Before the Flag Came Down

A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse

Article 4 of 12

What “ours” meant when the flag was still British.

By Nabaclis Piknee · September 5, 2026

I was a small boy when the flag was still British. Let me tell you what “ours” meant back then. The young ones today throw that word around like it always belonged to us. It didn’t. Not the way they think.

I remember the estate bell before I remember most anything else. It rang before light, and it rang the day into pieces that were not ours to arrange. My father’s people worked cane. My mother’s had a foot in the bauxite towns up the Demerara. In both places the pattern was the same. The ground was Guyana’s, the labour was Guyanese, and the profit took a boat to somewhere we would never see. Booker’s owned more sugar than the government owned country. A man could work a field his whole life. He never once sat in the room where other men priced it. Yuh sweat ah canefield but haffie buy sugar.

What a Company Town Teaches a Child

I grew up half in a bauxite town, and a bauxite town teaches a child things no schoolbook does. It teaches you that the best house on the hill belongs to the manager. The manager is not from here, and neither is his boss, nor his boss’s boss. It teaches you that the club with the good tennis court has a fence around it. The fence has a purpose. And it teaches you, without anybody saying it outright, that two Guyanas live on the same soil. One extracts. One gets extracted from. The line between them runs along the colour of your skin and the accent in your English. It runs there about as often as it runs anywhere else.

But I want to be fair to that boy I was. It is easy now to paint the whole colonial period one colour, and that is not honest either. Still, there was order in those company towns. Schools that ran on time. A hospital that had medicine in it. A library where a boy could read Lamming long before he knew Lamming would matter. The colonial economy was extractive, but it was not always incompetent. That distinction matters more than people want to admit when they are busy being angry. A curse is not simply foreign ownership. We were about to learn that the hard way.

The Talk on the Verandas

By the time I was a teenager, independence was not a rumour anymore. It was a conversation happening on every veranda in the country. But the old people were cautious in a way the young ones found frustrating. I remember an uncle of mine. He kept books for thirty years at a company he would never rise to run. He said something I did not understand until much later: “Independence go give we de company. It nah go give we de knowing how to run it.”

“Independence go give we de company. It nah go give we de knowing how to run it.”

— N.P.

He was not against independence. Nobody sensible in that house was against independence. But he had spent three decades watching the actual mechanics of ownership from the inside. The shipping contracts, the pricing arrangements, the technical decisions nobody in the field ever saw. So he knew something the crowds cheering in Georgetown did not yet know. A flag coming down is one achievement. A country becoming capable of running its own affairs is another entirely. Only one of them happens on a single afternoon in May.

What We Were Actually Inheriting

So understand what “ours” meant before the flag came down. We were inheriting land that was legally about to become ours. We were inheriting industries whose machinery and management and markets belonged to people who were about to leave. And we were inheriting a people trained, over generations, to labour inside a system rather than direct one. That is not a criticism of the people, though. It describes exactly what colonial extraction sets out to produce. You do not run a company town by teaching the workers how the company works. You run it by teaching them their part of it, and nothing more.

The Ground This Series Stands On

This is the ground the rest of this series stands on. Every boom that came after inherited the same gap. Bauxite’s nationalization, the gold rushes, the timber concessions, and now the oil. In each case, the nation owned the ground without knowing how to run what sits on it. What I have called the autonomous imagination is no luxury for a nation in that position. In the end, it is the entire difference between a flag coming down and a country actually beginning.

Next Wednesday: Article 5 of 12, “The Morning After.”

Beyond the Resource Curse — A GBJ Series

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