The Autonomous Imagination

A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse

Foreword to a twelve-part series

Two inherited ideas — Lamming’s and Ngũgĩ’s — and the third term this series will test against everything Guyana builds next.

By Nabaclis Piknee · August 19, 2026

Before this series begins, I want to explain a phrase I am going to use throughout it: the autonomous imagination. It is not my invention out of nowhere. It comes from arguing with two older ideas, both of them worth understanding first.

Lamming’s Ground

The Barbadian writer George Lamming believed that a colonised people never fully lose themselves, no matter how long the coloniser stays. He described a piece of inner ground — he called it “one acre of ground” — that belongs to a person and cannot really be bought, sold, or taken, even under empire. Freedom, in Lamming’s view, means standing back up on that ground. You do not have to build it. You only have to stop letting someone else convince you it was never yours.

Ngũgĩ’s Exorcism

The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o saw something darker. He argued that colonial rule did not just sit on top of a person’s mind. It got inside the mind’s own structure, especially through language. A person taught to think and dream in the coloniser’s tongue, he said, has already had part of the coloniser built into them. Freedom, in his view, is not standing up on ground that survived. It is actively removing what got planted there — most of all, by returning to your own language.

These are two different pictures. Lamming says: you already own the ground, so stand on it. Ngũgĩ says: the enemy is already inside the house, so you have to clear it out. But notice what both pictures share. Both are still describing a mind shaped by its relationship to the coloniser — either by what the coloniser failed to take, or by what the coloniser managed to put in. Both writers were working in a world where the coloniser was still close by, sometimes still literally in the room. That was the right fight for their time.

A Newer Problem

Guyana’s independence is now sixty years behind us. And here is the harder truth this series keeps returning to: the mind’s occupation did not simply end when the colonial flag came down. It changed landlords. A local government, a local elite, can end up deciding what is possible, what is valuable, and who a people are allowed to become, using exactly the same playbook a foreign power once used — just now wearing a familiar face and speaking in a familiar accent. Neither “stand on your ground” nor “clear out the coloniser’s language” fully describes what a citizen needs when the person limiting their future was born in the same village they were.

The mind’s occupation did not simply end when the colonial flag came down. It changed landlords.

— N.P.

A Third Term

This is why I want to offer a different word: autonomy.

Autonomy does not ask what ground you already own. It does not ask what foreign influence you have successfully removed. It asks a harder, forward-looking question: what are you now capable of building, on your own terms, answerable to no one’s ledger but your own — including the ledger of a local leader who claims the hard work is already finished?

An autonomous imagination is one that can look at a public fund and demand it stay protected, not because a foreign company might take the money, but because its own government might. It can look at a university and ask it to produce citizens capable of building institutions that answer to nobody’s borrowed script — not the coloniser’s, and not a countryman’s either. That is the real test this whole series is going to apply, piece by piece: not whether the ground is technically ours again, and not whether every foreign fingerprint has been scrubbed away, but whether we are, right now, actually capable of authoring what comes next.

That is the word I am asking you to carry into everything that follows. Not sovereignty alone. Not decolonisation alone. Autonomy — earned, built, and defended against any landlord at all, foreign or familiar.

Autonomy — earned, built, and defended against any landlord at all, foreign or familiar.

— N.P.

Next Wednesday: Article 1 of 12, “The Sovereignty of the Imagination.”

Beyond the Resource Curse — A GBJ Series

---

The Guyana Business Journal is supported by:

…and by individual supporters of independent Guyanese analysis: Courtney Noel | All Te Networks | Corine Locke | Tony Harris | Roderick Alsopp | Dr. Michelle Luard | Clarence Bone

🇬🇾 Support the Journal