The Big Drum Dance

Coming from Carriacou, the big drum was adopted by people of West African descent as a cultural expression that just made sense.

It was in the mid-1970s that I last saw André Beddoe. I went along with some friends to a shango for a "lime" (term used in Trinidad for hanging out). We drove to Laventille, the hilly eastern end of the city that had been settled by African peoples since the 1800s. I made sure that I brought a bottle of brandy and a carton of cigarettes as offerings, old habits die hard, I suppose.

We drove up to the top of "the hill" and I realised that we were going to a yard that I knew, next to Rudolph Charles' grandmother's house. Our small crowd of five or six was led by the young man who had been invited. I followed with my packages. The yard was crowded with children, goats, neighbours, well-wishers, practitioners and a dozen or so Guinea fowls woken up by the noise and bright lights.

I found André Beddoe telling "Big Snake" stories to some sisters, and with a nod and a wink the presents disappeared. A little later I sat quietly just inside the main door of the house. There was a candle burning in a corner and the atmosphere was peaceful and quiet. He didn't see me as he was coming in, shuffling his big feet that seldom had shoes. His hair was now completely white and his once muscular frame had become soft and bent with age.

He sighed as he walked and sat in a corner just under two boulas and a gran tambour hanging from the wall. From inside his shirt, he took a small drum and a little bent stick with which he began to beat. Offbeat at first, then quickening into a skipping, tripping, happy-sounding song, the words of which he sang at first in a raspy whisper and, as they came to him better, in a sweet low melodious voice of his early youth. He sang:

"Papa Llegba, ouvri barrier po'moin ago ye Azima Llegba guvri barrier po'moin - ouvri barrier po'moin aogo - ye - e ..."

I sat and watched and listened, and all of a sudden I realised that a strange and wonderful thing was taking place. André grew young before my eyes! He straightened up, became tall and slim. His face, unlined now, was aglow as he smiled and sang and whispered to Atibo Llegba to remove the barrier that he may pass, so that when he would come back he would salute the loas and thank the loa Abobo.

His voice evoked the memory of ancestors long dead on other islands; his quick-stepping drum went round and down to the most ancient ones beyond the gate. I looked on with amazement as André assumed with beauty the form of his beloved ancestor.

The big drum dance of Carriacou contains three main aspects. The first, most important and most sacred, which opens the ritual, is devoted to the ancestors. The second expresses dances and songs that were established before emancipation, and the third innovative and more syncretic stems from the long twilight of the post-emancipation period. In those days, the islands of the Grenadines lay almost unknown to the yachties and the outside world - which included place like Trinidad and Barbados.

The big drum dance contains songs that relate to slavery days and are sung in Patois. It would appear that they were well-evolved by the time emancipation came in 1838. Dance, song and drumming came aboard the swift windjammers built on Carriacou to Trinidad in the 1840s. The importation of the big drum was of great significance to Trinidad's black population.

Slavery had been brought to Trinidad with the French who arrived by virtue of the Cedula of Population of 1780s. Prior to their immigration, there were a few African people in the Spanish island. With the French and their slaves came an active syncretic movement, joining Catholicism to animism and to an ancestral cult, which was expressed as shango.

With the British capture of the island in 1797, there was an overall clamp-down on drumming and public African dancing. By 1799, the French planters had influenced the British authorities to think that a black insurrection of the type experienced in Haiti was imminent. This led to executions, banishment and beatings of the slaves on a large scale.

African culture in terms of religion, dance, song and drumming went  underground to a considerable extent. Stifled by regulations, broken up with police action and socially condemned by the planters, dark days had started for the drum.

With the passing of the period of the military governors from 1797 to 1813, a different and more insidious repression commenced under the first civil British governors. Respectability became the yardstick to acceptance, applied chiefly to free blacks and people of colour. Drumming became even less respectable, as the coloured folks wanted to distinguish themselves  clearly from their African slaves.

With emancipation in 1838 came a collapse of the economy. The former slaves left the estates, never to return. Seeking labour from the other British West Indian possessions, the planters and the administration encouraged a first wave of West Indian immigration on a large scale. Among the thousands who landed at the lighthouse jetty in Port of Spain were the men and women of the Grenadines. They brought with them the big drum dance of Carriacou and the big drum itself.

By its very nature, the big drum dance is accommodating. It celebrates all tribes; Yoruba, Congo, Coromant, Banda, Chamba, Moko Bange, Temné, Ibo are welcome to sing, to dance, to drum, and to express their relationship with a time out of mind. Joy and ecstasy are formed in another world. The dream memory of ancestors evoke powers to transcend this time.

