TWO days ago the logo for the 50th anniversary commemoration of our independence was revealed. It in effect signalled the beginning of activities to mark this most significant anniversary. Why is this anniversary so important? Some have asked what is there to celebrate. Others have pronounced on our non-achievement these five decades. Many have cited our politics of rancour and division as evidence of the failure of independence. The poverty we inherited from the plantations still stares us in the face.
A lot of those questions and the pessimism that accompany them arise from a place that conceptualises independence as the absence of challenges and oppression. The end of colonialism did not mean the cessation of the social relations that characterised colonisation or the transformation of a world order grounded in the dictates of colonial political economy. Independence, therefore, was the beginning of a new phase of struggle for freedom
After centuries of denial, on May 26, 1966, we embarked on the journey of nationhood. In effect, independence meant overcoming that denial—a denial of life, love, identity, humanity and freedom. We signalled to the world that we were equal human beings ready to chart our own destiny. Against all odds, we had made the miraculous journey from plantation to nation. But those who denied our humanity were not done with us; we were embarking on our independence in a world that was not constructed to accommodate us as a free people.
The ideologues of colonialism thought we could not exist in a state of freedom. If one believes a people are incapable of living as free people, one invariably sets out to prove it. But more than that, one sets out to convince that people of their incapability. That was a primary challenge of independence—could we govern ourselves as a free people?
The truth is that 50 years after we declared our independence, our Guyana is still here—we have survived. If there is nothing else to observe, that alone is worth observing and celebrating. We often underestimate the power of survival. If you are striving for liberation, you have to first of all survive oppression. Survival is the mother of independence and freedom.
Our foreparents had to survive slavery and indentureship so that emancipation and independence could be possible. As it turns out, our primary challenge during the last 50 years was surviving a hostile world that was unwilling to guarantee global equality and freedom. Self-determination and self-reliance for newly independent nations were enemies of the prevailing global order.
We have survived. But have we survived with our collective dignity intact? Have we carved out a national ethos from our act of survival? Have we crafted a social and ethnic equality out of our survival of global inequality? Have we found a national voice with an echo of inclusion? These questions must form the basis of our reflections as we commemorate our 50th anniversary of independence and survival.