Black History Makers supplement

• WHAT a fantastic supplement, Black History Makers, revealing a wholly positive local and global impact.

I discovered that the colonialists did what they wanted in the mid-1960s when my wife, son and I went to live in Trinidad and were surprised to see Indian people comprising almost half the population. We wondered what the heck was going on.

It didn’t take long to find out: when slavery was abolished, most of the people freed left the countryside, devoted largely to growing sugar cane, to get better lives either in the towns and cities, other islands, Africa, America north and south, or anywhere offering better opportunities.

But this left their former owners, the people owning and running the plantations, with a problem: how to harvest the cane.

So between 1845 and 1917 a total of 143,939 Indians were brought into Trinidad according to Caribbean Atlas, a wonderfully informative online resource.

This was a tiny step up from slavery and the plantation work remained as tough as ever; but by the 1960s the Indians had at least some semblance of freedom, their ancestors having opted to remain in their new homes, despite the difficulties.

Wonderful though your supplement was, at least one name was missing: the Trinidadian author VS Naipaul whose A House for Mr Biswas seemed hilarious and ludicrous, until I lived there and saw how well it reflected reality.

Colonialism was bad, but it has given us all a much more diverse and fascinating world than the dreary Manchester my family and I left in the 1960s.

DAVID REED,
NW3