THE EDITOR: Having read 'The psychology of Mandela Park' letter in the August 9 Newsday, I am compelled to point out that as citizens of TT there is another aspect to this psychology that is routinely ignored, which is our manifestation of low self-esteem in lauding foreign icons at the expense of our own. I refer here to yet another of our great Creole forebears - Jean-Baptiste Philippe.

According to Sue-Ann Gomes, Michel Philippe and his family had emigrated to Trinidad from Carriacou (Grenada) to take advantage of the favourable conditions of the 1783 Cedula of King Charles III of Spain, which set out the rights of free blacks and people of colour. Philippe's grandson, Jean-Baptiste Philippe, would then lead the fight against the invading English to retain these rights and privileges, enshrined in the Articles of Capitulation and the Treaty of Amiens.

Carl Campbell points out in his essay 'Man from the Naparimas':

'With the arrival of Governor Sir Ralph Woodford in 1813, pressures were brought to bear on the Free Coloureds. Dr Jean-Baptiste Philippe became their leader in the struggle against colonial prejudice. A struggle that took him to the House of Lords where he presented possibly the first civil rights case fought and won in the western world for the cause of black people.

'In 1823, Philippe headed a two-man delegation to London to present the grievances of the Free Coloureds to the Colonial Office. There followed a lengthy petition dated November 1823 outlining the abuses of the governors from Picton to Woodford.'

Then in 1824, Philippe published 'An Address to the Right Honourable Earl Bathurst by a Free Mulatto of the Island:'

'The result was instruction from the British government in 1825 to Woodford to begin the dismantlement of legal discrimination against the Free Coloureds. This process was begun decisively in January 1826 but what was done then, failed to satisfy Philippe and the Free Coloureds, leading to a further petition to the British government in 1828, which finally elicited a complete elimination of legal inequalities in March 1829.'

Dr Campbell adds that 'No monument was built to his memory as was suggested by a sympathiser in 1842, but some 30 years later there was a torchlight procession to his grave in San Fernando, and speeches in praise not of a leader of the Free Coloureds, but of a hero of the underprivileged people.'

It is a national embarrassment that a man who significantly defended our freedoms, in getting the English to abolish their efforts at imposing apartheid on free Trinidadians, should be so utterly ignored. Ever more scandalous is the preferment of a foreign hero in the renaming of King George V Park even as one of our own is ignored.

Perhaps by addressing this grave omission we might put an end to what appears to be a blight on the former Pompeii Savannah. The wilful destruction of the majestic samaan trees that once lined its perimeter and the artless 'warehouses' that now scar