When ‘gifts’ of public land ignore reparative justice

Gordon Laughlin is appalled by the treatment of the Hadeed family. He writes: “The Hadeed family has been part of Trinidad and Tobago’s business community for generations, creating jobs, investing locally, and building respected brands. Today, they face one of the greatest challenges in their history as the legal process surrounding the state-of-emergency detention continues through the courts” (Express, July 11).

Notably, he did not include those workers and families of the Orange Estates (that is, the Trinidad Sugar Estates) who were robbed of their ancestors’ inheritance by these gifts of public lands to the Hadeeds and the dealings of the PNM government that left the sugar workers empty handed. “William Hardin Burnley, Trinidad’s biggest slave owner, owned 14 sugar estates, the largest of which were Providence in the South and Orange Grove in the north, with 234 and 202 enslaved people, respectively. His son, William Frederick Burnley, inherited his father’s fortune.” He never stepped foot in Trinidad.

“That same land is now leased by Dominic Hadeed and goes under the name of Blue Waters. Eziz Hadeed, Dominic’s father, came from Syria in the 1960s and started selling clothes. Later, he founded the Fabric Land chain of stores. In 1996, he founded Blue Waters which is located at the Trincity Industrial Estates.” On February 6, 2021, I followed up with the observation: “I am still trying to understand why Blue Waters needed to import 39 non-nationals to work on its bottling plan when there is such high unemployment among our youths and specialized workers from Petrotrin and other related enterprises. “When Kamla Persad questioned Stuart Young about the matter, the latter explained: ‘This was a request by a manufacturer to bring specialized workers to upgrade their plant. This is not unusual or unique. The persons entering [the country] would have presented their negative PCR test, they may be paying for their quarantine at a State-supervised quarantine facility.” (Express, January 30, 2021.)

—Prof Cudjoe’s e-mail address is scudjoe@wellesley.edu.

note: Read the Prof Column.

.Cont'd

PNM’s betrayal of our people did not begin with Rowley, Robinson-Regis, and others. It began on October 31, 1975, when International Property Development, the former owners of Orange Sugar Estates Ltd, sold Burnley’s land (3,500 acres of prime property) to Home Construction Ltd for $15,016,800.

Home Construction paid $780,000 in cash to buy this land. It received a loan of $10,216,800 from Barclays Bank, the owners of whom participated in our enslavement. In this way, Burnley’s slave-holding lands became the property of local capitalists. The directors of this company (HCL) were Tajmool Hosein, Ameer Edoo and Mervyn de Souza who worked closely with Eric Williams. (See my essay, “Slavery, Colonialism, Independence, ‘the Same Khaki Pants’: The Exploitation of the Working People Continues” in my book Movement of the People (1983). My most recent book, The Slave Master of Trinidad, examines the life of Burnley and the Orange Grove Sugar Estates.

It is important that Robinson-Regis and the Hadeeds examine how social and reparative justice come into play in their dealing with the native populations.