THE MUSIC AND
RITUALS OF
EAST PORT OF SPAIN
Newsday Historical
Digest
June 25, 2000
Page 13
An
amazing subculture emerged in Port of Spain, in fact east Port
of Spain, by the 1870s. It was
significant because it contained the rootstock from which the Afro-Franco
cultural matrix emerged into what we now call 'born creole'.
This
heterogeneous assortment of people more or less covered the intermingling of
that flotsam and jetsam of Trinidad's Caribbean experience who had ended p here
by the time of the British conquest in 1797.
Despite attempts by the authorities, they had continued to preserve a
fluid, free-wheeling lifestyle that contained the extremes of excessive
religious piety and the working of obeah, drunken debauchery and the brave and
ferocious activity of the stickfight.
In
terms of syncretic movements, it was unique.
From a social point of view, the people who lived on the eastern fringes
of Port of Spain and across the dry river into the hills of Laventille and
Belmont established a culture from which calypso, Trinidad's version of
Carnival and later steelband, was born.
This culture was known as 'diametre' or jamettes society (beyond the
diameter of polite society).
Panders,
ponces, pimps and prostitutes, chantwells, stickmen and dandies, kalinda
drummers, men who played beast and devil, bats on roller skates and on
bicycles, shango priestesses, seer men and moco jumbies, real ligahoos,
raconteurs and macos, comperes and macomers, and the gentlemen who comprised
the Long John Cigar Smoking Club of Almond Walk - their names were Congo Jack
and Petit Belle Lilly, Alice Sugar, Mossy Milly, Ocean Lizzy and Sybil Steel,
Cutaway Rimbeau, Gumbo Gleaza, Gumbo Lili, Darling Dan, Zandolee, Ojuba the
Slave, Boboloops Spit in the Sea, and Mahal Who Drove an Invisible Car. Music was everywhere, violins guitars,
cuatros, bandols, mandolins, maracas and drums.
African
musical forms were maintained.
Remembered from pre-emancipation days they blossomed in the rich milieu
of 'behind the bridge'. Congo, sung in
Patois, was dance music for weddings and christenings by people of Congolese
descent, played on three drums and sung with a chorus. There were Rada hymns: chants, drums with
sticks, iron, chac chacs, chantwell and chorus. It was the music for ceremonies of Rada (Dahomey) cult groups, a
vehicle for the invocation of saints and induction of spirit possession. Shango blossomed, with its items associated
with the imminence of particular deities.
Music for the rites of the cult groups of Yoruba origin was hears,
including hymns, litanies and invocations.
On
the other hands, east Port of Spain at times echoed with French choral singing,
with the harmony of French folk and traditional 'chansons de Noel', Christmas
cantatas. It was music for the house,
polite music for visiting, not only at Christmas time.
On
occasion, fandangos were performed in the neighbourhood, rich traditional
Spanish music, with its competitive and repetitive singing, accompanied by
triple cuatros, bandols, guitars and chac chacs.
Dancing
was for pleasure. People knew how to do
reels and jigs, but also bongo, veiquoix, chaties, limbo and the bele. Music was for festivals or crisis, and
sometimes, music was associated with sacrifice to the ancestral spirits.
The
traveler C. W. Day records in 1845 his visit to a 'yard' where dances were
held. He marvelled at the young men who
stood transfixed for hours, torches held high in their hands, as the dancers
reeled and tumbled to the hypnotic rhythm of dozens of drums way into the
night.
The
land over the dry river, known as Piccadilly, was called Grand Jardin. Further north was Mango Rose and even
further north was Belle Eau Road, also known as Shapotie. The central area from Argyle Street to St
Paul Street was called Sorzanoville and later Gros Rouge. In those days, there was only one bridge
across the dry river at Cadiz Road.
During
the 1850s, many Africans rescued by British war ships from Portuguese slavers
on the high seas (Portugal had not yet abolished slavery) were 'freed' in Port
of Spain. Many of these made their
homes in the wooded hillsides of Laventille and Belmont to the extent that this
area was to be known for a time as 'Free Town' or 'Yoruba Town'. Disbanded veterans from the West India
Regiments came to live there, e.g. Sgt. Zampty who married Black Warner's
daughter and got a lane in Belmont named for him on Black Warner's land.
Papa
Nanee was a diviner from Dahomey. He
owned land in Belmont Valley Road and maintained a Rada religious and
ceremonial yard for many generations with great purity. It was here where up to the 1950s water
percussion could still be heard - the eerie sound of calabash halves, floating
upside down in a basin of water and hit with sticks.
Lacu
Harp and Lacu Pebwa were famous stickfighting yards. (Laku is patois for 'la
court' - the yard). Arnim 'Mitto'
Sampson, known as Strongman, recounts in an article by Andrew Pearse and
published in the Caribbean Quarterly, Volume 4, Nos. 3 and 4 of 1958: "The
drums would beat and canboulay stickmen sing
'Djab se yo neg,
me Die se nom-la bla,
Bamboula, Bamboula'
Roucou
John fought the invincible Tiny Satan at Laku Pebwa (Breadfruit Tree Yard) in
1875. Tiny Satan caught him six
consecutive blows and smashed his skull in.
Yet, Roucou stood up. When he finally
fell to the ground shortly before he died, he was still mumbling "Djab se
yo neg, me Die se nom-la bla…"
The
use of this theme was condemned by the famous mulatto barrister, Mr. Maxwell
Phillip. In his opinion it stigmatized
the Negro race atrociously, the words meaning:
The devil is a Negro,
But God is a white man,
Bamboula, bamboula.
The
majority of the leading batonniers of the time refused to cooperate with
Phillip, saying that when they sang 'Djab se yo neg' they were possessed by
satanic spirits which made them feel nothing; they could walk into battle and
meet sticks, stones, conch shells and even daggers…"
Behind
the bridge in those days produced, just as it does now, some of this country's
most colourful characters and bizarre incidents.
When
Hannibal the Mulatto died in jail, his last words were directed at his great
rival Zandoli. "Zandoli," he
murmured, "why you ain't find your hole?"
His
death in 1873 was just as stormy as his life.
Annie Coals and Myrtle the Turtle fought over his grave, and later his
body was dug up and ghouls carried away his head and shroud leaving the rotten
carcass at the side of the grave. A
vast crowd gathered in Lapeyrouse cemetery, led by Bodicea, the female
chantwell and famous jamettes, who had taken off her dress, waved it like a
flag and sang:
"Congo Jack vole tet la
Hannibal
U vole la mo, gade
bakanal"
(Congo Jack steal Hannibal's
head
You steal from the dead,
look bacchanal.")
Cedric
le Blanc, the white calypsonian, later sang of the incident:
"Bodicea first and then
Petite Belle
The Devil waiting for them
in Hell."