SUNDAY 7TH DECEMBER, 2014 – UWI TODAY
23
When I requested support
funds to commitThe UWI
St Augustine to this recollection of Robin Cohen’s
presence at UWI St Augustine from 1978-1980, the
Dean of the Faculty of Social Science, Errol Simms,
immediately agreed and committed funds to it, thus
bringing with me the weight of the UWI St Augustine
homage as well to the time that Robin spent with us as
a testament and to the continued value of his work to
the region. In preparation for this presentation I have
also drawn on the memories of colleagues who knew
Robin Cohen during his time in Trinidad and have
incorporated some of their memories and tributes.
My presentation begins with a quick visual
reminder to Robin of the campus as it was in the 1970s.
I could lay my hands only on few images then and
what it looks like now. There are still many traces and
trails of the past within the new so although it is now
an overgrown parking lot for some of us; the campus
has attempted to maintain something of the pastoral
beauty of its original site – the St Augustine estate,
once a thriving plantation.
UWI St Augustine formally opened its doors
in 1960 as a result of the merger of the University
College of the West Indies and the Imperial College
of Tropical Agriculture. As seen in the first image,
the building that currently houses a component of
our Administration was in fact the Imperial Tropical
College of Agriculture. All of this is to say that Robin
would have come to a relatively young campus then,
barely twenty years old, but a space that was already
rooted in a history of knowledge production, and well
known for its global contribution to the science of
tropical agriculture.
In the decade of the seventies, a time when many
economies had entered a recession, Trinidad and
Tobago’s economy was buoyant, fed by revenues from
its petroleum resources that had bolstered the state
sector and the declining agricultural sector. The
1970s Black Power revolution, a growing disaffection
by educated as well as working class youth who felt
disenfranchised by the current government, had
among its leadership students and some young faculty
ofThe UWI – thus the UWI Faculty of Social Sciences
and the Department of Sociology that Robin had
joined in 1977 from the University of Birmingham
were both known for theirmilitancy. Dr. Cecilia Karsh,
currently at the UWI Cave Hill campus in Barbados
reminded me that this was the tenor of the space she
had joined years earlier that had coincidedwith Robin’s
appointment with the same department.
Robin’s doctoral work on labour and migration in
Nigeria along with his early South African experience
and later sojourn in the UK would have well prepared
him, I sincerely hope, for the kind of society he
would encounter in Trinidad: its mixture of multiple
races muddling its way in an era of postcolonial
independence with overblown confidence and
petroleum dollars. Professor Rhoda Reddock noted
that although she was not privileged to be one of
Robin’s students at the UWI campus (she was then
working at the Cipriani Labour College nearby) she
did get to know him and his family. She describes the
campus that Robin joined as “then a golden period
of sociology at UWI, St. Augustine. …at that time
there were stalwarts like Susan Craig, Ken Pryce and
Farley Braithwaite. Sociology was at the forefront of
the analysis of social challenges facing the region and
globally.”
How do I come to be part of this story? I had
been working on the campus at the Institute for Social
and Economic Research as a Research Assistant and
had signed up as a graduate student to do the MSc in
Sociology – this was a degree equivalent to our MPhil
degree at present. Robin had been recruited as one of
our first professors in the Department of Sociology
which was still developing its graduate programme
and was hired, among other things, to take us through
rigorous training in theory and methodology. I recall
some of the students who joined the class that year,
or were there in previous years, among them Kim
Johnson, Daphne Phillips, Heather Hollingsworth
and Darius Figueira. All of us eventually graduated,
whether in sociology or otherwise, and most have
continued in some form of academia or writing.
Whether this was due to Robin’s influence, or to the
kind of student who would choose to do graduate
work at this time is an interesting point – I would
say that it was a bit of both. I think Robin had the
capacity to generate enthusiasm for knowledge and
spur us on to explore our individual intellectual
growth rather than imposing a tailored one-size-fit-
all programme and perhaps this was exactly what the
graduate programme needed at the time. For my part
he brought with hima wider understanding of a rapidly
evolving global consciousness and did not confine us
to the provinciality of place or space – thus already
pre-figuring the global citizens of academia that we
all had to become.
Professor Patricia Mohammed with Professor Robin Cohen
and his wife, Selina.
CAMPUS FAMILY
UWI St Augustine Administration building circa 1970s
Out of South Africa
B y P a t r i c i a M o h a m m e d
Please visit our website at
for the full text of this presentation.
The International Migration Institute of the Department of International Development, University of Oxford, partneredwith theMax Planck
Institute of Gottingen, Germany, for a retrospective on Professor Robin Cohen entitled
From New Helots to New Diasporas on
October
2 and 3. There were presentations from colleagues who know Robin from the various places where he has worked: Nigeria, South Africa,
Trinidad, Birmingham, Warwick, and Oxford. Professor Mohammed, a Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at The UWI St Augustine,
was asked to present on his sojourn in Trinidad at The UWI.
UWI St Augustine formally
opened its doors in 1960
as a result of the merger
of the University College
of the West Indies and the
Imperial College of Tropical
Agriculture.
