“Independence” within Coloniality

As we move on after our week-long euphoria of celebrating our 60th anniversary of our independence, we have to re-examine the substance of that “independence”, even as the two political protagonists pushing for independence – Jagan and Burnham – offered competing critiques of the colonial order and what was to replace it. Britain and its successor, the USA, offered the old, ironically named “Liberal” paradigm that had produced slavery and indentureship but was now fiercely anti-communist.
The ideological attempts to peel off the effects of colonialism in Guyana ranged from Jagan’s Marxism from the 1940s to Black Power in the 1960s and 70s, challenging Burnham’s “cooperative socialism” after he was handed “independence” for his assistance in removing Jagan. But after the 1980s, the ideological battles petered out with the end of the Cold War, and we supposedly arrived at “the end of ideology”. After Burnham’s socialist cooperative experiment ended disastrously, the PNC adopted – and the PPP continued – the neoliberal principles of the Washington Consensus in 1989, which collapsed in 2008.
One radical synthesising critique of the new, supposedly independent order was presented by the Latin American theorist Aníbal Quijano, which he called the “Coloniality of Power”. He demonstrated that while “colonialism” might have ended, its structural features, dubbed “coloniality”, remain firmly in place. Quijano posits that we were all conscripted by a European-defined “modernity” that began in 1492 with the conquest of the Americas. Modernity developed and extended the structures of power, control, and hegemony that emerged during the era of colonialism. He posits that the coloniality of power takes three forms: systems of (racial) hierarchies, systems of knowledge, and cultural systems.
Race was created to justify the enslavement of Africans using Christian myths, including a “Great Chain of Being” with God on top, followed by his angels, then mankind, with Whites on top and Blacks at the bottom. Other groups, like Indians and Chinese, were placed in intermediate positions – for which they fought each other to maintain their subaltern statuses. Remember the newly-minted lawyer Gandhi insisting that as a “Caucasian”, he shouldn’t be treated like a “Kaffir” in South Africa?! Race still matters and complicates intergroup relations created in multi-ethnic colonies like Guyana. It is ironic that we are still fighting while Whites globally remain on top.
Quijano asserts, in addition to racial classification and slavery, “The other process was the constitution of a new structure of control of labour and its resources and products.” The global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans and non-Europeans was an integral part of the development of the capitalist world system. That included transitional forms such as indentureship, in which the control of labour was guaranteed without the moral opprobrium of slavery. The Girmit/indentured, then, is an important cog in the extension of coloniality from slavery. They represent the contradictions inherent in the myth of “free labour” from slave labour in the “accumulation by dispossession” stage of capitalism.
The “systems of knowledge” should be especially relevant to the academics at our local university. Quijano writes, “Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony.” This leads to the third element of the coloniality of power – the creation of cultural systems that revolve around a Eurocentric hierarchy and that enforce Eurocentric economic and knowledge production systems. We all ape Eurocentric norms in which we will invariably be second-class.
We, therefore, all live within a multiplicity of colonialities: conquest and modernity; race; the nation; sexuality; motherhood; the hegemonic mind, etc. For us to have a clear idea as to what we hope to accomplish for real independence, we need to appreciate the constraints at the individual, group, state/nation, and global levels. For instance, why should we look down racially/ethnically at other groups when we ourselves are suffering from that scorn from others through hierarchies of race? Shouldn’t we fight for equity and equality of opportunity for all groups in each country we live in, plus gender justice and environmental sustainability?
Flight to the metropolitan countries is not the answer: we see the contradictions playing out there in virulent nativism and racism. As the western-dominated world system crumbles after 200 years, “natives” fleeing its contradictions in the periphery would gravitate to the metropoles to face a seething, anti-immigrant machinery that combines racist populism with arbitrary applications of the rule of law. Let us instead focus on building an equitable Guyana.