What are we building?

In Matthew 16:13–20, Jesus asks His disciples a deceptively simple question: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Peter responds with conviction: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Identity matters in this Gospel—but Jesus does not leave Peter there. Almost at once, identity becomes foundation, responsibility, construction: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.”

Perhaps there is a question here for Trinidad and Tobago too—one that goes beyond our increasingly repetitive arguments about who came from where and who owns what. What are we building? What have we already built together?

We remain strangely preoccupied with reducing ourselves to our ancestral points of departure but there is another fact that deserves greater attention: Trinidad and Tobago happened.

People arrived here under different circumstances: Indigenous peoples were already here; others came as colonisers, some enslaved, some indentured, some as migrants seeking opportunity. These histories cannot and should not be flattened into equivalence. Yet neither should history be frozen.

Generations were born here. They worked, traded, argued, intermarried, worshipped, cooked, celebrated, mourned, and raised children together. Languages changed. Food changed. Music changed. Religious and cultural practices met and crossed boundaries. What emerged was not simply Africa transplanted, India transplanted or Europe transplanted.

That is why the impulse to assign every cultural expression exclusively to one racial community can obscure a more fascinating truth: traditions may have identifiable roots, but many were shaped into their present form in this Caribbean space.

The uncomfortable colonial question

Here we might risk saying something unfashionable: not everything produced through the colonial encounter can be understood solely through the lens of loss.

Colonialism brought grave injustices that cannot be sanitised. Christianity itself must acknowledge the times the Gospel was compromised by accommodation with these systems.

The colonial period also created the circumstances in which peoples from different continents encountered one another on these islands. Institutions, languages, legal traditions, education, architecture, religious practice, and civic life all developed within that history. Some were imposed, some resisted, some adapted, some turned into tools by people who were never their intended beneficiaries.

English itself is an obvious example. It came through colonialism, yet it is now ours.

Christianity offers an even deeper example. It arrived entangled with European colonial expansion, but Christ does not belong to Europe. Today, the Church here speaks with its own voice, culture, theology, and experience.

Look around Trinidad and Tobago and the evidence is everywhere. Food is perhaps the easiest example. The instinct to divide everything neatly into ‘African food’ and ‘Indian food’ falls apart around an actual Trinidadian table, where ingredients, techniques, names and customs have crossed communities for generations.

The same is true of language, music, festivals, humour and even the way we practise religion.

What began within particular communities entered the wider national life. That does not erase origins—it simply acknowledges that culture is alive. People who share a place for generations inevitably shape one another.

The child who grows up eating doubles, pelau, pastelles, and chow is not conducting an anthropological exercise in different ethnic cultures. That child is eating Trinidad and Tobago.

Upon this rock

Jesus’ words to Peter ultimately point beyond identity towards vocation: “Upon this rock I will build my church.”

Previous generations made something from extraordinarily complicated beginnings. Our task cannot simply be to dismantle that inheritance into its original racial components. We must build upon it.

That means strengthening institutions instead of merely complaining about them; forming young people who believe they have a future here; taking responsibility for our neighbourhoods; demanding integrity in public life while practising it privately; building businesses and opportunities; protecting the vulnerable; caring for the environment; producing art, music, scholarship and ideas; and rediscovering the ordinary civic responsibility without which no nation survives.