In Guyana, however, notwithstanding the anti-colonial record of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) that so nobly championed the nation’s right to self-determination, no one political party that emerged during that period could properly claim exclusive right to be nationalist.

The period of struggle for nationalist government now over, 37 years later when Guyanese meet to celebrate the handing over of political power, the myths generated by colonial rule and imperialistic relationships continue. Our Nation must, in the midst of those celebrations, stop to distinguish between the institutionalized forms of constitutional rights and freedoms and the reality of political power exercised. That is, our Golden Arrowhead raised aloft, a National Anthem to accompany its seemingly snail’s crawl along a never-ending flag pole, are but archaic forms to remind the citizenry of the need for obedience to law.

Unfortunately, the reality remains that Britain never relinquished economic power on that glorious Independence Day. To many, exchange of the Union Jack for our Golden Arrowhead merely witnessed British economic interests being politely subordinated to new military and political interests of the USA.

While freed from the strictures of colonial rule, our Nation was now confronted by a new set of contradictions posed by the effect of a working class divided by an unfinished nationalist struggle. In addition, racial anxieties fuelled by the uncertainties of being an undeveloped country have compounded their adverse effect. On the other hand, our political leaders, Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan, having accepted the proposition that Guyana must be independent, were ill-equipped to rebut claims by the USA that the British could not be relied upon to suppress a second nationalist revolution in Latin America.

The historical scholarship now confirms that a post-war Britain was perceived by the USA as militarily and economically weak, and incapable of sustaining its traditional role as imperialist in a world now divided between the USA and the Soviet Union In short, political independence imposed upon Guyanese new demands to cope with the underlying contradictions introduced by the Cold War. And it is in this context that there was a radical shift in emphasis away from US resistance to independence to its support for a new Nation: Guyana.