you go back to people like Robert Love.”
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/4vA9E0y8hWA
Part 3: Early Black Intellectuals
Professor Seecharan discussed the role and importance of thinkers like Edward Blyden and Dr TES Scholes and their “conception of identity which necessarily has to incorporate elements of one’s ancestry. For them, Africa was not a dark continent. Africa was a source of enlightenment.”
[The full text of one of Dr. Scholes’ publications, ‘The British Empire and her Alliances” or ‘Britain’s duty to her colonies and subject races’ can be found on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/stream/britishempireall00scho/britishempireall00scho_djvu.txt]
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/yJ4XSptR35E
Part 4: Bechu, Bound Coolie Radical
‘Here was this man who came as an indentured labourer from India in 1894…he used to work in the overseer’s estate at Enmore..his letters to the press were rational, insightful, damning critiques of the colonial environment.’
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/NjHT0WhhQf8
Part 5: Walter Rodney
Rodney believed that “history must not be bottled up with the elite. It must be taken to the people. He called this ‘history as an instrument of liberation’.”
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/pmAeOOjAWUM
Part 6: Ivan Madray and the cricketers of Port Mourant
Professor Seecharan described a few of the characters and escapades in cricket at Port Mourant, Berbice, Guyana in the 1950s.
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/ZOm5c0zpBvE
Press Clippings:
1: Professor Clem Seecharan tells of finding himself through history.
2: Clem Seecharan introduces new book at Moray House