Jamaica 60
We are celebrating 60 years of independence, and it is important to understand what this means as well as what it does not mean. As of 1962, our elected representatives were no longer officially subordinate to the elected representatives of the United Kingdom, the country that we were once a colony of. While we unfortunately continue to maintain the British monarch as our official head of state, our government can now make decisions without them being overruled by politicians in London.
What we are really celebrating then is the independence of our political class from the British political class. It would be dishonest to deny that this was a progressive step forward from the explicitly colonial situation we were in before, we must be under no illusion about where we are now in terms of independence and sovereignty. Relics of colonialism still remain officially, and we have to deal with Neo-Colonialism where colonial relationships still remain even while we are not officially a colony.
As noted, the British monarch remains the head of state of Jamaica, a country she goes decades without visiting. The British royal family does not have to experience life here and is in no place to represent us as a people. Politicians floated the idea of becoming a republic for decades, without taking any serious steps to begin the process, and want to rush it without thoroughly doing things like critically looking at our constitution and political system. The struggle for reparations has also not been taken seriously; British politicians are considered the friends of our local political class despite their mockery of our demands for reparations.
Even while we have the right to vote for our representatives, it still does not feel like we really have power as a people. There is not much that we can do when politicians break promises that they make on the campaign trail, and the visibility of any political movement in modern Jamaica is determined by wealthy individuals who own the media and contribute the bulk of campaign funds so that they can influence the electoral process without having to stand in long lines to vote. We are therefore in a situation where there is an entrenched political class whose power depends on their ability to please the wealthy elites rather than the masses. Two parties with barely anything different between them trade power like a ping pong ball while the rest of us sit as spectators and pretend that we live in a country where people exercise power.
An even more powerful force than local capital is foreign capital. Our government sometimes seems to be subordinate to foreign governments and foreign investors, allowing itself to be a pawn of multinational Capitalists and Western imperialists. Rather than serving our own people, our economy seems to be set up to serve foreigners in multiple ways. Foreign investors are being allowed to grab land to displace our own nationals, tourists seem to be able to enjoy the natural beauty of our lands more than we can, and we seem to foolishly take pride in low-value exports that end up supporting industries in other countries.
We barely produce food for ourselves, and we have not industrialised to maintain the value of or add value to agricultural output. This is is important because it was a dynamic set in place by colonialism that we have to break out of. As a colony, we were expected to produce raw materials to support industry in Britain, while industrialisation was not allowed here because our workers were not deemed worthy of high-paying jobs and our lands were not deemed worthy of development beyond doing the bare minimum to ensure resource extraction. Today, we continue to remain a source of cheap labour to pamper tourists and to work in BPOs (call centers have replaced garment sweatshops).
Another major legacy of colonialism is the question of land. The white families that owned plantations and enslaved our ancestors are still very wealthy, while many descendants of enslaved people struggle to find secure land and housing. Save for the few members of each generation who get lucky to tell success stories, most people suffer from the entrenched inequality of the colonial system that was imposed on us.
The ruling class, the business and political elites, are celebrating the illusion of social and racial harmony even though none exists. They want us to believe that "independence" marks a hard barrier between the past and present, where the contradictions of race and class no longer matter or exist.
Again, 60 years of independence is a great achievement but we have much more to do. We do not want this milestone to be dismissed as insignificant, but we want greater for our people. Beware of the members of the economic elite and the political elite who want us to settle for what we have now rather than strive for greater; many are using the celebrations to distract us from their role in the injustices that have happened and that continue to happen today. Let us work towards real independence and the liberation of our people.