Trinidad and Tobago Carnival

Break of day

The official two days of Carnival begin in the dark on Monday morning with J’ouvert — from the French for “break of day”. Revellers parade through town in homemade or satirical costumes, covering themselves in oil, mud and powder and dancing to calypso and soca. Later on Monday and on Tuesday come the formal costumes of the mas bands: mas, short for masquerade, is the word for the costumes and for playing in a band.

Alongside the big bands, the National Carnival Commission keeps alive the traditional characters. The Midnight Robber wears a costume drawn from the American Wild West, with an oversized hat and a cape covered in symbols of death, blows a whistle and delivers boastful “Robber Talk” speeches drawn from sources including the Bible and Shakespeare, threatening his audience with a coffin-shaped money box. The Moko Jumbie strides on stilts ten to fifteen feet high; the name comes from West African tradition, and his height was said to let him see evil before ordinary people could. Other characters include the Dame Lorraine, a parody of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat often played by a man, and the Jab Jab devils.

From balls to Canboulay

From 1783, French settlers in Trinidad celebrated a carnival season from Christmas to Ash Wednesday with dinners, balls, concerts and hunting parties. After the Emancipation Bill of 1833, freed Africans joined in and brought Canboulay — from the French for “burnt cane” — with drums, singing, dancing and stick-fighting. It was first held on 1 August, Emancipation Day, and later moved to the night after Dimanche Gras, the Sunday before Carnival. The colonial government tried repeatedly to suppress the festivities, leading to the Canboulay riots of 1881 and 1884; a law of 1884 banned torches, drumming and stick-fighting and fixed the start of Carnival at 6 am on the Monday. Street carnival, once held over three days, was restricted to Monday and Tuesday in 1943.

Calypso and steelpan

Calypso, mainly of African origin, has been called a poor man’s newspaper: it grew from improvised songs of self-praise and scorn for others. Its stars have included the Roaring Lion, Lord Kitchener and the Mighty Sparrow, and in 1978 Calypso Rose became the first woman to win the Calypso Monarch competition. Today soca has overtaken calypso as the most popular carnival music.

The steelpan was born between 1935 and 1945. The bands of the time played tamboo bamboo — lengths of bamboo cut to different pitches — and around 1935 some began to beat metal containers instead. Players discovered that hammering and stretching the metal changed its pitch, and soon the first pan with enough notes to carry a simple melody appeared. At the end of the Second World War the rival bands of Port of Spain took the new sound onto the streets.