“You see Trinidad and Brazil we have the same vi­bra­tion. Ile Ife, Ile Ife, she make me to un­der­stand.”

Bahia Girl - David Rud­der

Soyi­ni Grey

Se­nior Re­porter

soyi­ni.grey@cnc3.co.tt

A con­ver­sa­tion on the African in­flu­ence in Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Car­ni­val has to come with caveats. This is be­cause the ear­li­est re­port­ing of the Car­ni­val was done by white elites, who were hos­tile to the ac­tiv­i­ties of the poor blacks and free coloureds. They al­so would have had an un­der­stand­ing of their tra­di­tion­al cus­toms, and for the most part, they (white slave mas­ters) were hos­tile to them, which was re­flect­ed in the writ­ing on Car­ni­val ac­tiv­i­ties.

Al­so, peo­ple from across the con­ti­nent were en­slaved in Trinidad. As a re­sult, some cul­tur­al re­ten­tions are stronger than oth­ers.

There was al­so in­ter­min­gling with the non-African cul­tures that ex­ist­ed in Trinidad. There were en­slaved peo­ple who were brought from var­i­ous parts of the con­ti­nent, in­clud­ing Nige­ria, Da­homey (now Benin), the Con­go and oth­ers. Post-Eman­ci­pa­tion free black peo­ple mi­grat­ed to Trinidad, in­clud­ing the Merikins. There were the Span­ish and then the French planters from the Caribbean: first Haiti, then Mar­tinique and Guade­loupe. Most of the in­den­tured In­di­ans in Trinidad came from the Bho­jpur and Awadh re­gions of North In­dia, on top of the ex­ist­ing com­mu­ni­ty of First Peo­ples they would have met on the is­land.

These peo­ple lived to­geth­er - they worked, loved, cel­e­brat­ed and prayed side by side, or with­in eye and earshot of each oth­er. As such, cre­oli­sa­tion, or the blend­ing of cul­tures, oc­curred to cre­ate new forms of ex­pres­sion.

Speak­ing in Jan­u­ary at the launch of the IdAke­da Group’s Africa in the Car­ni­val talk, which was the first event in their Kam­bule Spir­it of Car­ni­val Fes­ti­val 2025, writer/ac­tivist At­til­lah Springer set the tone by ex­plain­ing that “Car­ni­val is syn­cret­ic in its na­ture be­cause it had to be.”

Syn­cretism is the process by which two dis­tinct re­li­gions are merged, an ac­tiv­i­ty which en­slaved peo­ple in the Caribbean had to en­gage in to be able to prac­tice and ex­press their faith safe­ly.

Springer al­so ac­knowl­edged that the con­ver­sa­tion that evening would fo­cus on the Yoru­ba African tra­di­tions with­in the fes­ti­val, which does not mean that oth­er tra­di­tions were not present. As her co-pre­sen­ter Odun­m­baku Ades­o­ga So­morin, a young Niger­ian Ba­bal­a­wo liv­ing in Trinidad, point­ed out, “What every­body sees now as win­ing and en­joy­ing Car­ni­val, came very heav­i­ly from Con­golese cul­ture.”

Ac­cord­ing to Dr Kela Fran­cis, lec­tur­er and pro­gramme lead at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Car­ni­val Stud­ies de­part­ment, this is what makes our Car­ni­val so dis­tinct from even the oth­er Caribbean car­ni­vals. She notes that the Car­ni­val goes be­yond hav­ing el­e­ments of Africa and Eu­rope but al­so in­cludes East In­di­an, First Peo­ples and oth­er cul­tures in mean­ing­ful ways through­out all lev­els of the fes­ti­val.

“What’s unique about Trinidad, we blend so well,” Dr Fran­cis said.

“The rea­son we blend so well is be­cause we have an African base which made the space open for every­body.”

Dr Fran­cis al­so ad­dressed the per­cep­tion by some that T&T Car­ni­val was born out of the French elite in­flu­ence. The Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion, in de­tail­ing the his­to­ry of T&T’s Car­ni­val on its web­site, de­scribes the French elite as hav­ing de­vel­oped their Car­ni­val un­en­cum­bered for five decades be­fore the Africans were eman­ci­pat­ed and were then able to par­tic­i­pate.

