Profiles: Heroes, Role Models and Pioneers of Trinidad and Tobago - by Nasser Khan

175 ELMA CONSTANCE FRANCOIS (1897-1944) S he was an active Trade Unionist and together with Uriah Buzz Butler and others, led the historic general strike in June 1937. ADRIAN COLA RIENZI (1905-1972) B orn Krishna Deonarine, a high school drop-out due to family circumstances, he became an avid reader learning about Cola di Rienzo, a fourteenth century Italian activist and patriot who organised and fought great battles on behalf of workers. In 1927, Deonarine changed his name to Adrian Cola Rienzi, after a British magistrate Adrian Clarke and Cola di Rienzo and eventually became a lawyer in spite of his early educational setbacks. From 1930 to 1934, he studied abroad, first at Trinity College, Dublin, then at Middle Temple, England. A close comrade of Arthur Andrew Cipriani in the fight for the betterment of the working class with the passion to make Trinidad a better place, he parted ways with Cipriani’s party/union in 1936 to champion workers in the sugar cane industry in central Trinidad. That was the same year that Butler did the same to champion the plight of workers in the oil industry that was, like the sugar cane industry, based outside of Port of Spain, in the ‘oil belt’ in south Trinidad. Rienzi was the first president of the Trinidad and Tobago Trades Union Council, from its foundation in 1938 until 1944. He had earlier been instrumental in the formation of the Trinidad Citizens’ League (1934), a party closely aligned to the sugar industry. In November 1937 the All Trinidad Sugar Estate and Factory Workers Trade Union (ATSEFWTU) was registered, with Rienzi serving as president of both the Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU) and ATSEFWT, both of which he founded. In 1939 the Trade Union Congress (TUC) was established and Rienzi was elected its