Carl Wright

Carl Wright has devoted his entire working life to global action through grass roots activism and international diplomacy. During the past fifty years he engaged with world leaders and political icons from across the globe, including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Indira Gandhi, Julius Nyerere, Shridath Ramphal, Fidel Castro, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ban Ki-Moon, Cyril Ramaphosa, Helen Clark and Bob Hawke. In these and many other encounters, he reflects his experiences of, “What it was like to be there,” as he puts it.

Having made official visits to some 100 countries – from developed to developing nations, to fragile states and countries undergoing democratic transition – he has seen at first-hand what is required to implement good governance. These high-level missions included most of the 54 nations of the Commonwealth, along with some of the world’s least visited countries, such as Moldova, Myanmar and South Sudan.

Written from the perspective of a grass roots activist, Commonwealth diplomat and local government leader, these recollections provide rare insights into the relationships between inter-governmental organisations, global associations of mayors and trade unions, and the effects of political and social advocacy. In his writing he draws extensively on his experiences of working in the Commonwealth, the United Nations and the European Union at senior level.

Perhaps most significant is his long-standing involvement with the anti-apartheid struggle, and he recalls with great sensitivity the many challenges he and others faced.

Carl Wright’s personal and candid book delivers a critical message: the need for global understanding and co-operation. With the rise of political populists, authoritarian strongmen and violent extremists, he implores us to strengthen fragile international relations and mitigate the threat of conflict which is currently real and ever-present.

• 228 x 152 mm
• 352 pages
• Paperback

Dr Carl Wilms Wright is Secretary-General Emeritus of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum, which he set up in 1995 and led for 20 years. Prior to that, he held the diplomatic post of Assistant Director at the Commonwealth Secretariat, with special responsibility for programmes for Southern Africa, including post-apartheid human resource development. He served as Commonwealth election observer and on numerous UN and other expert groups and commissions. He has extensive knowledge of international organisations, and was also among the first UK nationals to work at the European Commission in 1973-74. In his earlier years, he was a trade union and Labour Movement activist, campaigning for human rights and fair labour standards, and he was the founding director of the Commonwealth Trade Union Council. Today, Carl Wright chairs the Canterbury Climate Action Partnership and maintains a range of academic and international roles.

Dr Colin Brian Furlonge

Dr Colin Furlonge served 34 years in the Public Service of Trinidad and Tobago, culminating with eight years as Medical Chief of Staff and three years as the nation’s Chief Medical Officer. In this expansive autobiography, he also provides a detailed expose as the “victim of a history of prejudicial treatment”. This treatment was directed by the Government of the day and guided by the Public Service Commission (PSC) – an institution created by the Constitution of a post-colonial Commonwealth Republic.
In 2004, he was compelled to resort to the High Court of Justice, whose Judgement stated that, “… compliance with PSC Regulations is necessary if there is to be confidence in the Public Service; failure to do so results in the warranted suspicion of arbitrariness, discrimination, bias, partiality and even political interference, especially when division along ethnic and political lines are often determinative of the perception of reality…”. It concluded that, “… the Applicant felt legitimately aggrieved.”
The treatment described in the Judgement was frequently repeated throughout his public service career and beyond. Dr Furlonge encourages all public servants to be resolute in giving honest, professional and evidence-based advice, and to retain all the necessary records to support their endeavours. He passionately recommends that Administrations and Oversight Commissions must adhere avidly to the rules and regulations if they are to instil trust and confidence in the public service, and engender hope for the future.

• 228 x 152 mm
• 616 pages
• Paperback

“… an eye-opener for employees of the Public Service and, more so, a must-read for medical doctors … The book depicts a son of the soil in his struggles, literally from boyhood, to achieve the ultimate position in the Health Service in Trinidad & Tobago.”   Mr Lal Sawh CMT, FRCS, FACS, reviewer for the British Medical Journal

“A remarkable story of a dedicated public servant who has served his country and the medical profession well.”   Professor Steven Myint M.D. PhD, former Dean of Medicine & Health at the University of Surrey, UK
“Bouts of laughter, intrigue and contemplation, punctuated by bouts of anger and sadness; an information boiling pot highlighting a fearless approach to life and public service.”   Dr Curtis Rambaran MD, FRCP, FAHA, former Consultant Physician, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, London

Georgia Brown

Located at the eastern-most tip of Jamaica is the fictional village of Cane Field Paradise. Its verdant surroundings are dominated by a sugar estate, which provides the main source of income for the inhabitants.

