They start practising again - the Steelband

Take a rusty, discarded oil drum, a heavy cannon ball, a blazing fire, a hammer for the fine-tuning, plenty noise, a pair of strong arms and a pair of good ears, surrounded by a bunch of "youts" from the neighbourhood - and you get a sound that is so soft and tinkling that it could be the soundtrack to Peter Pan's flying fairy. Or, it could be a thundering sound, pounding in your ears like a horde of Mongols thundering with their horses over the steppes of Tadjikistan.

The steelband is, in the best sense, a child of the oil age, both as a musical and as a social phenomenon. It is a 20th century phenomenon, and as such has become a part of history. But let us go 8 decades back, to the 1930s.

It was a hard time in Trinidad, as it was elsewhere in the world. The great depression in the United States had also affected the British crown colony. The British Empire dragged on like a wounded elephant. England's economy was not buoyant, which meant that her raw-material producing colonies saw their markets dwindling.

In Trinidad, thousands of people had no work. Tens of thousands of others were employed at hunger wages by sugar companies or in the oil fields. It was hard for the local population to see the foreign managers live in relative wealth and distinctive comfort, whilst Trinidadians saw their children hungry, without shoes or not able to afford school books.

However, people were far from being apathetic. For about 50 years now, the local reform movement had been attracting brave hearts and bright minds, who tried to walk the fine line between illegal sedition and necessary speaking up for His Majesty's subjects. Inspired by the Russian Revolution and Marcus Garvey's black nationalism, the reform movement and the budding union movement was relevant for Trinidadians of all skin tones and many social backgrounds, who sought social justice for themselves and for their countrymen and women.

They called their demonstrations "Hunger Marches", bringing to a point what it was all about. Retrenchment, undignified and unsanitary housing conditions, a lack of education and future prospects were things that the majority of the people had to live with in those years (not only in Trinidad, it must be remembered, but in the western world all over). It was not only workers who took to the streets, bringing sugar production and oil production to a halt, but also members of the educated black and coloured middle classes, who had been the true Creole backbone of the colony for many generations.

People like Elma Francois, Captain A.A. Cipriani and Uriah Butler emerged in the political arena. Civic courage was contagious: the calling for local representation gave birth to a whole artistic movement, a first independent Trinidadian expression, in particular in the writing arena: C.L.R. James, Alfred Mendes, Ralph de Boissière to name just a few. A couple years later, also Albert Gomes, who excelled in both, the political and the writers vocation. Free-thinking newspapers came on the scene, first and foremost "The Beacon".

The emergence of the steelband towards the end of the 1930s can be seen as a noisy, rhythmical, carnevalesque interpretation of what was left for local people: scraps (in this case scrap metal). At the beginning, it was not more than percussion, getting together and making noise with brake pads, biscuit tins and other metal pieces. But quickly, the tins got “tuned”, and the bigger oil drums started to be used.

Steelband became yet another musical expression of the African diaspora, and as such a part of that 20th century musical phenomenon that influenced popular music like no other. In the Caribbean, African musical expressions mixed with the relevant European administrative culture, creating such distinct genres like merengue and rumba in the Spanish islands, bele and compas in the French Antilles, and reggae and calypso in the British West Indies. With the exception of reggae, it is interesting how localised those artforms remained: just listen to your radio in Trinidad and try to find Cuban mambo or Martiniquan zouk!

Steelband, however, is not a musical genre, and was able to “travel”, so much so that the whole Caribbean now identifies with it as a folk artform. It seems to have been just what the tourist industry and the media needed!

The emergence of the Steelband is closely linked with Carnival. Carnival, a Catholic custom, was brought to Trinidad by the French settlers in the 1780s. At first, the African slaves were not permitted to participate in the celebrations and masked balls of the French families. However, they were allowed to celebrate “canboulay”, when lit torches were carried through the street to mark the end of the sugar cane harvest - a custom which has been recently adopted in the popular “Crop Over” Festival of Barbados.

Before the abolition of slavery in 1834, the life of the African slaves did not take place in a cultural vacuum, however. The dominant culture of Trinidad was French, albeit the fact that the administration was British since 1797. Syncretic cultural expressions like Shango, Santeria and Voodoo (mixed of Catholicism and the African pantheon) are as much part of this syncretism as are Carnival, stickfight, bele dancing and other folklore that have their roots in the first decades of the 19th century. Steelband can be seen as a 20th century extension of that syncretism, albeit with other parameters: trash from the industrial society was used in a rebellious movement against a ruling ethnical minority.

