When the language of a political campaign becomes the language of Independence, the issue is larger than a theme. It asks who gets to define the nation and whether all of us can recognise ourselves in it.
Culture is one of those words we use as though its meaning has already been settled. We point to the flag, the food, the music, the clothes, the festivals and the familiar scenes arranged for national display. We call them culture because they are visible, recognisable and easy to place on a programme. But culture is not merely what a country performs on a stage. It is how a people live, remember, argue, adapt and make meaning together.
Culture is the language we use when formality falls away. It is the recipe changed by every hand that prepares it, the joke that needs no explanation, the music made in bedrooms and backyards before it reaches the road, and the ways neighbours organise when institutions arrive late or not at all. It is also our silences, prejudices, class divisions, political loyalties and habits of power. Culture contains what flatters us and what indicts us. Culture is not something presented to the people. The people are the culture.
That is why the theme selected for Antigua and Barbuda’s 45th anniversary of Independence deserves closer thought. The official theme is “Renaissance: Rooted in Pride, Bounded by Prosperity for All.” Only months ago, “Renaissance: A New Era” was the central language of the Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party’s 2026 election campaign and manifesto.
The word itself does not belong to a political party. Renaissance signals rebirth, renewal or a period of new creative and intellectual energy. It is broad enough to carry national meaning. But words do not enter public life without history. In Antigua and Barbuda in 2026, “Renaissance” did not arrive as a neutral dictionary entry. It arrived in party colours, on campaign platforms and inside an electoral promise.
Its rapid reappearance as an Independence theme therefore raises a legitimate question: where does the party end and the nation begin?
This is not a semantic quarrel, nor does one have to reject the government’s vision to understand the concern. A governing party is elected to govern the whole country. It is entitled to pursue the programme on which it campaigned. Independence, however, is not a government programme. It is the shared inheritance of citizens who voted for the government, citizens who voted against it, citizens who did not vote and citizens whose relationship with Antigua and Barbuda cannot be contained by any party label.
An election victory gives a party the authority to govern. It does not make the party synonymous with the people.
That distinction is especially important in a small society. Here, the state is not an abstraction. It is employer, sponsor, landlord, regulator, broadcaster, cultural patron and gatekeeper. Party language can move quickly into public institutions because the distance between political organisation and state administration is already narrow. When the same slogan travels from manifesto to national celebration, it can feel less like inclusion and more like absorption. The nation is being invited to understand itself through the governing party’s account of progress.
Supporters may reasonably see continuity. If the promised renaissance is intended to improve ordinary lives, why should national renewal not be celebrated? Critics may just as reasonably see appropriation. Why should a commemoration belonging to everyone carry language so recently used to secure votes for one political organisation?
Both responses tell us something important. A national symbol does not become shared simply because an institution declares it so. Shared meaning requires recognition from the people expected to inhabit it. The deeper issue is not whether “Renaissance” is an inspiring word. It is whether the process of defining the national moment was itself national.
Who selected the theme? Were artists, historians, educators, cultural workers, community groups, young people, Barbudans and members of the diaspora invited to help shape it? Was there an open call or public consultation? Were other themes considered? These are not procedural details. The method by which culture is named reveals who is understood to have the authority to name it.
Too often, official culture works in one direction. Institutions choose the theme, design the logo, arrange the programme and then ask the population to participate. The public appears at the end of the process as audience, performer or decoration. Yet if we are the culture, participation must mean more than wearing national colours after the meaning has already been decided for us. It should mean having some power over the story being told.
That story must also be wide enough for disagreement. National unity is frequently presented as the absence of criticism, particularly around Independence. We are encouraged to put politics aside, as though politics were an external contaminant rather than one of the ways a society negotiates power and belonging. But a mature national culture does not require everyone to feel the same thing at the same time. It can hold pride and disappointment, celebration and scrutiny, gratitude and unfinished business.
Independence itself is not a completed achievement preserved behind glass. It is a continuing argument about who has power, who enjoys prosperity, whose history is remembered and whose version of the country becomes official. The phrase “prosperity for all” cannot be merely decorative. It invites material questions. Where is prosperity being felt? How is it being measured? With whom is it being shared? “For all” must include those at the edges of the official photograph.
It includes the vendor waiting to be paid, the family rationing water, the young person making art without a venue, the worker whose wages do not stretch, the Barbudan guarding a distinct history and relationship with land, and the citizen who loves the country without loving its government. They do not stand outside the culture because their experiences complicate the theme. Their experiences are part of the culture the theme must answer to.
There is a temptation to define our culture only through the things that make us proud. But culture is not a public relations exercise. It is the total record of how we live together. The beauty of Carnival and the politics of who gets paid are both culture. The national dish and the cost of putting food on a table are both culture. Our hospitality and our suspicion of outsiders are both culture. Our political passion and the fear of being publicly associated with the wrong side are both culture.
To say that we are the culture is not an empty affirmation. It is a claim about ownership. It means no ministry, party, committee or creative director has a monopoly on national meaning. The state can support culture, preserve archives, fund artists and organise commemorations. It can create the conditions in which cultural life thrives. But it cannot manufacture belonging by branding it, and it should not confuse political mandate with cultural authorship.
Perhaps Antigua and Barbuda does need a renaissance. But a genuine renaissance cannot simply be announced from above or inherited from a campaign. It must be visible in a wider field of voices, greater freedom to question, serious investment in cultural workers, honest engagement with history, and public institutions confident enough to distinguish the nation from the party managing it.
Renewal is not a slogan we repeat. It is a relationship we remake.
As the 45th anniversary approaches, the most useful response may not be to decide whether the theme is good or bad. It may be to ask what kind of national culture could produce a theme that people recognise as theirs before they are instructed to embrace it.
The answer begins with a simple correction. Culture is not what is handed down to us on a stage or printed above a government programme. It is what we have inherited, contested, altered and created together.
It is ours because it is us.
