Noble: Nation-building musings—is T&T under construction or destruction?

“On August 31, 1962, a country will be free, a miniature state will be established, but a society and a nation will not have been formed.

“After August 31, 1962, the people of Trinidad and Tobago will face the fiercest test in their history—whether they can invest with flesh and blood the bare skeleton of their national anthem: here, every creed and race find an equal place. That is their challenge.

“They may fail… But merely to make the attempt, merely to determine to succeed, would be an enormous tribute to their capacity, a powerful inspiration to frustrated humanity.”

Dr Eric Williams, the History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago.

Understanding this aspiration helps us to frame our discussion about our diverted Independence celebrations.

Benedict Anderson (1991) warned of the struggle to create a nation. He argued in his renowned book Imagined Communities: “It (ethnic or communal identity) is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

While we sing all ah we is one family, the reality is that numerous identities exist around the axes of race, culture, language, religion, and place of residence. Our politicians have leveraged these differences to serve their own interests.

For this reason, Derek Walcott (The Antilles 1992) could write: “The sigh of history rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.”

What are our national symbols which would unify us? What role does the Parade fill? We no longer sing the national songs and wonder why nobody cares about our nation. What unifies us?

We are witnessing a contestation over what Independence means and what it means to our immediate kinship group. We saw in our newspaper pages and online comments, the question being raised about ‘what Independence’? What do we have to celebrate?

What is absent is a recognition of what every creed and race needs. What do our children need?

Last year, among the crowd in attendance, were five youths from a Laventille group. One of them had never even seen a live horse before. Are such experiences without value?

Dr Williams wrote: “Together, the various groups in Trinidad and Tobago have suffered, together they have aspired, together they have achieved. Only together can they succeed. And only together can they build a society, can they build a nation, can they build a homeland.”

Our lack of knowledge about our colonial past condemns us. The advent of social media clouds our eyes, and we forget where we came from and our struggles.

Several ethnic groups occupied our land—among them were the Africans, Chinese and the East Indians (to distinguish them from the Amerindians, the original dwellers). The white planter class held the power. Initially, all but the Africans came to get wealth and to return from whence they came. The Africans were the feedstock of the chattel slavery era.

Thirty-two years before Emancipation, a small group of Chinese arrived in Trinidad. They had been introduced as an experiment in solving the anticipated problem of a labour shortage on the estates.

The Chinese were appalled at the work they were given. The whole experiment was a disaster. They had come a very long way—about 9,000 nautical miles—to accomplish very little. The Chinese were more willing to integrate with other groups.

After Emancipation, the Indian indentured servants arrived and were allocated to the various estates. They were housed in what, in many instances, were the ‘Negro quarters’.

It was a hard life, under harsh conditions, that was justifiably described as ‘a new system of slavery’. They were often ghettoised on the estates they worked for.

Their contractual arrangements were abused, their religious rituals proscribed, their marriages not recognised, and social ostracism forced them into protective clannishness (and then they were criticised for not mixing with the broader society). Cultural erasure had always been an overt goal of the colonisers.

“In general, most Indians could limit their contacts with others to a minimum. If they lived in rural settlements, the village community and the extended family cushioned them from wider contacts. This was strikingly illustrated by the reluctance of Indian men to cohabit with Creole women.

“Perhaps, the Indians who were mostly Hindus from northern India brought with them the caste-linked Indian contempt which reinforced the existing race and colour prejudices in the host society.” (Brereton, 1981).

To be a dougla (the offspring of Indo-African unions) carried the meaning of a person of impure breed explicitly related to the “progeny of inter-varnai marriage, acquiring the connotation of ‘bastard’, meaning illegitimate son of a prostitute, only in a secondary sense” (Reddock 1994).

This history of division is what makes the Hosay Massacre unique. Indian indentured immigrants, during Hosay, left the estates and paraded through San Fernando in honour of the Muslim martyrs Hassan and Husayn.

On the other hand, Canboulay displayed a marked black presence in Port of Spain with a reenactment of cane burnings reminiscent of enslavement. The government of the day sought to suppress both processions.

In San Fernando, the African potboilers joined the East Indian indentured workers to protest.

“The Canboulay Riots of 1881 and 1884—significantly, the latter occurring in the same year and town as the Hosay Massacre—represented Afro-Trinidadian resistance to colonial suppression of Carnival, an event deeply rooted in the cultural expressions of formerly enslaved people.”

Both served as cultural expressions and as acts of resistance against colonial suppression, uniting marginalised communities in defiance of oppressive systems.

We stumble when discussing the suspension of the Independence Day parade without appreciating the history of keeping the dominant ethnic groups separate. (The more we read about the State of Emergency, the more cartoonish the affair appears.)