With emancipation, Carnival changed dramatically. The former slaves and their offspring started to participate in it. The first “noisy” devices were added to revelries: kettles, salt boxes, chac-chacs etc. Carnival definitely lost its “polite” upper class touch immediately! The Europeans started to shun this kind of Carnival, which they called “Jamette Carnival”, the Carnival of those beyond the circle of polite society. Stick fighters, shantwells, drummers, prostitutes and bad johns! This was only to change towards the turn of the 20th century, when the “upper classes” once again took part in the festival.

With this, the Trini Carnival was quickly approaching a format that was to last for another century. Competitions were held in the various categories, and the raucousness of the street festival often clashed with the ideas of the British authorities as how His or Her Majesty’s subjects should behave!

Steelband started in 1937 or 1938, when “Alexander Ragtime Band” from Newtown, formerly the Calvary Tamboo Bamboo Band, came out to play. Their leader was “Lord Humbugger” Forde. The pans were made of paint tins, biscuit tins, linseed oil tins, carbide pans, zinc buckets and dustbin cover. Tuned into two notes, they were beat furiously and rhythmically together with the tamboo bamboo. What a novelty! What a spectacle! No wonder it caught!

A year later, the pan craze brought forth many more steelbands, all from depressed areas with great poverty. Inspired by the American cinema, the tradition of bombastic names was started: Destination Tokyo, Sun Valley, Hellyard, Cross of Lorraine, Red Army. It was the eve of World War II, which also was reflected in the steelband names.

From 1942 to 1945, Carnival was banned due to the war. It seems to have been a gestation period for the steelband. When in 1945 victory was celebrated by the allied forces and Trinidadians had a spontaneous Carnival in the middle of the year, steelbands joined in the street party with much refined instruments. The dudups of the pre-war days was joined by the first tenor pans made of oil drums, called “ping pong”.

From then on, there was no turning back for the development of this instrument. Socially, the steelband went the way of a lot of popular music of the second half of the 20th century. Much like ragtime, jazz, rock & roll, it all started with a couple rebellious youths from depressed urban areas, and ended up some 50 years later in dignified symphonic orchestra halls, carrying Trinidad’s indigenous musical genre (calypso) far beyond the island’s shores.

Elma Francois

Elma Francois has been immortalised in the character of ‘Cassie’ in Ralph de Boissière’s book ‘Crown Jewel’. She has been declared ‘National Heroine’ of our country in 1987. The first female labour leader in Trinidad and Tobago still has some truths to teach to women nowadays.

Elma was born in St. Vincent in 1897. Life was gloomy: her father, a labourer, died when she was still little, the family lost all their belongings in the volcanic eruption that devastated the island in 1902, and there weren’t any prospects for young women other than working as a domestic servant, picking cotton or finding some sort of employment in the sugar factory at Mount Bentick.

Elma did the latter, and promptly got herself fired. Already socially minded as a young teenager, she tried to organise the workers in the sugar factory, which was not met with understanding by the owners of Mount Bentick. Elma moved to Kingstown, where she had a liaison with Albert James. This produced a son. James went off to fight in World War I, and after the war settled in Trinidad. In 1919, Elma Francois migrated to Trinidad, leaving her two-year old boy behind in St. Vincent.

A typical ‘small islander’ story? Just wait and see.

First, she had to find an income. The Stollmeyers employed her as a servant in their ‘castle’ on the Savannah. Little did they know that they were housing a future labour leader! Not before long, Francois joined the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA), of which Captain A. A. Cipriani was an ardent promoter.

Reading books late into the night, Elma educated herself and proceeded to ‘preach’ labour and political matters to the people. At ‘La Cou Harpe’ in Observatory Street, on streetcorners in east Port-of-Spain, anywhere where she could reach the poor working class, Elma raised her voice and tried (doubtlessly with a heavy ‘Vincie’ accent) to talk the people out of their lethargy.

She fell in love with Jim Barrette, who became her companion for the rest of her life. Elma and Jim were two of the founding members of the National Unemployed Movement (NUM), which was formed in 1934. In those years, the world was in the grips of the Great Depression, which manifested itself in Trinidad with increasing unemployment and destitution especially among the rural Indian population and female workers.

The NUM started to register unemployed people, a thing that never had been done before, and organised regular ‘Hunger Marches’, demonstrations of the unemployed. At one time in July 1934, police stopped in Laventille a hunger march of Indian sugar workers from Caroni, preventing the demonstrators to join the black NUM-protesters in Port-of-Spain. Interestingly, inspite being so open to the cause of women workers, Elma Francois’ organisation never integrated the Indians fully. From being ‘national’ the NUM went to being ‘negro’, and one year later, in 1935, the NUM was renamed and restructured into the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association (NWCSA).

