IN Guyana, Monday was Caricom Day, a national holiday in honour of the Caricom dream. It’s a celebration and commitment to many ideals that remain elusive.
During the slave trade, history records that there were occasions when one ship will drop off enslaved people on one island in the Caribbean Sea and continue on to several islands delivering enslaved Africans and all along the journey pick up agricultural produce to take to Europe.
In some cases, the main ship will put off its cargo of enslaved humans at a single port where slave traders, middlemen and brokers will bundle their human cargo to other islands in smaller boats. The same was done with Indentured Servants.
Before our individual territories gained independence, we were one market space with freedom of movement as colonies of the Crown and British Overseas Territories. We all hoisted the Union Jack, we all sung God Save the Queen. We had the same school system, and for the most part, we had the same structure of economies. We cut cane with machete on the sugar plantations and started the boilers to churn sugar; we sent most of it to the UK and wider Europe. On the smaller Islands, our people head up the mountains to cultivate banana to send to Europe, and on most occasions, these products sailed on the same boat.
Many migrated to the very “motherland” and formed close knitted West Indian communities. Most of our brilliant sons and daughters converged at the same universities in the “motherland” they studied many of the same programmes. They shared the same burden to break the chains of colonialism.
Many came back to their home islands and fought synchronously for independence. Out of a common struggle, similar national mottos were birthed; “One people, One Nation, One Destiny”; “Together we aspire, together we achieve”; “Out of Many, One People”; “Ever conscious of God we aspire, build and advance as one people.” The fabric and structure of our culture, language, food, music, lifestyle, education and government are essentially the same.
Something changed in our territories after independence. The major changes took place at the level of government not among our people. The leaders seem to have been cut from the same cloth, they knew very well that our people prefer to live together, unhindered by definition of economic space and inter-territory movement. However, the taste of individual island power originating from a governance structure banqueted by a monarchial system that seemed to infuse a self-aggrandising intoxicating use of power and triumph of individualism.
Having also inherited, West Indies Cricket and several other common organs, our leaders set out to appease by entering into a treaty. With the very treaty, they set up implementation rules that has built in mechanisms to make it slow, painful and subject to general agreements to talk and talk.
The political process in each territory is of such that fear mongering about our minor differences became easy targets for political canvassing, so we shifted our lingo from proud West Indian to proud Jamaican, Guyanese, Bajan and Trini.
We are now stuck with an illusion of unity under the banner of Caricom when essentially, Caricom represents an undoing of freedoms we already shared and enjoyed with a promise to rebuild it.
Caricom remains an unrealised dream. We all have hope; our peoples have hope but we continue to rely on successive governments that are unwilling to cede some of their colonial-like power that the very colonisers did a better job at unifying the region.
Despite the challenges, like most ordinary citizens of the region, we continue to hope. Yes! I still have hope that our leaders can develop the collective courage to simply return regional movement of people and goods to pre-independence state and improve on that.
It’s not that hard, each of the territories have model legislation, some have already passed legislation that they do not act on. Caricom is at the crossroads, we either free our people and production from the clutches of self-interest and trod the path of passport free travel between Barbados and Guyana or seriously invoke Guyana’s Irfaan Ali’s two-word doctrine – Full Reciprocity. This week, Gros Islet Saint Lucia beckons.