Yvonne Ba­boolal

Re­move Her Majesty Queen Eliz­a­beth 11 as sym­bol­ic Head of the Com­mon­wealth at the up­com­ing Com­mon­wealth Heads of Gov­ern­ment Meet­ing in Port-of-Spain. This is the call com­ing from some stu­dents at­tached to the St Au­gus­tine cam­pus of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies. Stu­dents from U We Speak, a stu­dent ad­vo­ca­cy group, made the call dur­ing a pow­er­ful ren­di­tion of po­et­ry and song last Wednes­day night, one week be­fore the Com­mon­wealth Heads of Gov­ern­ment Meet­ing (CHOGM) in Port-of-Spain. A stu­dent crowd as­sem­bled at the Hu­man­i­ties Un­der­croft from 8 pm to sup­port per­for­mances cen­tered around the call for the re­moval of the Queen as Com­mon­wealth Head.

They ex­pressed sup­port for St Vin­cent prime min­is­ter, Dr Ralph Gon­salves' No­vem­ber 25 ref­er­en­dum, which af­fords cit­i­zens the vote on a new con­sti­tu­tion that would re­move the Queen of Eng­land as that coun­try's Head of State and em­pow­er an in­dige­nous pres­i­dent. "Her cur­rent po­si­tion in the or­gan­i­sa­tion is a pow­er­ful sym­bol that ap­pends to our lega­cy of colo­nial­ism. There­fore, it is in­im­i­cal to the Caribbean re­gion and our chil­dren not to re­place her," said sec­ond year psy­chol­o­gy stu­dent, Amil­car Sanatan, one of the or­gan­is­ers of the event. "For this rea­son, this is­sue must be im­me­di­ate­ly and ad­e­quate­ly ad­dressed by our lead­ers."

Sanatan stressed that their call was not racist or based on ha­tred of Whites or the British. "We not telling the woman to go home. We must not con­fuse British im­pe­ri­al­ism with British peo­ple." Neil Prout, a first year sports man­age­ment stu­dent, point­ed out that T&T, Guyana and Do­mini­ca are in­de­pen­dent and are ca­pa­ble of run­ning their own af­fairs. "We have come of age to han­dle our own thing." A pe­ti­tion call­ing for the re­moval of the Queen as Com­mon­wealth head was cir­cu­lat­ed at last Wednes­day's event for sig­na­tures. "We are go­ing to send this to Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning," Sanatan said. "Our lead­ers must form con­sen­sus in their de­ci­sion to change the Queen as sym­bol­ic Head of the Com­mon­wealth."

Sanatan said colo­nial­ism dis­man­tled the Caribbean peo­ple's psy­che and its harm­ful ef­fects are still felt so­cial­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly. "One can ar­gue that the Queen is 83 and it may ap­pear ir­rev­er­ent to dis­miss her po­si­tion in the or­gan­i­sa­tion now. "But it must be re­mem­bered that Queen Eliz­a­beth (1) lived for 101 years." Sanatan said last Wednes­day's event was in no way a protest against CHOGM. "It was a gath­er­ing of stu­dents who chal­lenge back­ward so­ci­etal norms and sys­tems." Posters of a frog wear­ing a crown and smok­ing a pipe, with the words, "Cra­paud smoke all a we pipe," were past­ed on the pil­lars at the Un­der­croft last Wednes­day.