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The Quest for Independence
Today is the 47th anniversary of our Independence from Britain and by now everyone hopefully accepts that independence is a process and not an event. This has not been appreciated enough and disappointment inevitably followed when the expectations raised by the event were not realised immediately. Like all processes, independence can also be reversed and we must always be alert to the direction and trajectory of our independence efforts.
Take the question of culture. Around the time of Independence there was a great deal of ferment over the “cultural” question. In promulgating a Eurocentric culture the colonial power created “black faces in white masks” among the local educated class. They then imitated the colonials as they lorded it over the “wretched of the earth” after independence.
In Guyana and the Caribbean, the question of an alternative Black Power, reverberated most in the idiom of reinvigorating an “authentic” Caribbean culture. Walter Rodney, the Marxist Pan-Africanist was careful to caution the inclusion of other cultural groups such as East Indians, into the creation of National Cultures. This problematic culture is still relevant to the goal of Independence in our country. Unfortunately it is given short shrift.
The national motto of “One People, One Nation, One Destiny” will never be realised unless we address the cultural question in a more sophisticated manner than sponsoring song and dance competitions.
We can now look at the goal of economic independence. We should note that before the countries we are imitating in economic development started out on that path, they had already more or less resolved the “national question”. Whether related through correlation or causation, seeing ourselves as one people can only help our efforts at economic development.
At Independence, while most of our political elites were imbued with the Marxist notion that “take care of the economic and all else will be added unto it”, some thought that control of the “political” was a necessary precursor. And it has been the conflict between the two imperatives that has stunted our economic independence.
It is a standing indictment on our leadership that even as we ‘celebrate Independence’ today, our politicians are still placing the question of political control ahead of the development of our country.
Four years after Independence, we became a Republic, cutting all ties to the Crown, and taking complete charge of our destiny. Perhaps to emphasise that point, the government of the day announced that we were actually a ‘Cooperative Republic’. We were going to achieve real independence by using the ‘cooperative’ as the basis of all social and economic relations.
It was a bold move that promised “the small man would be the real man”.
We know the effort failed but the root causes of that failure are under appreciated. First and foremost was the imperative to stress political control. Maybe one can understand it as a product of the times but surely today, we have to accept that such undivided “control” is ultimately a hollow construct as far as the development of the country is concerned. Insistence on such a conception of power today makes citizens quite cynical about the motives behind its pursuit.
The second reason for failure was that we became caught up in the power games of the time – the Cold War between the US and the USSR. Leaders might have thought they were clever to play off one against the other but ultimately we say that we should have said “a plague on both houses” and stuck with the ‘non-aligned’ ideal. Today we are once again entering an era when it appears that there will be competition between blocks – demarcated more by economics than ideology.
Let us chart a pragmatic course and not reflexively echo the vocabulary, much less the posture, of the inchoate struggle.
The corollary to this political pragmatism must be extended into our economic sphere for real independence in this area. China has shown, in the words of the leader who chose its present pragmatic path that “it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or grey if it catches mice”.
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