The NWCSA was highly influenced by Rupert Gittens, a ‘Belmont boy’ who had been deported from Marseilles back to Trinidad due to his involvement with the French communist party. Gittens put some socialist backbone into the NWCSA, and the eloquent Elma became ‘Comrade Francois’ and chief ideologue of the organisation.

Enlarging upon the issue of unemployment, the NWSCA went on the attack and took on imperialism and colonialism at large. In sympathising with the Ethiopians during Mussolini’s invasion of that country in 1935, they held a mass meeting in October of that year. This rally won the communist group support from other levels in the society, e.g. from Roman Catholics and many middle-class Afro-Trinidadians.

The NWSCA also started to attack Captain Arthur Cipriani, who in their view was not radical enough as a labour leader. Cipriani, who had meanwhile become Mayor of Port-of-Spain, had always had his own ideas concerning the manner in which the authorities could work towards the improvement of the situation of workers. He eyed the communist NWSCA suspiciously and banned them from assembling in Woodford Square.

While the organisation worked closely together with Uriah ‘Buzz’ Butler, Elma Francois was always in an ideological tug-o-war with him. In contrast to Butler, Francois denounced the British colonists, and as a communist she also denounced religion as a political means. Trinidadians being the spiritual people that they are, the latter didn’t always work in her fervour, and the NWSCA was never to exude the mass appeal that Butler possessed.

On June 19th, 1937, riots took place in Fyzabad and police officer Charlie King had been burned alive by the mob. Francois immediately went to Fyzabad and informed herself. Only three days later, the NWSCA had instigated the first strike in Port-of-Spain. Demonstrations and ‘strike fever’ spread throughout the whole country, to San Fernando and Arima. Out of that, the inevitable charges of unlawful assembly (of which Elma were eventually acquitted) and more importantly seditition resulted.

The sedition trials between October 1937 and February 1938 were a very trying time for Elma Francois, who undertook to defend herself and not leave it up to a lawyer. Fortunately for her, she was able to convince the all-male jury and the judge with her intelligence and eloquence, and she was finally acquitted. Her speech was well-prepared and clear, and in the cross-examination she kept a straight face. Rhoda Reddock, in her book about Elma Francois, reports her as answering to the prosecutor C.T.W.E. Worrell, who asked her why she persisted in making speeches which were ‘causing disaffection among his Majesty’s subjects’:

“I don’t know that my speeches create disaffection, I know that my speeches create a fire in the minds of the people so as to change the conditions which now exist, and it isn’t for me here to tell you what is existing because I believe that you are a son of some working-class family despite your lofty position as you stand before me as a prosecutor.”

Good for you, Elma! Her companion Jim Barrette, however, was put in jail for nine months for sedition, and Elma, who started to work hard to appeal the sentence, grew thin and gaunt in the struggle to free Jim.

In the following years, the NWSCA worked towards the formation of trade unions in northern Trinidad. The group started to publish a newsletter called ‘The New Emancipator’, reflecting the new and dynamic feeling of being emancipated now experienced by the black working class, just a century after the emancipation from slavery had taken place. Butler, who was detained in prison for the duration of the Second World War, was nevertheless present in spirit in the early meetings, in which Comrade Francois, inspite of her personal differences with ‘Buzz’, spoke of the close contact her organisation had with him.

Elma Francois developed a goitre in her forties, a growth which she left untreated. Her son, who had joined her in Trinidad at the age of 16, enlisted to fight in Europe. This made her worried and very unhappy. She died shortly after the farewell dance given for the Trinidadian contingent which left for the front in 1944.

Elma Francois’ death was a great loss to the NWSCA, and without her as their ‘heartbeat’, the organisation never became as active again as it once was.

To this day, she is truly a heroine, not because she was a ‘commie’ in times when communism had not been tested as yet, or because she was one of maybe two or three women who dared to stand up in a male world. These were only the realities of the times before the Second World War.

Outside of these realities, Elma Francois is a heroine because she personiefied timeless truths that many women nowadays should practice: political will, temerity to speak up in public, tenacity in educating herself and in using that education for a cause.

In the 1930s, the world was deep in the claws of the Great Depression, resulting in inflation, mass unemployment, hunger, shattered dreams, energy that evaporated, creativity that had no goal, hopelessness.

Elma Francois’ social conscience was as well developed as that of Uriah ‘Buzz’ Butler and Captain A. A. Cipriani, but she struggled for social justice in a different way. Butler and Cipriani strove for the improvement of the lives of workers by strengthening also those who could employ them. Elma Francois, however, was strongly influenced by radical communists, and her visions did not include the mercantile and industrial middle class in the process of reforming the society.