By Raffique Shah
September 05, 2024

It was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I was determined to make full use of everything I heard, saw and read. By the time Independence Day came around in 1962, I had learnt a whole lot of what it meant.

I did not quite understand some of the terms the politicians and legal professionals used. I knew that as a new nation we were severing ties with Britain, but the extent of that change was clouded by the perceptions and often plain politicking of certain politicians who had their own agendas.

At age 16, I was preparing for the end-of-year Cambridge School Certificate exams, and history was one of my chosen subjects. I was good at it. Sadly, my studies focused on British and European history—typical for students of that era.

Two years or so earlier, the government under Chief Minister Dr Eric Williams, had signalled its intention to pursue independence in a format that most British colonies did. What was confusing to me was that we were told we were becoming an independent nation, yet Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth remained our head of state, our justice system was tied to Britain’s like an umbilical cord, control of our economy in large measure remained in the hands of large British companies.

For instance, the corporations that exploited our resources before and after Independence were Tate & Lyle in sugar and British Petroleum in oil. I will have noted these contradictions and moved on. In the local Parliament the opposition DLP was congratulating itself for the arrangements I thought were backward: Dr Rudranath Capildeo and his not-so-merry-men insisted on the retention of the Privy Council as our final appellate court.

They had also, during the conference in London on our Independence, argued for the creation of a number of commissions that would be appointed by a complicated process, but supposedly remaining independent of the government and opposition. How that was going to work out in a newly independent country that was generating often bitter debates on this topic was yet to be seen.

On Independence Day these were the farthest thoughts in my mind. My colleagues and I who were members of the cadet corps took pride in forming a guard of honour of sorts on the Abercromby Street entrance to the Red House.

I was there when Dr Eric Williams arrived in PM1. He was greeted by applause by large sections of the crowd that had assembled on most of the streets that border the Red House.

Also entering the Parliament chamber that day were the chief justice and other judges and very senior public service officers whose faces and names meant nothing to me.

The queen was not here for our Independence celebrations and many people felt offended by that. After some hours in the hot sun, I was happy to be relieved of my cadet duties but I remained thinking that several things did not seem to measure up to citizens’ expectations.

Of course I—schoolboy-calypsonian Lord Carlti—had not only learnt the national anthem, with which I’d annoyed my relatives and friends by singing or whistling it, but I had also mastered some of the calypsoes rendered at the calypso competition a few nights before.

I had stayed up late to give everybody a good recount of the standard of competition, which Lord Brynner (Kade Simon) had won with his racy song, “Trinidad and Tobago Independence” (“This is your land, just as well as my land”), beating Sparrow into second place; while Rocky McCollin was third.

Independence ought to have brought some happiness to citizens. It is a landmark for any nation, especially those that felt the full weight of colonialism, slavery and indentureship, as Trinidad and Tobago did.

In my youthful perception, by the time the celebrations were over and the nation had gone back to work or school, they had just about forgotten what should have been a day of pride for citizens.

The divisions in society, however, prevented such spontaneous merriment: one could see people of one ethnicity or other huddled together, whispering criticisms of “the other group”.

As a juvenile, I did not easily pick up the undercurrents that Independence accentuated. We were still learning how to practise racism. When my age group gathered at school or on playgrounds, we hardly ever considered race a factor. We were there to learn and to enjoy ourselves; that was not the time or place for race.

Unfortunately, that was not a universal truth. Parents who were influenced by their ethnicity literally passed on the poisoned words and thoughts to their offspring who would, for generations to come, continue to hand it down like a birthright.

Fortunately for us in Trinidad and Tobago, the toxicity of race was never able to permeate and pollute to extent that it did in other countries.