For my 2024 Independence column, I did something unusual. I handed most of it over to an artificial intelligence chatbot and then published its output with appropriate disclosures.
At the time, there was a national discussion around colonial symbols and the coat of arms and I wanted to look beyond symbolism to the systems that survived colonialism. I therefore gave the AI the following prompt:
“Assume that a country was fully self governed, but the ‘shackles of colonialism’ remained in place by the citizens who assumed the governance of the country. How would the country look in substance in a post independence environment. Say 50 years after independence with minor changes from its inherited colonial structures?”
The response was interesting because the AI had no knowledge of the argument I was trying to make about Trinidad and Tobago. It simply described what such a country in those circumstances would probably look like.
It suggested that political institutions inherited from the colonial power would remain largely intact, power would stay concentrated among a relatively small urban elite and decision making would continue to be centralised in the capital. Government would become bureaucratic and rigid and the wider population, especially those in rural areas, would feel distant from the State.
Economically, the country would remain dependent on a narrow range of exports, foreign corporations would retain influence over important sectors and economic diversification would prove difficult. Infrastructure would also remain uneven because the colonial system would have originally developed roads, ports and services according to the needs of the colonial economy and it’s favoured few, rather than according to the needs of the entire population.
The AI then made a point that is especially relevant today. It said the most visible manifestation of inequality could be the divide in services between the urban elite and the rural poor.
A colonial governor was not running the country after Independence. Rather the point was, we inherited a colonial State and continued to operate it with the same institutional mindset. We could change who sits in the office without changing where the office sits, who has ready access to it and how national resources flow around it.
The map
Apply a racial profile to the urban and rural geography, and this is where our discussion about post colonialism becomes uncomfortable because geography in Trinidad was never racially neutral.
Slavery, emancipation and indentureship produced different settlement patterns. After emancipation many formerly enslaved Africans moved away from the plantations. Some established villages while others gravitated towards Port of Spain and San Fernando where there were opportunities as craftsmen, builders and domestic workers.
Indian indentureship came later to solve the labour problem on the sugar estate and post indenturhip many eventually settled around those estates. That history helps explain the concentration of Indo-Trinidadian communities across Central and South Trinidad.
Every social studies student knows that East Indians became an essentially agrarian population concentrated in rural areas while Africans became comparatively more concentrated in urban areas with skilled and semi skilled occupations.
Sixty four years after Independence the pattern has weakened but it has not disappeared. The last census still shows a country where Port of Spain and parts of the metropolitan north are disproportionately Afro Trinidadian while Couva-Tabaquite-Talparo, Penal-Debe and Princes Town are disproportionately Indo Trinidadian.
Now apply my 2024 AI experiment to that map.
If the inherited colonial State concentrates ministries, administrative authority, professional services, finance, corporate headquarters, courts, cultural institutions and decision makers in and around the capital, then proximity becomes an economic resource.
If you live close to the centre you do not simply live closer to buildings. You live closer to information, employment, networks, influence and opportunity. You can get to the institution and back home faster. You know people who work there. Your children grow up seeing particular professions and institutions as part of their normal environment. Businesses are closer to regulators, bankers, lawyers, government agencies and the people who make decisions.
Distance carries a cost inverse to the above benefits.
The same is true of public resources. Roads, drainage, water, transport, health facilities, schools and government offices determine how easily a community participates in the national economy. When investment repeatedly flows to the established centre, the geography becomes a manifestation of inequality. A colonial map can therefore survive without a single colonial official remaining.
For generations people from South and Central have had to spend more time and money travelling to access government services, specialist professional services and employment concentrated in the north. The cost is not simply the price of fuel or a taxi. It is the hours lost in traffic, the narrower employment radius, the inconvenience of accessing institutions and the compounding effect of being physically removed from the networks around which decisions are made.
This is not some imagined grievance. The dormitory communities around Port of Spain comprising of people from South and Central paying rent in order to work is proof enough.
In case it is not yet clear, yes there is Point Lisas which has transformed Central Trinidad. Yes San Fernando is an important commercial centre. We have hospitals, schools, industrial estates and State facilities across the country. The issue is the underlying distribution of power, access and opportunity and the length of time it is taking to build a country that functions as a country rather than as a capital city with supporting districts.
Two colonial legacies
This is also why our racial discussion requires more maturity than we normally bring to it.
For Afro-Trinidadians, one important channel of the colonial legacy runs from slavery to emancipation without substantial economic restitution, into unequal access to assets and the continuation of class and socioeconomic hierarchies. The fact that significant numbers lived closer to the urban center did not erase that poisoned inheritance.
For Indo-Trinidadians, the channel runs from indentureship to plantation labour, then into rural settlement across Central and South, agricultural dependence and greater distance from the centralised seat of power in the capital city.
Both are colonial legacies. They are simply not the same colonial legacy.
Once you understand that, the argument that discussing the historic experience of Indo-Trinidadians somehow excludes the experience of Afro-Trinidadians becomes intellectually lazy. We should be capable of holding the two historical realities in our heads at the same time.
This brings me to the Prime Minister’s Independence Day messaging and, more importantly, the reaction to it. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar spoke about people in cane fields and lagoons, surviving difficult circumstances and using education and ownership as routes to advancement. A remarkable amount of commentary seemed unable to process that history except through the narrow lens of contemporary race and party politics.
That reaction says more about those commentators than they seem to realise.
If you understand Laventille only through the legacy of slavery, but cannot understand Barrackpore through the legacy of indentureship, you are not engaging in national analysis. If you can recognise urban poverty as structural but dismiss rural distance and historical resource inequality as political storytelling, then you are applying two different intellectual standards. You are in fact intellectually dishonest.
I am from South Trinidad and I have worked in Port-of-Spain for more than 30 years. I know both environments. There is a Port-of-Spain view of T&T that frequently mistakes proximity to national institutions for the national experience itself. If you have spent your life moving through the capital’s institutions, professional networks and media environment, it is easy to assume the country works the same way for everyone else.
It does not.
Too much of our national commentary is produced through that lens. Editors and commentators who occupy national platforms have an obligation to understand the entire country they claim to interpret. That means understanding Point Fortin, Penal, Barrackpore, Rio Claro, Princes Town, Chaguanas, Sangre Grande and Tobago with the same seriousness afforded to Port of Spain and the East-West Corridor.
You are simply not fit to comment if you cannot grasp how geography, colonial labour systems and the distribution of State resources interact. A national platform does not magically create a national perspective which is why much of traditional local media has made themselves irrelevant.
That may sound harsh but this is exactly the problem my AI experiment highlighted two years ago. A post-colonial country can keep reproducing colonial outcomes when it never redesigns the State and its agents around the geography and circumstances of all its citizens.
Independence was not simply about changing who governed T&T. It was supposed to give us the capacity to govern differently. Sixty four years later, maybe the most important Independence conversation is why we haven’t and how to fix it.
Ian Narine is a financial consultant who understands that the distance from Port of Spain to San Fernando is the same as the distance from San Fernando to Port of Spain. Please send your comments to ian@iannarine.com.
