I was six years old when I was taken from England to Jamaica by my mother. Our lives were about to become curious reversed images: she had left Jamaica at the same age, to be raised and educated in Britain. As a little girl, I didn't understand all the reasons why my mother had decided to return to the birthplace she'd not seen for three-quarters of her life. With a teenage marriage behind her, I suspect that she wanted a completely new start. But I was also aware that the move had something to do with me.

I was already coming home and telling my parents about problems in the playground. I still remember a pair of red-faced, red-haired twins following a little Asian boy around the swings, chanting, "Paki! Paki!" They didn't know what it meant yet, but they knew it was enough to make him run away from them and then cry when they cornered him. I didn't know what the word meant either, but I was old enough to be angry.

Many years later Mum confirmed my suspicions, told me what she hoped Jamaican soil would do for me. She said she did not want me to be an "ethnic minority" in Britain. "Put her among other black people," she said. "Then when she gets older she can go anywhere she wants."

It was 1975 and the island was entering its adolescence: 13 years had passed since it had declared independence from British colonial rule and become part of the Commonwealth. At six years old, the Commonwealth meant nothing to me.

Today? Still nothing.

When I was asked to write this article, I rang up friends and family and did a quick vox pop: "What did it mean to you to grow up in the Commonwealth?" There were lots of silences. Then: "The Commonwealth? You mean Jamaica/Australia/Barbados/Kenya/India/Canada?" The question seemed bizarre to all of us. I dug further: "No, the Commonwealth. What does that mean to you?" The words flooded back: archaic, meaningless, colonialism, imperialism. And repeatedly: "What does it mean to me? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing." I suspect it means very little to a lot of English people as well.

I lived in Jamaica for 15 years of my life. Let me tell you about the circumstances in which the word "Commonwealth" entered my brain. I cheered Jamaica at the Commonwealth Games. I watched our governor general - a venerable old gentleman with the wonderful name of Florizel Glaspole - attend each and every state event as representative of Her Majesty and giggled at his tendency to "speaky-spoky" - to enunciate every word as if someone had slipped a very small but very sweet mango under his tongue.

I was aware that our A-level results were sent back to England for marking, and that my stepfather, who is a solicitor, stood in front of black men in white wigs and made references to the British privy council. Me and my friends ran, laughing, along part of the stretch of road that had been carefully dusted, rebuilt and laden with huge, orange flowers from the airport to Queen Elizabeth's hotel when our monarch came to visit us one summer. When she left, we watched the flowers wilt and die and potholes reclaim the roads.

The Chambers Dictionary has several definitions for the Commonwealth. "A state or dominion, especially applied to the Australian Federation and certain states of America." No mention of us, then. "A form of government in which the power rests with the people." Applicable to very few nation states anywhere in the world, I would argue. "A group of states, united by a strong but elastic link." Eh?

But let me provide a definition of my own. A footprint from the past. Yep, that's right. A footprint in the sand of the island that nurtured me, that taught me who I was and who I always will be. One thing that all members of the Commonwealth have in common is that they all have a particular link with Britain's imperial past - as trust territories, protectorates and colonies. In short, we once belonged to somebody. Perhaps that is why we don't try to remember, and why we feel nothing.

Except that we are lying. We feel a great deal that is legacy from our colonial past. I've heard some people suggest that the formerly colonised should, in effect, get over it, remove the chips on the shoulders and march forward into some kind of shining amnesiac sunset. Certainly I don't think anyone can benefit from permanent residence in the past - but what is less understood is that the legacy of the past still affects our present, here in the Commonwealth.

Jamaica was a teenager when I got there, and like all teenagers, it was discovering its identity. Our national motto may be "Out of many, one people", but we were still learning to value those of us who were dark-skinned after being devalued by a history in which our colonial government was as strangled by apartheid as South Africa. I know this because the nanny who was a second mother to me still wants to know if I have found a nice white man with blue eyes to have my own twins with. I know because black people all over the world spend a fortune on skin-bleaching and hair-straightening products.

We were learning to value our language - not only to converse in the Queen's English, but to rock to the rhythms of Jamaican patois, to make music of it, to claim it, to love it. We are still learning now: a friend's child got rapped on the knuckles with a ruler the other day because she said "gwine" instead of "going". I could go on and on about the many unfortunate, contemporary side effects of Britain's great imperial past. Bob Marley was not brought to the world's attention because he lived in the Commonwealth, but because he was Jamaican; and in being a son of the soil, he told us, and people all over the world, to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, that none but ourselves could free our minds.

The fact that many, many residents of the Commonwealth feel no connection with this "strong but elastic link" to an imperial past is, I dare say, not particularly surprising. I am sure our forefathers thought they might get something tangible from this arrangement, but the dream has fallen rather short. It's a footprint. The Queen is our official head of state, but you know, I am not personally aware of a Jamaican who cares.

So I can't tell you what growing up in the Commonwealth meant to me. But I can say what growing up in Jamaica meant to me. My mother was right. We all, whatever our origins, need somewhere to belong, where we are the majority. I belonged to a community and it's something I carry with me anywhere I go in the world. The word "Yardie" was not originally coined to indicate a gun-toting crack dealer, as it has come to mean in the British press. "Yard" means "home" in Jamaica, and so we are all Yardies. I didn't grow up in the Commonwealth. I grew up in my yard.

· Leone Ross is a novelist. Her fiction includes All the Blood Is Red (ARP) and Orange Laughter (Anchor Press).

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Tuesday July 23 2002

The Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, London, assures us there are no plans to close its library, contrary to what the writer of the piece claimed.