NEXT year Guyana would be celebrating 50 years as an independent nation. Our sister CARICOM nation, Barbados, also celebrates its 50th anniversary. These two Caribbean countries followed Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago who celebrated their 50th anniversaries four years ago. So the Caribbean is 50 years old. While we are young nations, we are no longer children. In some respects we have grown up.The last 50 years can be described as the transition period. But our transition from plantation to nation was full of challenges. When we became independent in the turbulent 1960s the world was a different place. The raging Cold War meant that independence was not as straightforward as it seemed.
The primary challenge for the Region, therefore, was how to create new nations out of the sordid legacy of slavery and colonialism — how to create a national economy that responded first and foremost to the needs of the Caribbean peoples? How to create nations that reflect the identity of their peoples rather than that of their former masters? How to create a political democracy out of a political history and culture that were authoritarian in nature? How to transform a Region of poverty into a Region of opportunity and material advancement?

The new leaders, armed with very little experience in political governance, were challenged to fashion a democratic form of governance out of fragile institutions and a less than democratic political culture. The withdrawing rulers left a political order whose democratic form masked a less than democratic content. In this regard, the Caribbean leaderships were challenged to maintain not only the integrity of whatever democratic forms they inherited from the British, but also to upgrade them with the aim of confronting and overcoming the endemic inequalities left behind by colonialism.

They were also challenged to balance the competing demands of the two dominant groups in the society – the middle class, including the economic elite, and the working poor. The latter group, which had fuelled the anti-colonial rebellion, had definite expectations of the new political order in terms of their own material and social well-being.
It was also expected that the alliance with the middle classes, so pivotal to the success of the independence movement, would continue in the post-colonial era, leading to a society in which the working class would be brought into the mainstream of the independent nations.
So, given those challenges, how have we in Guyana done these past 50 years? We have had our own peculiar challenges, courtesy of our plural nature. As we move into the next half century, it is a good time to take stock of our independence. It is important that we do a thorough examination of the last 50 years to determine what we did right and where we went wrong. We owe it to ourselves, particularly the younger generations whose task it would be to see us through the next period. In this regard, a series of 50-50 conversations at all levels of our society is very much in order.