The Peoples of Trinidad & Tobago

When one lands in from the USA or from England, from a context of stark and simplistic white-versus-non-white racism, from a situation where the mere allusion to race is likely to offend people's delicacy, being fraught with hair-raising echoes of gas-chambers and lynching mobs, one is shocked and scandalized to find that frank references to racial characteristics are part and parcel of the normal vocabulary of altercation, on the playground as in the traffic-jam. Someone who offends you is not merely a fool. He is a damn coolie fool, or a damn stupid nigger, or a red ass, or a damn thieving Chinee.

Recently a little Chinese boy in my class gave a joke to the rest of the class: an Indian and a Creole...were having an argument -- how to pronounce the word p-o-t-a-t-o-e-s. The Indian insisted the word was 'aloo' (the Hindi word for potato which has passed into our dialect); the Creole said the word was 'callaloo' (a staple African-Caribbean food). The arguing pair happened to pass a Chinese shop. 'Let we go in and drink a beer and ask the Chinese man.' So they went in and ordered beers and put it to the Chinese man. 'Long,' said the Chinese man, 'you long, and you long. P-o-t-a-t-o-e-s spell pollaloes.'

The boy's father is a 'Chinee man' -- an immigrant from China. The boy is a 'Chinee boy', but he is a Trinidadian, therefore sharing in the ethos of the society into which he was born, qualified to make fun of the Chinese newcomer who never quite succeeds in mastering the communal language.

There is a certain level at which we are 'a people', there does exist a distinct common denominator of consciousness or culture. But an important aspect of this collective consciousness is our awareness of racial and cultural diversity, the awareness that our society is composed of several different peoples.

Racial, and by the same token cultural, Trinidad presents the Caribbean in microcosm. The other islands are more homogeneous in character, or at least strongly marked by a particular influence. Barbados is Little England, Martinique is unmistakably French, Haiti has preserved an essential Africanity and there are the Spanish islands. In Trinidad all these cultures are represented. There is the Britishness of Trinidad -- English is our official language, our legal system and constitution are British. There is the French Creole presence -- French patois is still a vigorous language in the country, a large number of our folk-songs are in patois, our English dialect is strongly flavoured by patois. African culture survives in many areas of our daily life -- in our music, our food, in our indigenous religions, Shango, Obeah, and Christian elements is effected. Spanish influences are abundant -- the language is still spoken in some parts of the island, many of our folk-songs are in Spanish; parang, our Christmas music, is Spanish. Our proximity to South America...makes for continuing Spanish influence.

Almost all the races present in the Caribbean are to be found in significant numbers in Trinidad, whereas there are islands from which certain of our peoples are practically absent. The Indian population of the Caribbean is almost entirely restricted to Trinidad and Guyana, although there is a sprinkling of Indians in other islands. The Chinese are a significant presence in our community, but less so in other parts of the Caribbean. There is even a handful of Caribs in Trinidad, when this, the indigenous has died out completely from most of the other islands.

A sampling of our place-names will help to illustrate the permanent impact which the various peoples have made upon the country. Although the Amerindians have all but died out here, the names they gave to their settlements remain.... The Amerindian names are many-syllabled and lovely to pronounce, and flavour the everyday vocabulary of all the people who have inherited this piece of Carib soil: Guayaguayare, Cunaripo, Chacachacare, Caroni, Naparima, Tunapuna, Carapichaima, Mucurapo.... The Spanish name 'Trinidad" (Trinity) was given by Christopher Columbus; Spanish settlers named Santa Cruz, Rio Claro, Sangre Grande, El Socorro, San Fernando.... Some of our French place-names are Point-à-Pierre, Blanchisseuse, Champ Fleurs, Bonne Aventure, Grande Rivière.... Many an English town has its namesake on the island of Tobago, -- Scarborough, Plymouth, Roxborough, Pembroke -- but in Trinidad the English place-names are a minority scattered among the place-names given by the other peoples. African place-names, however, are even more rare: the African worked the land for centuries without owning a jot of it. Indian indentured labourers, on the other hand, were given grants of land as an inducement to stay. Fyzabad, Hindustan, Calcutta Settlement, Madras Settlement...are among the places named in tribute to India.

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Racial rivalry and disaffection exist, despite the sentimental inaccuracies we publish about ourselves in the tourist brochures. History has cast the various races in certain roles, and this, along with the inevitable differences in attitudes, inclinations and ideals from one group to another, leads to racial stereotypying.

The labouring classes are African and Indian, but there is a certain mistrust between them. The African is alarmed at what he sees as phenomenal progress on the part of the Indian...who was imported to occupy the ignominious lowest rung of the society vacated by the African at Emancipation.

It is said that the experience of slavery-forced labour on the plantation bred in the African an aversion to working the land. The Indian has certainly remained closer to the land than he. Indians introduced rice to the Caribbean and continue to be responsible for its cultivation, and the sugar-cane belt is populated mainly by Indians. So to the rest of the population the 'coolie' belongs down in Caroni or Chaguanas, ankle-deep in rice-patch, or bundling cane, and seems threatening when he turns up elsewhere. Traditionally the African's ambition has been to move into white-collar jobs, the professions. Today the Public Service is still manned mainly by Africans. But more and more Indians have entered the professions and as many Indians as Africans are qualifying for scholarships to higher education....

