Trinidad and Tobago at 64: Take Me Home

As Trinidad and Tobago approaches its 64th anniversary of Independence, the most important question is not how old we are, but how faithfully we have lived the promise with which we began.

Dr Eric Williams saw the challenge clearly. On the eve of nationhood, he thoughtfully adapted an older judgement on emancipation to suit our own situation: “Two races have been freed, but a society has not been formed.”

Independence, he argued, demanded more than boundaries, flag, anthem and flower; it demanded that we forge a nation “out of the discordant elements and … rival colours” that had made us. That was the unfinished work of 1962: to turn a population into a people.

Williams knew how audacious the demand was. In his Independence address, he told a nation drawn from every corner of the Earth that it could no longer live by ancestral loyalties. “There can be no Mother India… no Mother Africa… no Mother England… no Mother China… no Mother Syria and no Mother Lebanon,” he declared. “A nation, like an individual, can have only one Mother.”

Our National Anthem sang the same dream—”Side by side we stand,” pledging our lives to a land where “every creed and race find an equal place.”

Sixty-four years later, how have we done?

A parable in steel

Let me answer with an image entirely our own. The wartime American presence brought oil and left the bay of Port of Spain littered with discarded drums. From that refuse—the cast-off metal of the yards, the containers the first world had used and thrown away—the poorest among us hammered out something the world had never known: the steelpan. Waste was made to sing and became our gift to the world.

This is no mere origin story. It is a parable of whom we are called to be. If we can take the discarded oil drum of empire and make from it an instrument of joy, then nothing in our national life—no wound, no division, no inheritance of pain—lies beyond transformation.

What we have built

We must never tell our story as though Independence was a failure; that would insult the generations who built this country. In the life of any nation, 64 years is young, and its founding promises would still need to be proven. Ours are still testing us.

We created and sustained a parliamentary democracy, a professional public service and an independent judiciary; we built schools from early childhood to university and a health system that by 2010 had lifted literacy near 99 per cent (PAHO); we turned oil and gas into roads, hospitals and housing, and produced world-class scholars, artists, athletes and professionals.

And we have done something we too often underestimate: we have learnt, imperfectly but truly, to live together. Hindu, Muslim and Christian holy days belong to one national calendar. Divali lights shine from homes that are not Hindu; Muslims share sawine; Christians open their tables to their neighbours. Steelpan, Calypso, Chutney and Soca tell the story of peoples who met one another and made something that could only have been born here.

This is not nothing. It is nation-building.

The promise still unfulfilled

Yet an anniversary must be more than congratulations. Williams put the question to the new nation directly: “What use will you make of your independence?” At 64, we must answer.

Our anthem promises that every creed and race will find an equal place, yet race remains a powerful influence in our politics, and at moments of tension, ancestral fears wake with alarming speed.

Class has carved out another Trinidad and Tobago. In some instances, children of every race inherit schooling, supportive networks, and security. Meanwhile, other children—of all races—are born where violence, fragile families and thin opportunity can stunt their future, before it even begins.

Democracy, for Williams, always meant more than elections; it was about “equality of opportunity for all in education, in the public service, and in private employment,” and “the protection of the weak against the strong.” Looking at these ideals, we still have work to do.

Crime has wounded our national imagination. Too many citizens fear one another; too many young men believe the legitimate economy has no place for them; too many of us speak of certain communities as though they were another country. There is a bitter irony in it: Laventille, the hill where the pan was born, is now named mostly for its dead. The place that gave the nation its proudest sound we have too often left to its wounds.

Beneath race, class and crime lies a deeper crisis still—a crisis of belonging. Do I hold this country as ours, or as a place from which to take what I can for myself and my own?

That is the question at 64. And here the pan speaks again.

From refuse to covenant

Freetown Collective, in ‘Take Me Home’ from their album The Covenant, refuses the tired story that the nation is finished, that there is only crime, that the sensible thing is to leave.

The singer looks again at these islands—sun and rain, peoples gathered from across the world—and arrives at the decisive turn: when she needs me most, how could I leave her alone?

That is covenant, and covenant is not contract. A consumer asks what the country can give him; a partisan asks what his group can get; a cynic asks how fast he can leave. Covenant asks instead: What do I owe the place that has become my home? And it answers: I stay when it is hard; your wounds become my concern; your flourishing and mine are bound together.

For the Christian this runs deeper still. Covenant is nuptial before it is national—it is the language Scripture uses for God binding Himself to His people, and for Christ giving Himself to the Church (Eph 5).

It is also the marrow of Catholic Social Teaching: solidarity, the common good, the conviction that another’s future is my own responsibility. So, when Freetown Collective dares to sing, “Marry me to the heart of Port of Spain,” they are nearer the Gospel than they may know.

I cannot ask, with Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and still call myself innocent of my neighbour’s wounds.

We took an oil drum and made it sing. Now we are asked to take the harder metal—our fixation on race and class, our tribalism, our hoarding for ourselves—and, with the same genius, hammer it into something beautiful: a people.

This is the conversion 64 asks of us: from contract to covenant, from tribe to nation, from entitlement to belonging.

None of this asks us to surrender what we are. Our inheritances—African, Indian, European, Chinese, Syrian, Lebanese, Indigenous, mixed—are gifts; so are our faiths; so is honest political difference.

Williams asked only that tolerance become, in his phrase, “a code of everyday behaviour”—that no loyalty grow greater than our commitment to one another.

A child murdered in Laventille is ours. A family struggling in Penal is ours. A fisherman in Tobago is ours. A young man convinced the economy has no place for him is ours. A young professional who cannot picture a future here is ours. Nationhood begins the moment someone else’s future becomes my own.

At Independence we inherited a country. At 64, our task is still to become a people—and we have already proved that we know how. We did it in steel.

Williams once hoped we would “invest with flesh and blood the bare skeleton” of our anthem. That is the invitation of 2026: not merely to live in this land, but to love her; to take her home, not as nostalgia, nor because all is well, but because all is not well, and because this is we place.

Marry me to the heart of Trinidad and Tobago. And if we dare to make that covenant together, the promise of 1962 can yet become flesh: side by side we stand, every creed and race finding an equal place, and God blessing our nation.

Key Message:

At 64, our task is no longer to build a country but to become a people—turning our divisions, like the discarded oil drums that became the steelpan, into something beautiful through covenant.

Action Step:

This week, take one concrete step to make the flourishing of someone across a divide—of race, class, or place—your own concern.

Scripture for Reflection:

1 Corinthians 12:26