For nine decades, the sugar factory dominated the skyline and the daily lives of the local residents, and it is where employment is guaranteed to any able-bodied person. Consequently, the villagers work hard, but they also play hard… especially on payday!

Merriment and excitement ensue during these times of plenty but the thrill of the moment is punctuated by the unexpected closure of the sugar factory.

The Demise of Cane Field Paradise is an intimate portrait and picturesque narrative of the reality of Jamaican village life. It shifts across the landscape of the overarching sugar estate, the backbreaking labour, crop over celebrations, family life and the elation of payday.

Although fictional, Cane Field Paradise is born of fact and is a reflection of a once prestigious village whose future in the modern era is uncertain.

“Georgia’s use of the English language is truly distinguished. Her choice of words, use of metaphor, account of events, graphic portraits – and so much else, come alive in this truly outstanding narrative.”

Dr Trevor Munroe, Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of the West Indies

• 216 x 138 mm
• 80 pages
• Paperback

Georgia Brown describes herself as a ‘true born native’ of Duckenfield, the village in Jamaica on which her novel is based. Her love and respect for the country of her birth is reflected in her writing and she hopes that readers will gain an insight into the complex yet endearing aspects of Jamaican village society. She currently teaches History to high school students in Florida, USA. The Demise of Cane Field Paradise follows her debut novel, My Sugar Island Home (2021).

Asher and Martin Hoyles

West Indians have been coming to Britain for over 300 years, so the arrival of around 500 Caribbean passengers on the Empire Windrush in 1948 was not new. This book records twenty-eight early West Indian immigrants, such as Norman Manley, Learie Constantine, Una Marson and C.L.R. James, but also less well-known figures like the model Fanny Eaton, nurse Annie Brewster, footballer Andrew Watson and airman Billy Strachan. Their stories are interspersed with Asher’s passionate poems.

“People of West Indian descent are often reduced to one single word: Windrush. This crushes their individuality and is historically inaccurate. Asher and Martin Hoyles truthfully and poetically tell the stories of those who came to Britain much earlier. Embedding the Windrush Scandal in a much deeper history of debt that we owe to those who came to Britain, the authors don’t weaken the case for justice for Windrush citizens, they fortify it.”  David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, north London

“A useful reminder that the arrival of Empire Windrush into Tilbury Docks in June 1948 was not the start of migration from the Caribbean to Britain. This book contains fascinating portraits of the lives of the pre-Windrush arrivals.”  Amelia Gentleman, author of The Windrush Betrayal, 2019

“A selection of important Caribbean men and women whose contributions to Britain brought about positive changes. They arrived on ships many years before the Empire Windrush. The individuals are role-models and their lives will inspire readers. Before Windrush should be in every home and library.”  Arthur Torrington CBE, Director, Windrush Foundation

“This book must be welcomed for drawing attention to the historical contributions made by a range of remarkable women and men, who have impacted on so many spheres of British life.”  Margaret Busby

• 216 x 138 mm
• 144 pages
• Paperback

Asher Hoyles works as a Learning Support Practitioner at NewVic Sixth Form College in East London. She has a BA in Education & Community Studies from the University of East London, is a qualified teacher and has a Postgraduate Certificate in Dyslexia from University College London. For over 25 years Asher has been writing poetry which she has performed in many venues around the UK. She has run poetry workshops in schools, colleges and prisons, and at Clean Break Theatre Company in Kentish Town. Asher is the author of Raise Up the Low, Bring Down the Mighty: Performance Poetry (Hansib, 2018), and co-authored Dyslexia from a Cultural Perspective (Hansib, 2007).

Martin Hoyles taught English and drama for ten years in Newham schools – grammar, secondary modern and comprehensive. Then for over 30 years he was a senior lecturer at the University of East London in the departments of Education, Cultural Studies, and Communication Studies. He has written books on the history of gardening, childhood, and literacy, as well as more recently with Asher on mixed-race achievement, black performance poetry, and dyslexia. His most recent book is Ira Aldridge: Famous Speeches published by Hansib in 2019.

Martin Hoyles

Out of the three leading black figures in eighteenth-century England (Sancho, Equiano and Cugoano), Ottobah Cugoano is the least well known. Yet he was the most radical, campaigning not just against the slave trade but for a ‘total abolition of slavery’.

In 1770, at the age of thirteen, he was kidnapped by his ‘own countrymen’ in Africa and sold into slavery. After enduring the middle passage, he worked on a plantation in Grenada and other parts of the West Indies.

