Guyana at 55

May 26, 2021 Editorial

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Kaieteur News – Today, the country celebrates its 55th Anniversary as an independent nation. Independence itself is a tenuous, patchwork thing. It implies a birth and purity of a nation when it hardly ever is for countries like ours, whether in any real or symbolic sense. A simple example is the nation’s most obvious symbol of sovereignty – the Guyana flag. The Golden Arrowhead – which we are taught from nursery school represents various characteristics of our national spirit and various natural resources – was not designed by any national artist bursting with pride for our pending independence but by a 20-year-old American, Whitney Smith, in 1960, six years before Independence. The flag, commissioned by then Premier, Cheddi Jagan, would make its debut under Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham, under an independence transition curated in the finest detail by the British and the Americans in keeping with their Cold War geopolitical interests. A perhaps symbolically notable occurrence is that Smith died at the age of 76 in November 2016, five months after the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the country whose flag he had designed.

The celebration of the Independence Anniversary has become a sort of ritual that we throw money behind and celebrate with a sort of semi-religiousity, with the solemnity and the fanfare and the fireworks and albeit the genuine expressions of patriotism. And like many rituals, after half a century of not only repetition within the celebration itself, but otherwise falling far short of the ideals previously enshrined in the ritual, that ritual of celebrating the annual Independence Anniversary has become empty.

The ideal, 55 years ago was that, after centuries of exploitation of our various people – from conquest and subjugation through slavery through indentureship through colonial rule – the second-class citizens of what finally coalesced under what was defined by imperial powers as British Guiana would finally be able to chart their own course, to control their own economy to their own benefit and to elect a political leadership accountable to them and not some shadowy power thousands of miles away. The reality however was much different and ten years after, the British multinational Booker’s was still in charge of our primary export, sugar. In 1980, some twenty years after he had designed our flag of Independence, Whitney Smith might have wondered how we as a people had fallen short of everything that flag symbolised as we had moved from what would have then been a symbolic independence, to a dictatorship in less than a decade and a half, with the imposition of an oppressive new Constitution via a rigged referendum and the assassination of Dr. Walter Rodney. And would Smith have recognised the hand of his own government in sustaining such miseries?

Martin Carter in a 1979 poem published in a government anthology would cry, subversively and impotently, for someone to show him a freedom “different from this now,” the realisation having likely dawned upon him that we had merely left one sort of bondage for another.

The lesson of the past half century plus five years should have been this – a nation’s development is never static and therefore its self-definition of independence should never be. For us to be truly and consistently close to the idea of independence, the concept of independence itself has to evolve.

We keep looking at independence as an event when we can’t afford to keep referring to it as a past accomplishment only. We need to redefine it to reflect our growth and current challenges. We need to build on it. There’s work required to maintain and enhance it.

We aren’t truly independent, for example, if communities across the nation aren’t empowered to thrive. We aren’t truly independent if companies from rich countries come and exploit our resources and grow even more wealth and then those countries come back and ‘save’ us with a relative pittance in ‘aid.’ With the oil and gas sector rapidly expanding, what is emerging is a picture that makes one wonder if we are being hooked into some cycle that will see few benefiting while, as happened under the yoke of colonialism from which we sought to free ourselves, the majority of our people suffer systemic exploitation, humiliation and disregard. If we can’t control our own development and resources, then we really are at risk of losing our independence as well, the little that we have ever truly had in the first place. Our population and its challenges are ever evolving. Our solutions must too. If we fail to innovate in how we define independence for the current era, we are just setting ourselves up for neocolonialism.

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