Part of the bulletin series of articles.
Summary
- The Commonwealth is a forward-facing, confident country that believes in what it is doing, and so has transformed the lived experience of the people in it.
- The Commonwealth rarely bans traditional practices and does not suppress culture in general, but it does make a lot of traditional practices a choice rather than necessary, which is often fatal for them.
- Things antithetical to its principles, such as Principe’s traditional polygyny, are being displaced through education and bureaucracy.
- Very few traditions are actually in fatal decline, since for every person leaving the old ways behind there is often another seeking them out.
Much of modern coverage of small islands like Tristan da Cunha is in the vein of traditional island life dying to modern cosmopolitanism. A common question about the Commonwealth is whether the same is happening in its republics, either because of technological innovations like robots or social shifts like changing demography and assimilation to a common Vekllei identity. It is an ongoing and common tension within the country. To what extent depends on what is being talked about, but Vekllei is a forward-facing, confident country that believes in what it is doing, and so has transformed the lived experience of the people in it. Most of the time that is a good thing – better living conditions, better education, more freedom to choose, more freedom to travel – but not always.
A regular theme in Vekllei is a moral universalism. They are not Westphalian; they do not believe in the primacy of sovereignty nor do they elevate race or culture. Vekllei is a country that still talks about civilisation, not through the lens of European paternalism or as a defence of colonialism but as a process, becoming more civilised each day and forever. To them, civilisation means dignity (comfort, friendship, stability), independence (choice, freedom, identity) and pleasure (fun, curiosity, health). Things antithetical to those principles, which the national ideology of the country holds as basic truths, are slowly displaced through education and bureaucracy.
An example is Principe’s traditional polygyny, which has been disrupted substantially by giving women universal and compulsory education and letting them travel domestically for school and residence. This has undermined traditional social structures in Principe that span hundreds of years.
The most obvious and ruthless aspect of this trend is English primacy. This is not to the exclusion of local languages, per se, but in work and school English is spoken so people can communicate, regardless of whether they are French Creole or Portuguese Creole or Inuit. The thinking, which is intuitive to the culture of Vekllei bureaucrats, is axiomatic: if language is not deterministic (i.e. thoughts can be expressed equally in any language) then no language is better than another, and so English (the international language of business and commerce, and spoken widely as a secondary language) is best suited for communication.
There is a question of inevitability. The Commonwealth rarely bans traditional practices and does not suppress culture in general, but it does make a lot of traditional practices a choice rather than necessary, which is often fatal for them. As such, there is a tremendous sentimentality and constant see-sawing in their views of the past. Romanticism as a style is very popular in Vekllei, and is often nostalgic for pre-federal times. This nostalgia, like most nostalgia, is more about memory than fact – the colonial period is a popular subject and is often romanticised, despite most of their ancestors being enslaved during it.
The truth is that traditions, sympathetic as they are, are closely tied to the material conditions of the time. People can take the food, clothes and dancing with them, but the rest – polygyny, land use and inheritance, clan structures and chiefdoms, gender roles and so on – are weakened by the choices provided by Commonwealth prosperity. The difference in Vekllei is that the Commonwealth is a country that knows what it is, and responds to genuine attempts to reverse course swiftly and unsympathetically. It is not a society that can tolerate the enslavement of women to their husbands, or landlordism, or many other features of the pre- and post-colonial societies that came before it.
The basic truth is that younger people in Vekllei are becoming more similar; they have common values, common visions of the future and, now, a common language. But anyone actually living in Vekllei would quickly realise it is a place of very vigorous and colourful culture, as the past, present and future clash continuously. They are very educated, and so take a very educated view of things. While villages are emptying out into cities as young people seek education and excitement, there is another generation of bush poets and primitivists seeking out homesteads and simple living.
There is perhaps a good argument, then, that very few things are actually in fatal decline. For every hundred Inuit graduates going off to the Caribbean or South Atlantic for work and school, there is at least one Vekllei person looking to live among the Kala Inuit hunting seal far from civilisation.