ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: Selwyn Cudjoe, the heir to CLR James
Architect of diversity and democracy and an intellectual of the African renaissance
On a chilly spring day last week I arrived in the salubrious setting of Wellesley College in Massachusetts to honour towering Trinidadian pan-African scholar Selwyn Cudjoe, who was retiring from the college after 38 years. A stellar group of academics and former students gathered to pay tribute to this unassuming don.
Kellie Carter Jackson, chair of Wellesley’s Africana studies department, which Cudjoe had built into a strong unit, praised his outspoken courage in making the college more diverse. Other colleagues spoke of his uncompromising, principled antiracism. Cudjoe himself quoted African-American scholar-activist Frederick Douglass’s maxim: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”..
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