Père Labat wrote in the 1720s:
"They use two drums hollowed to unequal lengths. One of the ends is pen, the other covered with a sheepskin or goatskin without hair, scraped like parchment. The largest of these two drums which they simply call the big drum ('grand tambour') may measure 3 or 4 feet in length with a diameter of about fifteen inches. The smaller one, which is called the baboula, is about the same length with a diameter of 8 or 9 inches.

Those who beat the drums to work the beat of the dance put them between their legs or sit on them and strike them with the flat of the four fingers of each hand. The man who plays the large drum strikes it deliberately and rhytmically, but the baboula player drums as fast as he can, hardly keeping the rhythm, and as the sound of the baboula is much quieter than that of the big drum and is very penetrating, its only use is to make noise without working the beat of the dance or the movements of the dancers."

For more information and pictures of the present-day big drum dance, you can visit http://www.grenadines.net/carriacou/carriacouBIGDRUM.htm

Lorna McDaniel is the founding editor of the journal "New Directions: Readings in African Diaspora Music". You can find McDaniel's articles in the journals "The Black Perspective in Music" and "Black Music Research Journal". She was a lecturer at the University of Michigan, the University of Nigeria, and Cheyney University.

For more information on Lorna McDaniel's book on the big drum dance, visit http://www.upf.com/Fall1998/mcdaniel.html.

Buy "A Rada Community in Trinidad" by clicking here:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble

Buy "The Voice in the Govi" by clicking here:

Amazon.com
Barnesandnoble.com

Buy "Folklore & Legends of Trinidad and Tobago" by clicking here:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble

The African Prince

 "Sail off the starboard, bowmaster Jackson," snapped at Captain Peppard. Midshipman Jackson trained his glass along the steadily rising and falling horizon. The Portuguese barcantine appeared to be making directly towards H.M.S. Vigilante.

"Looks like slaver, sir."

"Trifle worse for wear."

"Order number two to fire."

"Fire number two!"

The order shouted from the quarterdeck was immediately carried out by a grinning sailor whiteout a tooth to his name. Boom! an indeterminate period, and a splash, well to the port of the Portuguese.

"Take her about, Mister Jackson, and see to the main gallants. Fasten the mizzen halyard, no luff today, Mr. Jackson!"

"Ay ay, sir!"

Captain Peppard moved to the rail.

"Stand by to board the Portuguese. Look lively at the divots!"

"Ay ay, sir!"

"Helm's alee, Captain, sir!"

"Fire number four."

"Fire number four!"

Several seconds - Boom! - huge splash just off the barcantine's starboard gunnel.

"He's put her into irons, sir. Not a breath to her canvas, she's dead in the water."

"Sergeant, board her."

"Ay ay, sir!"

The Portuguese out of Goa bound for Recife, her bow now in the wind, heaved and wallowed in the startlingly brilliant mid-Atlantic green. The sky above, true blue. From 30 yards, the Royal Marines in the Vigilante's longboat could smell the cargo: human beings, chained together in despair.

Britain's blockade of the Portuguese slave trade in the mid 19th century, the 1850s, created a different class of African people in Trinidad and Tobago. Freed from slave trading ships, they arrived on these islands 20-odd years after the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire. They knew nothing of plantation life and its attendant depredations, nor were they caught up in the variegated cross-currents and miasma of coloured creole society that confused the free blacks and people of colour with the slaves, both before and after abolition.

They were distinguished by this lack of experience. All the same, they were thrown into the crucible of colonial prejudice and racial discrimination.

The number of freed Africans was quite substantial in the British West Indies: some eight or ten thousand were dispersed in the Caribbean. Among them, one day, was a prince.

The Royal House of Oyo was descendant of the Gods. At a time now so distant that it could be grasped only in metaphor and expressed purely in ritual, the great old ones had come and had allowed themselves to stay. He had been entrusted to their care of young Olumide so as to benefit from his knowledge of the earth and of what walked upon it. Because he was his father's eldest son, he was a prince, and as such was one of the sons of the Gods.

The tall, ascetic youth and the boy were walking swiftly along the path that made its way through the tall grass. The sun was huge and red and out of shape as a result of the heat of the day. It was close to setting, causing the village huts to stand out sharply in classic silhouette like black, hooded shapes.

