Keith Rowley extend wishes on Spiritual Shouter Baptist Liberation Day

Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago Dr Keith Rowley released his message to the Nation on the Occasion of Spiritual Shouter Baptist Liberation Day 2022.

"It is with deep-felt emotions that I bring 2022 Greetings to the Spiritual Shouter Baptist community on behalf of the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, members of my family, and myself, as Prime Minister,".

PM Rowley's full statement 

Every year, I feel a rush of emotions whenever this celebration comes around because I attempt to transport myself into an observer, trying somehow to experience going back in time to the historical road which the early members of the Spiritual Shouter Baptists faith traveled in Trinidad and Tobago.

Theirs is the sad history of a people seeking legitimacy, a right to worship what they felt deeply in their being, and a defence of their sense of self. Theirs was first a small struggle, then a movement of resistance in a world which had deemed the African as a person, unworthy of respect, "primitive", "barbarous", "uncivilised" – a stereotype perpetuated by the European world, which still lingers in some minds.

Franz Fanon wrote of "The Dammed"; Derek Walcott in his "A Far Cry from Africa" tells of a history of "violence of beast on beast" and of the "upright man" who sought "his Divinity by inflicting pain" on others; and Professor Lloyd Braithwaite, one of our early sociologists wrote of Willy Richardson's poem which recounted the despair: