Wesley Gibbings
Caribbean
Broadcasting Union
57th
Annual General Assembly
Georgetown,
Guyana
Wednesday August
19, 2026
Distinguished delegates of the Caribbean Broadcasting
Union, honoured guests, members of the Singh family, media comrades, ladies and
gentlemen.
We gather today in Georgetown - on the very soil from
which Rickey Singh came - to do
something that is, in truth, somewhat overdue but yet perfectly timed.
We are assembled to honour a remarkable Caribbean
journalist -Rickey Singh - and to celebrate his induction into the Caribbean
Broadcasting Union Hall of Fame at a time when journalistic skill and judgment
are indispensably required to make sense of so much that is around us.
It is thus abundantly evident that this tribute represents
more than commendations in support of an award. It is about memory as constructed
through first and second drafts of history. It is about public service through
the journalistic creed to seek and speak truth.
And it is about the responsibility of those who use words
to help people understand themselves.
In our region and beyond, there are few better human
representations of such pursuits than our late colleague.
Guyana, from whence he came, has always been a country
shaped by water. Yes, the often turbulent, even deadly Atlantic. But equally so
its rivers that carry more than boats and commerce but also chapters of memory.
The Demerara, the Berbice and the Essequibo and all their
various tributaries have witnessed empire, slavery, emancipation,
indentureship, political struggle, and independence.
They have carried pain and sorrow from one generation to
another, but they have also borne hope and aspirations. So too have the blades
of grass and the trees reaching towards our so often troubled skies.
It was from such a landscape, and its accompanying
peoplescape, a young Rickey Singh emerged.
He was born in Canal Number Two Polder – an agricultural
community across the bridge about an hour away from here nowadays - on February
1, 1937. He lost his father before he had the opportunity to know him, and his
mother while he was still a boy.
Such losses can harden a human being. Such circumstances,
in the face of a changing and troubled world, and at that time in the throes of
global military conflict, can harden hearts and make people indifferent to
human need and suffering.
In Rickey’s case, they seem instead to have deepened
compassion. This is reflected in his clear and persistent understanding of the
loneliness of the vulnerable and the quiet courage of ordinary people.
His mother, Jessie, had spoken out for women whose work
was undervalued and whose dignity was too easily overlooked. She understood
something that her son would carry throughout his own life: that injustice does
not become acceptable simply because it has become customary or widely ignored.
For more than six decades, Rickey Singh continued the
conversation his mother had begun through his journalism, his activism, and his
interpersonal relationships, with all due scepticism, strong personal
convictions, and an unbending sense of right and wrong.
He carried such a predisposition from the cane fields to
newspaper offices, from government buildings to CARICOM summits, from the
Caribbean to the wider world, all connected through the veins of history.
Presidents and prime ministers heard, and most times, listened
to him. Diplomats understood where he was coming from and often referenced him.
Journalists listened to him and some wanted to be like him. But so too did
ordinary citizens of the Caribbean pay attention to Rickey - people who wanted
someone to tell them honestly what was happening in the world around them.
Martin Carter once wrote:
“I do not sleep to dream, but
dream to change the world.”
Those words speak to something fundamental about Rickey
Singh. His journalism was never content merely to observe and report on the
Caribbean. He wanted, through his work, to change the way we understood it -
and, in doing so, to change the way we understood our responsibilities to one
another.
For Rickey, journalism was never a comfortable seat from
which to watch history pass. It was participation. It was active citizenship.
Carter gave us another brief but powerful reminder: “All
are involved!”
Rickey Singh understood that instinctively. He knew
that an election in Guyana could alter political thinking in Barbados. He knew
that a constitutional crisis in Jamaica mattered in Port of Spain. He
understood that the pain of Grenada, the uncertainty of Suriname, the
aspirations of Belize, and the trials of Haiti were not foreign matters.
They were part of the same Caribbean story. To him, the
newsroom dichotomy of so-called local and regional news was a fiction that
omitted critical elements of a united Caribbean paradigm. Think of this in
2026. Take a minute to reflect on how correct he was.
Indeed, such consciousness frames the quality of his
journalism. Some reported what had happened. Rickey asked what it meant. Others
described the crisis of the day. Rickey searched for its causes and its
consequences. Others pursued the headline and the deadline. Rickey followed its
impact on human history.
He began as a young reporter at the Guiana Graphic, where
the newsroom became for him a classroom, a family, and a platform from which to
serve the public.
Very early, he recognised something that many of us take much
longer to get: the Caribbean cannot be understood one territory, one island or
one headline at a time.
The sea does not merely separate us. It connects us. The
sky in its limitlessness establishes borderlessness and common ownership.
That conviction found perhaps its most eloquent expression
in the title of his celebrated newspaper column: Our Caribbean. The title
itself is declarative of a region that belongs to all of us.
That the farmer in St Elizabeth, the fisherman in Gouyave,
the teacher in Castries, the hunters of the Rupunini Savannahs, the steelpan
arranger in Port of Spain - all belong to the same larger story.
Rickey Singh invited us to see the region not as a
collection of fragments, but as a community with shared responsibilities. In
the story of the parts, he saw a sum that was greater even than the whole.
In that sense, his journalism reflected the profound
insights of another great Guyanese, Wilson Harris. Harris spoke of the
“creative fusion” of what is absent and what is present.
That is also what serious journalism does. It searches for
people and experiences that power chronically ignores. It listens for the
voices that do not always enter official records.
It understands that a country is not defined only by its
leaders, its declarations and its ceremonies. It is also defined by workers,
farmers, families, migrants, communities, and citizens whose experiences may
never otherwise find their way into the official account.
Rickey’s recognition of this was reflected in his belief
in the assertion of human rights as both universal and indivisible. His
foundational activity with the Caribbean Human Rights Network proved the point
at a time, such as now, when rights had slid, almost silently, off the agenda
of indispensable developmental assets.
The recently-launched Rickey Singh Initiative for
Excellence in Journalism by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
(IACHR) establishes important links connecting Rickey’s journalism, his human
rights advocacy, and his sense of a hemispheric space within which the
Caribbean does not reside at the margins.
There is a lesson for every journalist as Rickey at his
often-irascible best would contend that no single article, including those
produced by him, can contain the whole truth of a society.
No reporter can explain every dimension of a crisis. But
every honest account can contribute another piece to our understanding. These
parts that are greater than the whole.
Derek Walcott reminded us that if we break a vase, we
often realise that “the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than
that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”
Rickey Singh understood that journalism requires us to
keep asking, keep listening, and keep searching for the missing pieces in order
to re-assemble them.
At Caribbean Contact, which is where I first met him, he
helped create a regional meeting place for ideas. It was a publication with
limited resources but an enormous purpose.
There is a current effort to have Rickey’s collection of
every edition of the newspaper digitised, stored, and made available to all generations
for all time. In my view, this would constitute an enduring tribute not only to
a late, great Caribbean editor but to an effort to engrave independent
journalism as part of our region’s institutional landscape.
Though I am aware of interest by a Canadian university,
here is an assignment for a Caribbean institution - as part of a greater effort
to capture memory as provided by mass media.
 |
| With the great mentor and journalistic exemplar |
You see, from the Port of Spain office of Caribbean
Contact, Rickey helped give shape to a regional conversation about politics,
faith, social justice, democracy, and Caribbean identity.
And he did something else that is perhaps even more
important. He helped other people find their voices. Many young journalists and
writers discovered their possibilities because Rickey Singh encouraged them. He
saw potential before others saw achievement. I was part of one such cohort in
the early 1980s.
He understood that editing was not merely about correcting
grammar or improving structure but also about cultivating confidence and
context, rooted in unique Caribbean realities.
He did not merely publish stories. He nurtured
storytellers. That is a profound part of his legacy, that he helped construct a
community of Caribbean journalists – one that needed to be cherished and
protected.
Then at the Caribbean News Agency (CANA) he partnered with
and helped mentor many of today’s media leaders and accomplished practitioners.
Rickey didn't merely compose and publish Caribbean
journalism; he helped build the institutional structures through which
Caribbean journalists could work collectively.
As founding President of the Caribbean Association of
Media Workers, he helped give practical meaning to regional solidarity among
media professionals, and brought meaning to freedom of the press even as media
development required a stronger, more socially aware cadre of professionals.
Significantly, he understood that press freedom required collective
action that transcended territorial lines. The threats faced by journalists do
not stop at national borders, and therefore the defence of journalism must
cross those borders as well.
Martin Carter had by then provided stark context in the
admonition that “a mouth is always muzzled by the food it eats to live.”
Through this, the lessons of silence achieved through fear and dependence found
expression in the inaugural tenets of the CAMWORK mandate.
Rickey Singh provided a living example of the costs of resistance.
His criticism of authoritarianism in Guyana placed him in personal danger.
Elsewhere in the region, work permits became problematic mainly because his
commentary was inconvenient to those who preferred praise to scrutiny.
Exile, uncertainty, and official displeasure became
familiar companions. Yet he continued. Those of us who communicated with him
knew he was not prepared to address intolerance through hatred. He answered it
with persistence and a refusal to surrender to self-censorship.
There he was: asking the difficult questions and insisting
on public accountability even as the region he loved navigated some of its most
difficult chapters.
He chronicled the overthrow of Sir Eric Gairy and the
revolutionary promise that captivated Grenada. He reported on the murder of
Maurice Bishop and the violence that followed in October 1983.
He wrote courageously about the assassination of Walter
Rodney and refused to allow difficult questions to be buried beneath official
explanations.
He covered the attempted coup in Trinidad and Tobago in
1990 with constitutional democracy as a central theme of his reporting. And,
most of all, there appeared to be an understanding – which remains true today -
that these were not isolated emergencies or single country events.
 |
| The honour was mine to speak on the contributions of Rickey Singh |
Breaking news we are all taught is there as a first
interpretation of occurrences that eventually become history. Journalism, against
such a backdrop, is required to go beyond accounts of what happened.
It should anticipate the questions that future generations
will need to ask. Wilson Harris once explained that “the block imprints of
history need to be re-opened…” History, his work suggested, is not a static
artifact but a living entity that requires re-opening and re-packaging.
Such is an essential role of journalists. We are
charged, so often, with re-opening the past and reviewing official versions. In
it lies a duty to ask difficult questions about who was heard. Who was ignored.
Who paid the price.
True, we often get this wrong. Rickey knew this well, and
he was usually willing to acknowledge such a shortcoming in his own practice.
Yet, his value to others was the admonition to never allow history to become a
closed chapter.
Few understood this better than a cadre of regional
journalists who roamed alongside Rickey as they trailed presidents and prime
ministers from capital to capital. Building journalistic memory and calling out
discrepancies wherever they found them.
But they were not members of any official entourage. They
were there as journalists, accountable to audiences interested in public disclosure
and truth-telling. Rickey earned our respect not through any acts of arrogance
but through experience and integrity.
Less experienced journalists listened to him because he
understood that credibility is accumulated slowly - one report, one correction,
one difficult decision at a time. And perhaps that is why his legacy is
especially relevant now.
Today’s world of instant news and information – packaged
in sizes fit for single bites – challenges such a mandate as never before. Rumour
can reach thousands before facts have been checked. Opinion is routinely
presented as evidence. Technology can amplify truth - but it can also amplify
falsehood just as efficiently.
However, core journalistic principles remain exactly the
same – verification, fairness, balance, and a disciplined effort to keep
personal bias from distorting the account.
Had Rickey been with us this evening, he would have
enlivened this assembly not with a discourse on the impact of technology, but
with an examination of how facts and truth remain constant fixtures on our
journalistic agendas.
Speaking of technology, some of us here this evening would
recall CANA’s introduction of Tandy PCs in the 1980s and Rickey’s rather proud and
conspicuous proficiency at conference news centres. So, it cannot be said he
was among the Luddite generation with a prolonged preference for manual and
electronic typewriters.
Yet, he would be clear that while technology changes.
Ethics do not. Platforms change but the obligation to verify remains.
The courage to question remains. The discipline to listen
remains alongside the humility to correct errors. And the responsibility to
place the public interest above personal advancement remains. Rickey paid a
high price for the latter.
I spoke earlier about Walcott’s fragments. But from those
fragments, Caribbean people created new communities, new languages, new music,
new traditions, and new ways of belonging.
The impact of Caribbean journalism can help gather those
fragments, re-assemble them even. Rickey’s newspaper columns, addressed most of
these aspirations.
He reminded us that the Caribbean’s strength lies not in
pretending that our differences do not exist, but in learning to understand
them. Walcott gave us another beautiful phrase: “All of the Antilles, every
island, is an effort of memory.”
That is also a way of thinking about journalism. Every
accurate article is an effort of memory. Every careful broadcast is an attempt
to prevent people and events from disappearing. Every interview preserves some
fragment of public life that might otherwise be forgotten.
Walcott spoke, too, of “islands not written about but
writing themselves.” Rickey Singh was one of those writers who helped the
Caribbean write itself.
He wrote about politics, certainly. But he also wrote
about people. He understood that public life is not made only in parliaments
and conference rooms.
It is made in villages and markets, schools and farms,
churches and studios, newsrooms and family homes. He understood that the
history of the region lives in ordinary experience.
He did not belong only to one country. He belonged to the
Caribbean.
And there comes a moment in every life devoted to public
service when achievement begins to give way to legacy. Not because the work is
finished. But because the work has passed into the hands of others.
There is where Rickey Singh’s work now resides. It rests
with the journalist who refuses to change a story because a minister objects. It
rests with the editor who insists that facts matter more than convenience.
It rests with the broadcaster who asks one more difficult
question. It rests with the young reporter who understands that public trust is
more valuable than personal popularity.
Martin Carter gave us the words: “Death must not find us
thinking that we die.” Those words fit today’s proceedings. Because Rickey
Singh’s voice has not disappeared. It lives in the standards he defended. It
lives in the journalists he mentored. It lives in the institutions he helped
build. It lives in the questions his work taught us to ask.
As we gather here in Georgetown - where the Atlantic meets the rivers, and
where so many Caribbean journeys have begun - let us return to the image with
which we began.
The rivers continue their patient movement. They join
distant places without asking permission. They carry memory - quietly and
persistently towards the sea. Truth moves in much the same way. It may be
delayed. It may be obstructed. It may be denied. But if people are willing to
protect it, truth continues to find a way forward.
For more than six decades, the people of the Caribbean
entrusted Rickey Singh with their stories. There can be no higher calling for a
journalist. And there can be no finer tribute.
Today, therefore, we honour not simply a journalist. We
honour a regionalist. A teacher. A mentor. A builder of institutions. A
defender of press freedom. And, above all, a guardian of truth.
Rickey Singh gave his life to the Caribbean. And the
Caribbean is richer because of it.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