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The African meanwhile chastises himself for his lack of 'business sense', for his slackness in letting the 'coolie' creep up on him. No one subscribes to the caricaturization of the African as much as the African himself. He will tell you cheerfully that his people are no good at anything, that every other race will overtake them by their industriousness while they drink rum and dance, sing, play mas' and dress to kill.

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Another cause of mistrust between Africans and Indians is the cultural tenacity of the Indian. The Indian arrived with his culture intact -- his gods, his name, his language. Despite creeping westernization, the core of his culture remains, an indissoluble factor in our midst. The total disruption of the African's culture left him pliable, given him a chameleon nature, made him a man without fixed values. So that the Indian who remains stubbornly Indian is an opaqueness with which he cannot cope, an unknown quantity he cannot reckon with.

The African often accuses the Indian of 'clannishness', which only means that to him the Indian is too inward-looking, too self-sufficient, in contrast to his own openness and receptivity. In fact the African, the ex-slave, has traditionally sought to escape from his racial classification, to belie his African origins and move 'up' into whiteness. It is only within the past decade that he has begun to perform a volte face, fairly erecting his africanity into a religion.

It is too easy to dismiss the African movement in Trinidad as merely another fad imported from America. Of course there is some posturing and fad-following, but basically the new glorification of blackness, the wearing of African fabrics and of clothes inspired (at an obvious distance) by traditional African styles, the displays of African hair that would have been considered obscene ten years ago -- all of these manifestations illustrate the ex-slave's thirst for the restoration of his manhood, for an authentic manhood, defined by himself and not by the criteria of his masters.

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Fortunately the political creed which accompanies the African movement insists on a reconciliation of the two major races of Trinidad, invoking their common dispossessedness, so that it does not itself contain the threat of African-Indian confrontation, as might have been feared. Instead it proposes...their welding into a common front against a common oppressor who is still identified as white or fair-skinned.

Why is this, ask Europeans, when the country is now run by black people? But a light skin remains a passport to privilege. It is an unwritten requirement for positions of greatest responsibility in big business, and for other areas of employment which carry a certain social status. Bank clerks, secretaries or receptionists in large firms, or clerks in the more prestigious department stores are usually the descendants of the mulatto who since slavery was considered closer to human than the pure African.

In the crudest terms, ownership is still white (expatriate or native-born), and dispossession still black, despite those blacks who may have strayed up into the fairer income brackets.

If the tourist brochure's idyll of diverse peoples living in harmony is to begin to be a complete reality, there are two important currents of racial disharmony to be dealt with. One is lateral: the African-Indian tension, a double current; and the other runs vertically, from top to bottom. Given the economic strength of the white minority it seems absurd to speak of this vertical tension in terms of black 'racism' against whites; like feeling sorry for the elephant who complains of some ants in his path looking up at him with resentment.

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African-Indian disharmony is potentially more worrying. Continued prejudice between these two groups would be more devastating to the society.

Here again economics enter into the problem. It is extremely dangerous for a multiracial society to entrust its progress so emphatically to the principle of competition, for it means that all the other factors which contribute to racism -- factors which appear to be instinctive and are hard to pin down -- find a ramping-ground in such competition. Africans and Indians are at loggerheads not merely because they differ somewhat in appearance and customs but because they think in terms of the one stealing a march on the other to get a bigger share of the cake. Economic competition gets mixed up with race, and becomes racial rivalry.

One obvious weapon against racial prejudice at the primitive or emotional level is education. But for the time being in Trinidad and Tobago African and Indian citizens come up through the school system with their myths about each other intact.

There are those who see our salvation in a consciously implemented levelling-out of the races in cultural terms. But this, precisely, is one of the causes of tension. Each group periodically accuses the other of wanting to impose its character, of wanting to swamp the other's individuality. Africans often complain of the quota of radio time given to Indian music...and shiver to think of what would happen if an Indian political party came to power...for then 'they' would surely go the whole hog and make this a 'Coolie country'. An Indian rebuke, usually aimed at a member of the younger Indian generation, is 'You getting too much like nigger!'

Cultural pooling, voluntary and unforced, rather than cultural levelling out is what is to be desired. And already, almost imperceptibly, Africans and Indians have begun to adopt what they will of each other's culture. They participate freely in each other's festivals and cultural manifestations. Indians invite their African neighbours to share in the feasting of Divali and Eid (respectively a Hindu and Muslim religious festival, each a public holiday in Trinidad and Tobago.) The dialect spoken by all Trinidadians was fashioned originally by the African slaves and their descendants. Indians have begun to beat steelband and compose calypsoes (both originally African developments), as Africans now beat drums in Indian festivals of Phagwa and Hosay, and Africans have taken to mastering Indian dances.