This was where tragedy struck. Suddenly, strange men were upon them; hard blows were delivered, a net thrown upon them, and they were hoisted upon long poles and borne away. They had been stolen, and were soon to be sold to the Muslim trader who in turn sold them along with a party of Ibo from the north to the man who owned the wharves where the ships came.

Put aboard the Portuguese barcantine, they were herded below decks. They now possessed nothing, but they had a secret. No one knew who or what the boy was, and for many years after, he kept his secret of being a prince.

Arriving in Trinidad, he took the name Charles Robinson; maybe it was given to him. He and his tutor fell into Trinidad's life of the 1850s, and witnessed many wondrous sights. 1851 was the year of jubilee for the Roman Catholics, and he saw a grand procession make its way from the city's Romanesque cathedral to the hill of Calvary, just off Piccadilly Street in Port of Spain. Twenty days later, the cross was struck by lightning.

The first horse races were held that year at the Queen's Park Savannah. He had never seen a horse or a horse race before he came to Trinidad. His tutor continued his education, worked and looked after the boy. He took the name of Charles Robertson. They both became Catholics. Charles grew into a hard-working, thrifty young man and traveled down the main to Venezuela, where he bought a parcel of land and went into farming.

Five or six years later, gold was found on the land, and his parcel, along with others, became the famous El Callao mine from which Charles made a fortune. Returning to Trinidad, he married a member of the Blandin family and had three sons and a daughter. He did not live to enjoy either his wealth or his family, but passed away early. Today, his dozens of descendants live around us, among them the McShine, the Davis and the Carters. His old tutor became brother Vincent of Mt. St. Benedict.

Buy "The Book of Trinidad" by clicking here:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble

Buy "A Rada Community in Trinidad" by clicking here:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble

Amerindian Names

Place names are points of memory in the fabric of West Indian lifestyle. Let us look at some of the names that come from the period long before the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean Sea, from the years when Trinidad was settled only by the Amerindian people. The world being ‘brand new’ in those days, things received their names for the first time - some of them have survived.
The tribal people gave names to the rivers and plains, the mountains and capes. Some of these names are to be found in Venezuela as well, such as Tacarigua, which has a parallel in the Lago Tacarigua, or Cumana, which is found in two places on Trinidad’s North coast and also on the mainland. There is a Caroni river on this island and a mighty Caroni running through the jungles on the neighbouring continent. Other pre-Columbian names are Arouca and Caura, where the Capuchins had missions in the 17th century.
People spoke Spanish exclusively in these hamlets until quite recently. Siparia was the site of another mission, where tobacco was cultivated. Arima and Naparima, Toco and Tunapuna, Chaguanas and Chaguaramas, Piarco and Oropouche - all these are Amerindian names which survived. Port of Spain was once called Conquerabia, a name which disappeared early.
Corosal, Maraval and many other names ending in -al are very interesting, because in most cases the -al is the Spanish collective suffix, sometimes stuck onto an old Amerindian root. For example, a place rich in the palmtree called “corozo” by the Amerindians became “Corozal”. In Cocal, the name refers to an abundance of coconut trees. The story is that a ship was wrecked on this part of the east coast of Trinidad. Its cargo of nuts were washed ashore and took root. Maraval is described as a large track of land below Anapo. It was covered with maro trees.
This marriage of Spanish and Amerindian also happened in the other islands. Pouisal in Montserrat got its name from the abundance of poui trees, as did Morichal in the same island and in Trinidad as well, which refers to the moriche palms that grew there.
The Spanish settlers who came in the wake of Christopher Columbus named their estates after the distant places now left behind: El Socorro, Barataria, Aranjuez, El Dorado. When they marveled at the beauty of their new homes, they called the Vistabella and Buenos Ayres.
There is magic and beauty in these place names. They contain, like time capsules, messages from another age, when our country was still roamed by its original inhabitants.
They contain, like time capsules, messages from another age, when our country was young.

From the African languages, other words have survived like "zami" fi (meaning "friends"), and "susu", which we use when we become "partners", each contributing so much a week to a savings club. When gardeners went into their fields, they owuld take with them a calabash full of water, known long ago as a "paki", unsing te Ashanti work "apakyi". In parts of West Africa, it is the custom to name a child by the day of the week on which it was born, for example "cudjoe" is the the Ashanti word for Monday, "quashie" for Sunday, "quaco" for Wednesday, "cuffie" for Friday and so on.


