Citizenship and the Commonwealth The Active Commonwealth ...

Citizenship in the CommonwealthRum, curry and cricket ― multiculturalism and multi-nationalism in theCommonwealth Caribbean (Speaker: Kris Rampersad)Rum, curry and cricket are symbols of the multinational nature ofthe Commonwealth Caribbean and are all products of the process ofcolonialism and globalisation that developed into the Commonwealth ofnations.The process of building a sense ofidentity as a global citizen did notbegin in the 1970s as is being toutedin much international discourse; thatprocess has been unfolding in theformer colonies of the British, Frenchand Dutch in the Caribbean sinceCommonwealthcitizens should nurturetransnational solidarityto fight justice issuesthe initial encounter between the old worlds and the new one. Researchevidence from early English newspapers in Trinidad and Tobago reveals thecolonies engaged in interrogating and pronouncing upon the multinationalnature of their specific reality as well as the world. Kris Rampersad’s book,Finding a Place, documented that process and provided evidence thatshows, in relation to transplanted people from India to the Caribbeanthrough British colonialism, that there was no conceptual conflict betweenbeing a citizen under foreign rule of both the new world and the old atthe same time. People accepted their multinational character and weretrying to find ways of having this accommodated within the political andsocial structures. And so, more than 200 years ago, Trinidad and Tobagobecame a microcosm of the process of globalisation, since the islandshad already been populated by indigenous groups first from Europe, thenfrom Africa followed by Asia (Indians, Chinese). As early as this, evenbefore aeroplanes, mass communication and the internet, motherland andhome could be several places at the same time. There was no conflict, forinstance, in the idea of being simultaneously a son of India, a citizen of theCommonwealth, and a Trinidadian. The country became an incubator fordiversity.In October 2010, German chancellor Angela Merkel claimed that hercountry’s attempts to create a multicultural society had ‘utterly failed’.Since the term ‘multicultural’ entered the global vocabulary in the1970s, UNESCO has introduced a number of awkward culture-basedconventions to protect and preserve the ‘diversity’ of culture and heritage.25