Jubilee and the National Question

By Ravi Dev

I have always had mixed emotions when thinking about our “independence”.  I am old enough to have experienced first-hand the violent wrenching apart of our peoples that preceded this supposedly blessed state and left it in quotation marks for me ever since.

I was in short-pants as the police fired tear gas to clear “peaceful protesters” squatting on my primary schools steps at Uitvlugt during the 80-day strike of 1962. It was an open secret, known even by schoolboys, that the British and the US wanted the PPP out and that the independence that was to come to Trinidad that year should have then been ours also.

By 1963 we had three schools in the three sections of my village as the madness continued – mainly in Georgetown. But I remember collecting paper “axes” at a UF Rally as they excoriated the “communist PPP” and demanded citizens “axe the tax”.

Then, of course, there was the denouement of 1964, as Cheddi (as even schoolboys referred to him) made one last-ditch, eventually futile, attempt to reverse a history written (and funded) by “the best and brightest” of the West. 1964 saw ethnic cleansing in our country even before the term was invented.

Even then, I had my doubts “independence” could deliver us to the promised land of economic development and political equality, which the politicians had promised could be ours once the “white man” was gone. It didn’t strike me as likely, given the deepening divisions I witnessed all around me every day in every activity – whether in school or in the wider world.

Everything was defined as “us” and “them”. I found the announced “national” motto, “One People, One Nation, One Destiny” rather ironic – even as an aspiration, given the continuation of opportunistic ethnically centred politics.

The rigging of the 1968 elections deepened my scepticism. We were attempting to achieve an end-state in Guyana that our model – Britain, Europe and the US had achieved only after undergoing, sequentially over many centuries, three massive macro-societal revolutions – centred on national identity, political participation and economic distribution.

That we had inherited a state and not a nation was supposed to be solved by a “motto”. England and the other European states had honed a “national” outlook in their peoples after centuries of often brutal persecutions, inquisitions and pogroms that suppressed expressions of differences.

These methods were rightfully rejected by the time of our independence and it ought not to surprise many that the lack of a ‘national” will has proven to be our Achilles heel in our quest for “development”. What has been surprising is the stubborn refusal by our elites, even in the present when it has been demonstrated even in our putative models that suppressed identities cannot be obliterated and must be given expression.

Our politicians, steeped in Marxist-Leninist lore, defined us as Homo economicus and concentrated on “economic” development as if that could be disjunctured from the need for identity and group worth. The strand of thought that suggested that “man does not live by bread alone” was derided as “backward. Eusi Kwayana became a voice in the wilderness, when he raised concerns about race and identity.

What has also been surprising is that politicians expect us to act as ‘one people’ when in their mobilisation initiatives, they plunge into activities that exacerbate the divide and even spill over into open hostilities.

How were we expected to pull together post-independence after the ethnically directed violence and ethnic cleansing of the early sixties, rigged elections after 1968, ethnically directed “kick-down-the-door bandits” after the seventies?

And in the last decade how can we have “social cohesion” after ethnically directed violence by criminals and state-backed private contractors created killing fields on the East Coast Demerara.

We have called for a truth and reconciliation commission since 1998. Maybe in the year of our Independence Jubilee, the time has come?