Delivered at a conference honouring Rex Nettleford, this lecture returns to a question Best first put in 1967 and asks what three decades of formal independence have done to it. Nettleford stands as his figure of Caribbean "betweenity", obliged to inherit a landscape through borrowed institutions and another people's language.

Best is unsparing about the region's validating elites, himself among them, and about a university that answered each failure of its social sciences by adding a department, then a faculty, then an institute, without confronting the question underneath: how a people comes to know itself, for its own purposes, with the resources it has.

He turns to upheavals in physics and mathematics, where instability and uncertainty have displaced the old order of closed and self-regulating systems, to argue that no tradition can claim the right to rule on the strength of scientific triumph. The conclusion puts the creative arts, not economics, at the centre of independent thought.