Fran­cis ac­knowl­edges that the French elite had a role but cau­tioned that it may be overem­pha­sised in the es­tab­lished his­to­ry.

“The French elite, they had their tra­di­tion, it did in­flu­ence some of what we do, and the in­flu­ence went both ways, but even if we say it’s French, a lot of the Fran­coph­o­ne for­mer en­slaved or free-coloureds, they were the peo­ple fer­ment­ing what we see in the street to­day,” she said.

There is the be­lief that the Africans de­vel­oped the mas­quer­ade as­pect of Car­ni­val be­cause they copied what their mas­ters were do­ing, es­pe­cial­ly in their balls. How­ev­er, it is now un­der­stood that satire was a fea­ture in Yoru­ba cul­ture, and most of the ole mas cos­tumes re­flect this. They in­clude the Ba­by Doll as a crit­i­cism of the rich men who im­preg­nat­ed poor, low­er-class girls, then left them alone to fig­ure out child­care with no sup­port, fi­nan­cial or oth­er­wise.

The Yoru­ba link may al­so be ev­i­dent in how deeply many peo­ple con­nect with the fes­ti­val.

In the song Bahia Girl, ca­lyp­son­ian David Rud­der tells his Brazil­ian dance part­ner that he recog­nised her move­ments and vibe from the Bap­tists in Trinidad. She ex­plains, how­ev­er, that what he (Rud­der) is see­ing is as a re­sult of Ile Ife, which is both a re­al place in Nige­ria and a meta­phys­i­cal one in Or­isha canon.

As So­morin ex­plained, Ile-Ife is where “the world be­gan to spread.” Ex­plain­ing fur­ther he said, “Ife means to spread, for things to hap­pen, to oc­cur. It means the be­gin­ning. It means the essence that start­ed every­thing.”

This be­lief sys­tem al­so al­lows peo­ple to cre­ate space in Car­ni­val for the cel­e­bra­tion of an­ces­tors.

It is some­thing re­tired lin­guist Pro­fes­sor Mau­reen Warn­er-Lewis ex­plained via email to Guardian Me­dia. She has spent years study­ing West African lan­guages and their re­la­tion to the Caribbean. She al­so learned Yoru­ba and lived in Nige­ria for some time.

She ex­plained that the ekpo mas­quer­ade of south east Nige­ria rep­re­sents an­ces­tral fig­ures. Dur­ing the mas­quer­ade, par­tic­i­pants smear their bod­ies with palm oil and char­coal to “achieve the colour of death.” She be­lieves the ekpo mas­quer­ade is the root from which the Jab Mo­lassie and Blue Dev­il mas in T&T Car­ni­val emerged. She al­so notes “the colours blue and black are not sep­a­rat­ed in sev­er­al West African lan­guages - in oth­er words, the same term suf­fices for both colours, which are dis­tin­guished from each oth­er as in Eng­lish. This is why the dev­ils ap­pear in black and in blue.”

Dr Fran­cis says for devo­tees, the veil be­tween life and death is thin, and cos­tum­ing can be used to merge the two, which hap­pens via the mas.

“What we see in Car­ni­val, we cre­at­ed a space where that kind of men­tal­i­ty, world­view, can be ex­pressed through move­ment and mu­sic.”

This, she said, is why peo­ple like Trinidad Car­ni­val so much, even if it’s not some­thing they can ar­tic­u­late.

“We try to sell a big street par­ty, but our street par­ty is you jump­ing up with every­thing: hu­man, de­ity, your an­ces­tors, those yet to be born, his­to­ry, pos­si­bil­i­ty, and the apoth­e­o­sis of self,” Fran­cis said.

At the IdAke­da Group’s dis­cus­sion, Springer al­so spoke of the need for fur­ther re­search so that in­ac­cu­rate nar­ra­tives could be ad­dressed, but, more im­por­tant­ly, to en­sure the in­for­ma­tion about who we are and how we came to be is re­vealed and shared with the mass­es. She said their Car­ni­val events were de­signed to in­form but al­so en­cour­age in­formed ac­tion from the pub­lic as it re­lates to our cul­ture.