Prior to becoming a Co-operative Republic on the 23rd February 1970, Pastor Fiedtkou suggested to the Jaycees that the celebration at Linden be called Mashramani.

It was from this Mashramani celebrated by the Linden Jaycees that the national festival, Mashramani, emerged to celebrate the Co-operative Republic Day on the 23rd February each year.

Tota Mangar, writing in ‘History This Year’, posits that it would have been extremely difficult to come up with a more appropriate name for such a major national event. After all, our history is replete with the cooperative spirit and cooperative efforts by people of diverse backgrounds.

Working together on a cooperative basis, on communally shared activities, represents an inherent quality in the day-to-day activities of indigenous Guyanese, especially the Arawak tribe. It represents the ethos of cohesion that lies at the heart of the Amerindian way of life.

Mashramani is an Amerindian word, basically Arawak in origin, which means, in essence, “a celebratory festivity after a cooperative effort or venture.” It grew out of the feasting and dancing, or any mass celebration that characterized spontaneous joy consequent upon the successful completion of land preparation and cassava planting, or even hunting and raiding expeditions by our indigenous peoples.

Co-operative efforts hallmarked the very existence of our ancestors on various fronts, but mainly in the labour, social, and political arenas.

The sterling contributions by the Father of Trade Unionism in Guyana, Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow, and others in the early 20th century contributed immensely to labour organization and the formation of trade unions to improve pay and working conditions for the Guyanese labour force.

Mangar laments that the efforts by our two major political leaders, Dr. Cheddi Jagan and Mr. Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, to awaken the political consciousness of the Guyanese people was derailed by foreign intervention, which created a serious rift between these leaders that still adversely affects the cohesion of our people and consequently the development paradigm of our country.

Mashramani, which engenders a spirit of camaraderie and the evocation of pride of things Guyanese that transcends the divides, does much to heal the wounded soul of this nation.

However, it is incumbent upon all national leaders to pursue the primary objective of transforming this unity of celebration to transcend this one day and impregnate the continuous processes of endeavour and development as a priority if this nation is to withstand natural and global forces that makes our country’s survival, and the quality of our survival, vulnerable to natural and external forces.

Our freedom is subjective, dependent on the not-so-tender mercies of the international power-brokers, who use Third World countries as pawns on their chessboards in their eternal quest for resource-acquisition and domination.

The ostensible conference of freedom was a mere symbolic gesture, because constitutional delinquency then prevailed and the seven years development plan (see Dr. Jagan’s West on Trial” for details) depended heavily on support from Britain, which never quite relinquished its stranglehold on this nation’s economy, thus compromising its autonomy.

Kwame Nkrumah, defining neo-colonialism and the subjective independence granted to colonized countries in his book “Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Colonialism” states: The essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, its economic system, and thus its political system is directed from outside.”

Liberty is relative. When we are not allowed by those who have orchestrated themselves into guardians of this country’s purse-strings to determine the processes of this country’s revenue-management, then that subjectivity is comparable to national captivity, equating a Government and its people to mere pawns on an internationally-scaled economic chessboard.

Economic domination by foreign powers and resultant national subservience as the Guyanese workforce bends its knees before the inhuman conditionalities of external funding agencies, to which the human factor is an entirely negligible quotient in their fiscal programmes, ostensibly targeting human development, is irony indeed.

Factored into this equation are the forces fighting to divide this nation in primary pursuit of agendas configured toward self-aggrandizement.

So the Guyanese nation remains, in many ways, divided unto itself, blind to the reality that true freedom, economic and otherwise, does not fructify from destruction of the production systems, the infrastructural networks, and the social construct, but rather from a unity of purpose to reach a common goal – the goal of a nation united in the struggle for a liberated economy, which is the primary factor that would eventuate in national prosperity and optimum social development.

It is only when this nation has broken the shackles of economic dependency can we realize our potential as a truly free people, with all the resultant implications, all resonating with upward-spiraling mobility and indicators.

Centuries after giving Socrates hemlock that nation still carries the stigma, but the ideas that that great philosopher expounded soars over the centuries and into the minds and souls of the world’s greatest thinkers.

Enchaining our potential for true freedom – a liberated economy, freedom of expression – so courageously pursued by H.E. President Jagdeo in his struggles on the various international fronts, even when some of his adversaries are aggressors who benefit directly from his contentions against adverse global imperatives, freedom of association; in effect all the freedoms that constitute democracy, would forever keep us a captive nation.

Slavery and domination are relative, and to be a truly free people we need to allow the concept of unity and cooperativism inherent in the spirit of Mashramani to prevail over our prejudices and myopia so that we can break all frontiers in our development dimensions.