In 1772 Cugoano was brought to England where he gained his freedom. By the mid-1780s he was employed as a servant by the court painters Richard and Maria Cosway in Schomberg House, Pall Mall. It was here, in 1787, that Cugoano published his book Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species.

By then he had already begun his letter writing campaign against the slave trade by writing to the Prince of Wales. Along with other ‘sons of Africa’, including Equiano, Cugoano also wrote to King George III, Edmund Burke and William Pitt.

Cugoano’s passionate rhetoric and reasoned argument make his book a milestone in anti-slavery literature.

‘A good, crisp and punchy account. Cugoano deserves to be better known.’  Professor James Walvin (University of York)

‘A well-researched biography aimed at the general reader.’ Professor Vincent Carretta (University of Maryland)

‘Martin Hoyles is to be thanked for having unearthed more information about the activities and milieu of the African abolitionist Ottobah Cugoano. Though details of his life are still sparse, it is clear that black witness and agitation played a far greater part in the development – and eventual success – of anti-slavery than traditional accounts have allowed.’ Professor Robin Blackburn (University of Essex)

• 228 x 152 mm
• 216 pages
• Paperback

Martin Hoyles

Ira Aldridge was one of the most celebrated actors of the nineteenth century. He performed in all the major towns in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and won international fame when he toured Europe, earning a dozen honours and awards, including a knighthood in Germany. He was idolised in Russia. He was most famous for his portrayal of Othello, but he also acted in many other roles in a career spanning more than forty years. He was the first Black actor to play white roles, including Shylock, Richard III, King Lear and Macbeth.

After three years of amateur dramatics in New York, Ira realised that there was no future for him as an actor in America, so in 1824, at the age of seventeen, he left for England. He worked his passage to Liverpool as a ship’s steward. Amazingly, in May 1825, he played Othello at the Royalty Theatre in the east end of London and in October took the main role in the Royal Coburg Theatre (now the Old Vic). He played the part of the African prince Oroonoko in The Revolt of Surinam, a story which challenged the evils of slavery. The production was a remarkable success, despite a review in The Times which said that “owing to the shape of his lips it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English”!

Despite being “the world’s most celebrated interpreter of Shakespeare” during his lifetime, Ira Aldridge was largely forgotten in Britain and America after his death in 1867. With 2007 marking the 200th anniversary of his birth, it is time to celebrate his achievements, not only as a brilliant realistic actor, but also as a valiant campaigner against slavery.

• 226 x 138 mm
• 104 pages
• Paperback

Louis Lee Sing

Angry with their religions and the wrongdoings of so many clerics, two young people decide to address the status quo. Set in Trinidad and Tobago’s capital, Port-of-Spain, Nathan John and Miriam Suielman seek to attract many others to their cause and come up with the notion to stage and host a conference. The resulting event, entitled ‘Conference of the Un-Godly’, draws participants from across the globe.

In this cauldron of religious fervour, a spotlight is not only turned upon the abuses within the church but also the subject of religion as a whole. And it is within this arena that ‘sinners’ and ‘saints’ alike bare their souls.
For Nathan and Miriam, the conference is an illuminating spectacle. They had arrived as unknowns, but their overnight success has created a demand for them from organisations the world over.

• 216 x 138 mm
• 260 pages
• Paperback

Louis Lee Sing served as Mayor of Trinidad and Tobago’s capital, Port-of-Spain, from 2010 to 2013. Throughout his adult life, he has been part of the media, beginning as a cub reporter in the weekly press. He boasts of having clawed his way up the ladder to become founder and owner of a leading broadcasting cluster within the nation’s radio market. Closer to the Church is his debut novel and his third published book.

Patricia Mohammed

The revolutionary act of imprinting gender into Caribbean thought is celebrated by Patricia Mohammed as she brings together decades worth of her critical essays that have influenced directions in feminism and in social thinking. A primary player in an ever-evolving Caribbean gender discourse for over four decades, Mohammed has produced an interdisciplinary manifesto that establishes founding moments and ongoing debates in gender and feminist theory; she marks out thematic shifts in academia and activism, including the area of masculinity, that inform feminist political strategy in the region.

Juxtaposing theoretical ideas with empirical flows of data, her strategic arrangement of this collection allows the reader to see the past and future as synonymous happenings, as temporal movements that rely on each other. Demonstrating a disciplinary promiscuity that is the cornerstone of her gender scholarship, the essays move between historical, biographical, popular culture and visual lens, revealing an intersectional analysis that is central to understanding of this region and to the current global condition.

