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Drum: INSIGHT
money generated by these instant super
markets ran to tens of millions of pounds.
The numbers participating in the carnival leapt
dramatically, when the born-here generation of
Caribbeans came to the party. They weren’t
playin’ mas, but they were at the party –
famously, banding around the sound systems.
Veterans will recall the early ‘culture clash’, inside
the carnival – with acoustic pan and mas on
the road, suspicious of and even opposed to
blaring, electrified sound boxes and their over
excited, street-rushing youth followers. But,
paradoxically, at the very same time, all sides
were united by a new realisation. Our Carnival
had shifted from being a ‘social healing’ thing
to being a ‘proud occupation’ thing. We took
over and ran the streets for two days. Carnival
became a kind of ‘temporary autonomous zone’
– which really disturbed the authorities and
particularly the police. The years 1976 and
1977 saw carnival riots of great intensity,
when the agendas of the police and the
carnival clashed bloodily.
At this juncture, what was interesting to a
sociologist like me was the way in which the
old, historical Caribbean spirit of post-slavery
celebration of the freedom to ritually take over
the streets, was joined with a new, very
contemporary need of black youth, to relish
being part of something that allowed them to
be ‘large’ in the very streets where, in all-yearround everyday life, they were being tormented
by racist policing. Older folks will recall that
right through the 1970s and into the 1980s,
the ‘sus-law’, as we called it in our militant
political campaigns, was used to target working
class youth and especially black working class
youth. It was as though the police were trying
to make the streets ’no go’ areas for black youth.
So, in this time, Carnival in the UK had stumbled
upon a new purpose. It was a cultural resistance
festival of creation and recreation, with historical
as well as contemporary roots, saying: “We
are here, and, we ain’t goin’ nowhere else. You
carn’ move we. You carn’ sen’ us back, unless
we decide to go. And you carn’ run us off the
streets on these two ritual days.” And that is
the spirit that survives to the present day –
sort of.
But watch this. Just as interesting as the
complex history and sociology of the
emergence of the carnival in the UK up to the
1980s, was what happened next. Because – at
the same time as the policing arm of the
authorities panicked about the size, the energy
and the spirit of the carnival, there were also
moves by more liberal parts of the very same
authorities to adopt it as a kind of proud
multicultural trophy, and to exploit it as a
tourist attraction. It attracted substantial public
and private support – cash and in kind.
In the Caribbean, on the other hand, or more
specifically, in the Caribbean heartland of
carnival, Trinidad and Tobago, the spirit of
carnival has a related but very different historical
rootedness.
In the Caribbean, Carnival is a post-slavery
cultural statement. It says: “We’ve freed
ourselves and we are freeing-up ourselves”.
And it is this spirit of ‘being free’ that is rekindled
and stoked up, ritually, each year. Carnival in
the Caribbean is, then, a critical, questioning,
renewal of creative free-spiritedness – ritually
celebrated each year. I want to emphasise this.
Carnival is critical, questioning, and creative.
We see all these three characteristics in the
‘griot’ story-telling and biting, sometimes
scandalous, social commentary tradition of
kaiso/calypso/soca. We see them in the
astounding invention and socially challenging
rise of pan/steelband. (Who says that Caribbean
people are only mimics, who only copy other
people, especially Europeans, and who have
never invented anything of note?) And we see
the mix of the critical, the questioning and »