Is it that the President, the Prime Minister, the Chief Justice and government ministers will not attend the carded National Prayer Meeting? Or will some ministers and Hindu devotees attend the Ganesh Utsav celebrations instead?

We forget the 1970 marches’ attempt to unite the two major groups and the intervention by Badase Sagan Maraj and Dr Eric Williams.

Dr Claudius Fergus’ exposition is required reading. He also references Dr Bridget Brereton’s account of a reversal of the Hosay Massacre, when a dockworkers’ strike soon spread island-wide and included plantation-based Indian labourers in several districts as well as urban Indians and Africans.

What are we doing to unify the nation? Are we witnessing a sleight of hand approach to managing the country?

We forget the Point Lisas Estate development that Dr Williams financed at the expense of his home constituency. Dr Trevor Farrell’s book, The Worship of the Golden Calf, published posthumously in 2022, described the scale of such investments. He identified it as at the intersection of colonialism, neo-colonialism and backwardness.

 

“The resources that can be committed to a large industrial project can be nothing short of immense. These projects can represent a major share of the investment capital a country is ploughing into the future.

“Further, the economic significance of such projects may be even greater than implied by their share of a country’s gross or net capital formation.”

Dr Williams imagined that the Estate would lead to ‘economic development not only of the South but the whole country’. It did not happen. The wealth and jobs largely remained in the South.

To mimic JD Vance at the Ukraine meeting: have the beneficiaries ever expressed gratitude to the East Port of Spain communities? These deprived communities remain neglected and abused by all, including the PNM.

Justin Ram, an IDB economist, raised interesting questions about our country’s development, which we should consider while celebrating our Independence. He could be speaking about the Laventille constituencies.

He noted that “the major losers from our current economic model are many citizens who cannot find meaningful employment in their domestic market, and the education system has little to no incentive to provide high-quality education for all except for a few, because of the poor labour market outcomes in this type of economy.”

 

Some got rich, the others sucked salt. Does that build a nation?

“[Our] national character, as developed and encouraged by generations of slavery and colonialism… pronounced materialism and disastrous individualism have spread to all parts of the fabric of the society.

“[…] The political parties are riddled with individualism. The trade unions are riddled with individualism. The professions are riddled with individualism. Each seeks aggrandisement at the expense of his neighbour, giving rise to attitudes that threaten equality of opportunity and jeopardise political democracy.”

VS Naipaul quoted by Dr Eric Williams, in the History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago.

How do we rectify that scourge?

In 1962, Dr Williams pronounced: “only together can they build a society, can they build a nation, can they build a homeland. There can be no Mother India, for those whose ancestors came from India… there can be no Mother Africa, for those of African origin.

“There can be no Mother England and no dual loyalties… There can be no Mother China, even if one could agree as to which China is the Mother; and there can be no Mother Syria and no Mother Lebanon.

“A nation, like an individual, can have only one Mother. The only Mother we recognise is Mother Trinidad and Tobago, and Mother cannot discriminate between her children.”

Mrs Kamla Persad Bissessar said essentially the same thing twice: “But we have no Mother Europe, Mother India, Mother Africa, or Mother China. We only have our beloved Mother Trinidad and Tobago.

“There are, however, our Great Grandmothers India, Africa, Europe, China, and the Middle East.”

At this year’s Indian Arrival Day celebration, she said: “I urge all citizens to always remember that, no matter what our backgrounds may be or which motherland all our ancestors once called home, we remain the privileged inheritors of this great nation they came to and sacrificed their lives to build for us.”

She added: “Let us never forget, then, our duty to their memory—to continue to build our TT into a place of peace, tolerance, happiness, and progress for all of our citizens.”

Should we evaluate her administration’s actions based on these words? Is national unity being built? Are we honouring national or sectarian memory?

How could we choose a single site (laden with ethno-religious significance) to host a national prayer meeting? Will religious people from Mayaro or Point Fortin travel to Chaguanas for prayers? Or are we busing them in?

Stung by the Prime Minister’s politicalised taunt, what does the PNM do? Can we evaluate them now?

What does the PNM mean by limiting their response (Pan on the Avenue and Family days) to their strongholds? How do they motivate the missing 100,000 votes? Have they ceded the La Brea, Point Fortin and Tobago? Has the PNM retreated to being an urban party?

In discussing the impact of a fake doctor, Dr Joel Teelucksingh had this to say.

“And if you think about it, the fake doctor might actually be less harmful: at least patients can spot his fraud after a few botched prescriptions.

“Politicians, on the other hand, lie with a smile, a flag pin, and a rehearsed bow, and generations later, we’re still treating the wounds.” (Emphasis is mine.)

Let’s build a nation together!