Writing Gender into the Caribbean: Selected Essays from 1988-2020, establishes a chronology that is faithful to the evolving theoretical concepts and ideas in the field of gender and development studies, while demonstrating that collaborative affinities across shared yet different histories remain the backbone of the ongoing feminist project of reconstructing knowledge. In the face of narratives that cast shadows on the value of evolutionary progress, Mohammed encourages us to take pause and recognise how far gender scholars and feminists have come in leaving the world more gender equitable than we found it.

"Spanning four decades this collection takes us on a journey of exploration whose compass is feminist thought, and whose goal is a better understanding of the centrality of gender roles and relations in Caribbean society. Interdisciplinary perspectives, from history to sociology to art criticism, intersect in these essays, and diverse sources of inspiration, from song to film to oral traditions, inspire Mohammed’s analyses of gender politics and the imaginaries that represent them. This assemblage offers us an important and exciting intellectual history by one of the region’s foremost scholar-activists."  Aisha Khan, Professor of Anthropology, New York University

"Mohammed has produced a powerful analysis of Anglo-Caribbean feminist thinking drawing on four decades of feminist activism and scholarship. Selecting from her published and unpublished essays over the years, this book highlights the importance of revisiting past scholarship, demonstrating how rethinking past work is important for all of us who struggle with new and old thoughts as we continue contributing to future gender scholarship, debate and policy-making."  Jane Parpart, Professor, Global Governance and Human Security, University of Massachusetts, Boston

• 228 x 152 mm
• 720 pages
• Paperback

PATRICIA MOHAMMED is Emerita Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine, a key thinker in Caribbean feminist theory, founding member (1978) of the Concerned Women for Progress, the first second wave feminist organisation in Trinidad and served as Coordinator of the First Rape Crisis Centre in this society from 1985. She is the primary architect of four National Gender Policies on Gender Equality and Equity and one of the pioneers in the development of gender studies at tertiary level in the Anglophone Caribbean.

Mohammed served as first Head of the Mona Campus Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS), UWI, Jamaica, before returning to UWI, Augustine, Trinidad, ending her academic career there as this university’s first appointed Director of Graduate Studies and Research.

Her international exposure includes Visiting Professor at State University of New York at Albany in 2007, and short fellowships or teaching stints at the University of Namibia, Windhoek; Emory University, Atlanta; the University of California, Berkeley; Rutgers University, New Jersey; and Warwick University, United Kingdom.

Among her publications, Gender in Caribbean Development (Ed), 1988, Rethinking Caribbean Difference (Ed), Feminist Review, Routledge Journals, 1998, and Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917 – 1947, Palgrave UK and The Hague, 2001, remain core contributions in gender. Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation, Macmillan UK, 2009 and a series of documentary films, including the award-winning Coolie Pink and Green (2009) and City on a Hill (2015) added a cultural studies lens of filmmaking and visual iconography to her competencies.

This booklet is in furtherance of Guyana’s defence of its sovereignty. It elaborates the themes to which the President spoke when marking the self-determination of the people of Guyana fifty-five years ago.

On the 50th Anniversary of Guyana’s Independence in 2016, its Government issued the publication, The New Conquistadors: The Venezuelan Challenge to Guyana’s Sovereignty. In this successor publication, the mask of the conquistador is stripped off, revealing the naked visage of Venezuelan imperialism and its ambition to possess two-thirds of Guyana.

This booklet is in two Parts: Part I, updating The New Conquistadors and Part II enlarging its coverage into the phase of more active United Nations involvement and that of the International Court of Justice. Its purpose is to inform the people of Guyana, the Caribbean region and the international community more widely of the shameful imperial quest that drives the Venezuelan threat to Guyana.

The photograph on the front cover is of the prow of Mt. Roraima on whose historic summit the boundaries of Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil intersect – the ‘tri-junction point’. That ‘boundary point’ was formally marked with a monument in 1931 by an official Mixed Commission of the three countries. It was the commencement of the demarcation of the Guyana-Brazil boundary on the Guyana-Venezuela boundary line. Mt. Roraima is a reminder for all time and to all people of Venezuela’s eastern border. Guyana’s sun sets there – on Mt. Roraima – and always will.

“We may be a small country, but we are a proud people. We have no military might, but we have moral and legal right. We pick fights with no one, but we will resist threats from anyone. In doing so, we will seek the protection of international law and the support of the international community.”  Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali, President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana, 30 January 2021

• 220 x 148 mm
• 74 pages
• Paperback