In our search for African words that have survived, we have to turn to our floklore. Here we find fascinating evidence of African survivals: anansi, the central charater of many folk tales, is in fact the spider god of the Akan-Ashanti people. In Accra, Lagos and the northern regions of Nigeria, where the land falls away into a vast ocean of tawny-coloured sand, people know all about this Anasi, the spiderman who is weak but who overcomes the strong by guile in a way that the Greek hero Odysseus overcame the cyclop.
Nansi stories brough delight, but as a boy gowing up in belmont in the 1940s and 1950s, these were jumbies living in the "big canal", in Olton Road and at the corner of Reform Lane and Hermitage Road - a dangerous place after 9 o'clock!
Throughout the Caribbean, out the Caribbean region, chance word used in conversation, a game played at evening time, a song chanted to still a restless child, the names given to food and plants, link us with distant times and with men and women long dead. Cudjoe, Quashie, Paki, Zami, Senseh: words like these whisper of the past, revealing our history to us - but only to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

African cultural influences

Trinidad started late as a colony, which was partly the reason that it experienced several waves of immigration lasting from the 1780s to the 1950s.

The various groups of people who came contributed to the development of our overall culture and music and folklore in various ways: some to story-telling and singing, others to music, to dance, to cooking. Out of all this has come our unique way of expressing ourselves. As it is with all true folk arts, they provide an excellent method by which to gather an overview of social development. In the 1800s, these were in Trinidad a mixture of creole (that is, born in the Caribbean) slaves and African slaves. To what extent there was contact and sharing of culture can only be guessed at. We know that in a census taken in 1813, there were 13,980 people from six or seven areas of West and Central Africa and Mozambique, and 11,629 creole slaves, the majority of them French-speaking. It is estimated that just over 5,000 slaves were brought into Trinidad between 1798 and 1802. After emancipation, between the years 1841 and 1867, the African population - that is, the people who had never known slavery as the result of being taken off slave ships and freed in Trinidad - amounted to 3,383 who came from Sierra Leone, 3,510 from the Kru coast and 3,396 from St. Helena.

Between 1838 and 1931, approximately 100,000 British West Indian migrants settled in Trinidad. They came from both Protestant and Catholic islands. This was culturally important as each denomination possessed a different cycle of festivals. All these people were absorbed into colonial life, and as a result of extensive intermarriage virtually lost their identity almost immediately. However, there remained a vast assortment of words and ways of doing things, spiritually and culturally, that remained unique. This expressed itself in song, dance and lifestyle. L.O. Inniss in his "reminiscences of Old Trinidad" recalls "Bloke", a game played with a hole being made in the ground or in a wall. You played this game with dry gru gru beff seeds, hard and round like big black marbles. Bloke was highly competitive and often led to fights in school yards. It was, in fact, the precursor of pitching marbles.

Professor Phillip Sherlock tells us that bloke has a West African origin, similar to another one, called "Warri". Warri is the name of a tribe in the Niger delta. It is also a board game, not dissimilar to Backgammon. Long ago, at the end of the day, men would sit with a board between them and with small stones enjoy this game of skill.

From the African languages, other words have survived like "zami" (meaning "friends"), and "susu", which we use when we become "partners", each contributing so much a week to a savings club. When gardeners went into their fields, they would take with them a calabash full of water, known long ago as a "paki", unsing the Ashanti work "apakyi". In parts of West Africa, it is the custom to name a child by the day of the week on which it was born, for example "cudjoe" is the the Ashanti word for Monday, "quashie" for Sunday, "quaco" for Wednesday, "cuffie" for Friday and so on.

In our search for African words that have survived, we have to turn to our folklore. Here we find fascinating evidence of African survivals: anansi, the central charater of many folk tales, is in fact the spider god of the Akan-Ashanti people. In Accra, Lagos and the northern regions of Nigeria, where the land falls away into a vast ocean of tawny-coloured sand, people know all about this Anasi, the spiderman who is weak but who overcomes the strong by guile in a way that the Greek hero Odysseus overcame the cyclop.

Nansi stories brought delight, but as a boy gowing up in belmont in the 1940s and 1950s, these were jumbies living in the "big canal", in Olton Road by Papit's Shop, and at the corner of Reform Lane and Hermitage Road - a dangerous place after 9 o'clock!

Throughout the Caribbean region, a chance word used in conversation, a game played at evening time, a song chanted to still a restless child, the names given to food and plants, link us with distant times and with men and women long dead. Cudjoe, Quashie, Paki, Zami, Senseh: words like these whisper of the past, revealing our history to us - but only to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Buy "A Rada Community in Trinidad" by clicking here:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble

Buy "The Book of Trinidad" by clicking here:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble