Ian Isidore Smart, Ph.D.

THE ROLE OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAS

This is a study commissioned by the Unit of Social Development, Education and Culture of the Organization of American States under the following terms of reference:

Using the hemispheric reality as a foundation, preparing a study of the theme: “The role of Cultural Diversity in the Development of the Americas”. The impact of cultural diversity on the economic, social reality and development of the Americas should be measured/studied at the national, regional, hemispheric levels.

Including:

The Ministers of Culture of CARICOM (and associated members) have a mechanism of meetings and permanent consultations, taking that reality as a foundation,

1. What focus or foci have been given to cultural diversity?2. What capacity does cultural diversity have in the construction of national

identity?3. How can ancestral cultural diversity be maintained while simultaneously

allowing for the achievement of modernization/development?4. What role has been given to diversity as a possible instrument/catalyst of

development?5. Do all (some) of the countries affiliated with CARICOM (and associated

members) have regional or national cultural policies that include cultural diversity as an engine/catalyst for development?

6. What strategies can be implemented with the collaboration of International Organizations, the IDB and World Bank?

7. What quantitative and qualitative information supports the thesis of the document?

Introduction

The idea of diversity has tended to ground the traditional approach by academe to the

Caribbean. As we move into the twenty-first century this approach has to be revisited.

Our paper will begin with a review of the very concept of diversity as it applies to

Caribbean reality. Having clarified this issue, the study will proceed. Since Carnival is so

central to Caribbean culture, our study will be centered on the Carnival phenomenon and

will respond specifically to the questions posed in our mandate.

Cultural diversity has been the basis of academic approaches to the Caribbean reality.

The assumption is made that each of the islands and territories of the region has

developed a peculiar, sui generis cultural tradition. This assumption has been diligently

promoted by scholars and, therefore, uncritically accepted by the policy makers in the

governmental, nongovernmental, and academic spheres of each of the nations and

territories of CARICOM (and associated members). As a result, the man in the street of

the region tends to view the Caribbean as a culturally very diverse entity. On the other

hand, many are the voices of the practitioners of culture, which proclaim the cultural

unity of the region. One such voice is that of Black Stalin, one of the renowned oral

poets (griots) of Trinidad and Tobago. In his 1979 Kaiso, “The Caribbean Man,” Stalin

declared:

Them is one race

The Caribbean man

From the same place

The Caribbean man

That make the same trip

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The Caribbean man

On the same ship

The Caribbean man.

(Quoted in Central American Writers 5)

Black Stalin’s view of the regional cultural reality is generally shared by the artists and

intellectuals who are native to the region.

In 1948 the British colonial machine established a native university in the Anglophone

Caribbean. It was called the University College of the West Indies and was sited in Mona,

Jamaica. It was intended to be the West Indian University, serving all of the English-

speaking islands and territories of the region. These included British Honduras (now

Belize) and British Guiana (now Guyana), and they were all at the time British colonial

possessions. The University of the West Indies still serves Belize, however Guyana has

created its own institution of tertiary education, the University of Guyana. A CARICOM

university has existed, then, for over a half century. The University of the West Indies is

still a single entity with major campuses now in Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago in

addition to the flagship campus in Mona, Jamaica. In spite of this basic manifestation of

cultural unity, the majority of the very academics who staff the regional university appear

to have accepted unquestioningly the cultural diversity paradigm as the preferred one.

In the United States, one nation under God, every one of the fifty states has its own

system of institutions of tertiary education. The University of Maryland is quite distinct

and different from the University of California, etc. etc. However, scholars routinely

propose the melting pot (or at least the salad bowl) model as the appropriate point of

departure for discussing the cultural reality of the United States. The various nations of

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Europe have moved towards a political unity expressed in the European Union. A French

citizen who was born in 1860 and lived for eight-five years would have experienced in

his flesh and blood three explosions of savage tribal conflict between the Gauls and the

Germans, namely, the Franco-Prussian War, World War 1, and World War 11. This

person’s grandchildren live in a world in which France and Germany have become

merely units in an overarching European state. Clearly, French and German are still two

quite distinct languages. Clearly, French and German cultural traditions are quite distinct.

The cultural diversity paradigm would appear to be quite appropriate for a study of the

European Union. However, the academy has tended to focus on the cultural unity rather

than the cultural diversity of Europe.

In a watershed article, “African Philosophical Systems A Rational Reconstruction,” the

Trinidadian scholar, Lancine Keita posits, “modern African thought is equipped,

therefore, with a foundation on which new structures could be developed” (170). Keita

has followed in the footsteps of Cheikh Anta Diop who was the most impressive of the

twentieth century scholars to present arguments for the cultural unity of Africa. Keita

cites also, for example, J. Olumide Lucas who “argues for religious, cultural and

linguistic kinships between the Yorubas of West Africa and the ancient Egyptians” (177).

The academy, which accepts so readily the cultural unity of Europe, rejects outright any

argument for the analogous unity in Africa.

In May 2000, we had the privilege of being invited to speak at the University of

Birmingham, England under the auspices of the Department of Spanish. We were politely

but firmly chided for suggesting a profound kinship between contemporary Africans,

such as the Yoruba, and the people of Ancient Egypt. We were deemed to be “romancing

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Africa,” to be unfaithful to the cultural reality. Our response on that occasion is

instructive. We affirmed categorically the right of Africans (even those who happened to

be born in the Caribbean or in the Diaspora) to speak authoritatively on things African.

Statements of this kind are to considered privileged by non-Africans, whose most fitting

response would have to be one of respectful and attentive silence.

Keita affirms in his article:

On the other hand, there is no historical evidence to show that there are any cultural

affinities between Greek culture and that of, say, the Gauls and Vandals of Europe. Yet

the philosophical writings of Descartes were inspired mainly by Greek thought and not

by the traditional beliefs of the Gallic or Norman people. And there is nothing in Leibniz’

writings to suggest that the rationalism he espoused was derived from the lore and myth

of the unlettered Vandals. (178)

Indeed, the romantic movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century was hailed as

a vindication of the indigenous northern European genius vis-à-vis the Greco-Roman

(Mediterranean) one. The latter is classical, whereas the former is romantic.

Keita continues:

And although there is no known evidence that there exists any relationship whatever

between the purely indigenous belief systems of the pre-modern peoples of Europe [the

romantic tradition] and classical Greek thought [the classical tradition, per se], all Europe

claims the Greek heritage. One might venture to argue that classical Greek thought was

accepted as the intellectual foundation of modern Europe thought mainly because it

satisfied the criteria of philosophy, that is, that the Greeks were the first Europeans to

articulate cogent and systematic theories about the nature of the world. (178)

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The European scholar, Martin Bernal, published in 1987 (a decade after Keita’s article

first appeared) the first volume of his groundbreaking work, Black Athena: The

Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. On the first page of the main body of his text

Bernal declares:

These volumes are concerned with two models of Greek history: one viewing Greece as

essentially European or Aryan, and the other seeing it as Levantine, on the periphery of

the Egyptian and Semitic cultural area. I call them the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Ancient’ models. The

‘Ancient Model’ was the conventional view among Greeks in the Classical and

Hellenistic ages. According to it, Greek culture had arisen as the result of colonization,

around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civilized the native inhabitants.

Furthermore, Greeks had continued to borrow heavily from Near Eastern cultures. (1)

One full generation before Bernal, in 1954, George G. M. James, a scholar from British

Guiana (now Guyana) penned the powerful volume, Stolen Legacy, with the very explicit

if somewhat cumbersome subtitle, The Greeks were not the authors of Greek Philosophy,

but the people of North Africa, commonly called the Egyptians. James’s arguments are

compelling. Although Bernal has declared explicitly that he was unaware of the work of

James, Black Athena is beyond doubt the intellectual child of Stolen Legacy.

Furthermore, there is reason to suspect that contrary to his written declaration, Bernal

was indeed very aware of James’s work before he wrote Black Athena.

Bernal asserts:

Most people are surprised to learn that the Aryan Model, which most of us have been

brought up to believe, developed only during the first half of the 19th century . . ..

According to the Aryan Model, there had been an invasion from the north unreported

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in ancient tradition which had overwhelmed the local `Aegean’ or `Pre-Hellenic’

culture . . .. It is from the construction of this Aryan Model that I call this volume The

Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985. (1-2)

It is not without significance that the “Fabrication of Ancient Greece” is exactly

coterminous with the development of the “Enlightenment” and the establishment of

“modernity.” We have argued that there is a profound connection between these

phenomena.

Europe at the end of the eighteenth century had become outrageously wealthy as a

consequence of the enslavement of Africans. Yet the “Ancient Model” affirmed

unequivocally that these Africans (deemed by the framers of the United States

Constitution to be three-fifths human) were the originators of civilization. The French

intellectual Count Constantine Francis Chassebeuf de Volney was a contemporary of the

framers of the United States Constitution. The Frenchman, however, understood the

primacy of Africa, declaring in his work, Ruins of Empire:

There [in so-called “darkest Africa”] a people, now forgotten, discovered, while others

were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected

from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of

nature, those civil and religious systems that still govern the universe. (Quoted in

Amazing Connections 13)

Unwilling to give up the immense wealth generated by the greatest of crimes against

humanity, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Europeans opted to rewrite history. They, as

Bernal put it, “fabricated Ancient Greece.” They called this process”enlightenment” and

declared it the beginning of modernity. It was, in effect, obfuscation and the installation

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of white supremacy.

Keita sums up poignantly:

As was indicated in this paper, the origins of Greek thought were non-European, but

latter-day European nationalism sought to ascribe an independent origin to Greek

thought, hence, the concept of the Greek miracle. Greek thought, like the religious

movement, Christianity, was important for European civilization in that it fostered

cultural homogeneity over a culturally disparate group of peoples. Witness, for example,

the significant fact that the heritage of the Greeks is maintained even in modern

mathematics by the purely arbitrary usage of Greek letters as mathematical symbols.

Europe claims the Greek heritage, but the concept of Europe was alien to the Greek

mind. European philosophy is best seen, therefore, as an artificial construction serving

the function of maintaining the cultural and racial integrity of those peoples who live

west of Asia. (178)

Keita goes on to assert: “On the other hand, a stronger case can be made for important

cultural links between the civilization of ancient Egypt and other African societies”

(178). In the more than two decades since Keita first wrote his article the evidence has

become overwhelming not only in support of the “African Origin of Civilization” but

also of the “Cultural Unity of Africa.”

The cultural unity of Africa under girds the cultural unity of the Caribbean and especially

that of CARIOM (and associated members). It seems utterly unbalanced to posit the

cultural homogeneity of European peoples while downplaying or even downright

disparaging the cultural homogeneity of people who number some five million and who

speak the same language. In the introduction to his 1978 book, The Caribbean: The

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Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, the Jamaican scholar Franklin W. Knight states

quite clearly:

The concept of the Caribbean endorsed in this book emphasizes cultural commonalities

rather than political chronology, without neglecting the importance of the latter. In my

view, the region comprises one culture area in which common factors have forged a

more-or-less common way of looking at life, the world, and their place in the scheme of

things. All of the societies of the Caribbean share an identifiable Weltanschauung, despite

the superficial divisions that are apparent. The difference in belief, values, and attitudes

of the Trinidadian and the Guyanese is perhaps no greater than that between the English

and the Welsh, or the Castilian and the Andalusian. Moreover, the Caribbean peoples,

with their distinctive artificial societies, common history, and common problems, seem to

have more in common than the Texan and the New Yorker, or the Mayan Indian and the

cosmopolite of Mexico City do in their respective nations of the United States and

Mexico. (xi)

The time has come for us to put to rest forever the approach to the study of the Caribbean

which privileges the concept of cultural diversity. This approach is posited on the

Machiavellian principle of divide and conquer, divide et impera. The principle of unity in

diversity is on the other hand one of those systems referenced by Count Volney as having

been founded by Africans on the study of the laws of nature. It is one of the cardinal

epistemological principles. Arguably the most important application of this principle is a

passage “from a hymn to the god [Amun] that was written in Dynasty 19, probably

during the reign of Ramesses 11, on a papyrus that is now in the Netherlands National

Museum of Antiquities in Leiden” (Allen 182).

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James P. Allen, a contemporary white American scholar, who is the curator of Egyptian

Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, has given the academy one of

the most cogent presentations on the Leiden papyrus. Allen’s translation of the powerful

passage is as follows:

All the gods are three:

Amun, Re, and Ptah, without their second.

His identity is hidden in Amun,

His is Re as face, his body is Ptah.

He goes on to declare:

This passage, the most famous in the Leiden papyrus, recognizes the existence of a single

god (in the singular pronoun “his”) but accepts, at the same time, three separate aspects

of the god: existing apart from nature (as Amun), yet visible in and governing nature (as

Re), and the source of all things in nature (as Ptah). These lines have been regarded as

the ultimate expression not only of Egyptian creation accounts but also of the entire

3,000-year history of Egyptian theology. (183)

The overwhelming majority of the citizens of CARICOM (and associated members) are

of African ancestry. It is most fitting, therefore, that they, as the direct descendants of the

discoverers of the civil and religious systems which still govern the universe, be the

primary beneficiaries of the most fundamental of the systems bequeathed by their

ancestors to all humanity. Rather than thwarting their aspirations to full development

with the burden of cultural diversity, the academy must begin to promote the thrust

toward full empowerment through the mechanism of a productive and liberating heuristic

paradigm. This paradigm is cultural unity in diversity.

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There is no better manifestation of the power of the unity in diversity principle than

Carnival in CARICOM (and associated members). The Trinidad and Tobago Carnival is

widely regarded as the most prominent of the Carnivals in CARICOM. However,

Carnival is central to the cultural life of every single CARICOM nation. Most

importantly, Carnival is the most significant engine of potential development for all of

these nations individually and for the region as a whole.

Carnival as the Basis of the Cultural Unity in Diversity

Trinidadians and Tobagonians think of their Carnival as “we thing,” a sui generis national

festival. And, they are right, but not for the reason which seems to be uppermost in their

minds. They are right because the Carnival is “a black thing,” a festival that has its roots

in the very mother of all festivals, the Wosirian (Osirian) mystery play that was

celebrated annually in Kemet (Ancient Egypt) from the very dawn of history.

Approximately fifty years ago, the Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavo Paz wrote a

fascinating analysis of his people and their culture, El laberinto de la soledad [The

Labyrinth of Solitude], which contributes significantly to our understanding of human

festivals. Paz is the embodiment of what Knight called the “cosmopolite” Mexican from

the capital city. And, true to Knight’s analysis, even as he expounded on the fiesta as a

national cultural phenomenon, Paz seems to have been blissfully unaware of the fact that

the native peoples of Chiapas view their Carnival as the most beautiful and representative

festival.

Every CARICOM nation has a Carnival, which it tends to view as its special festival.

Some of these Carnivals might be considered reconstituted festivals developed on the

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Trinidad and Tobago model. Such would be, for example, the St. Vincent Carnival, the

Jamaica Carnival, the Antigua Carnival, and the Virgin Islands Carnival. Others such as

the Guyanese Mashramani and the Barbados Crop Over are harvest festivals not related

to the festival, which evolved within the Christian calendar. The Carnivals of Haiti,

Panama, Cuba, and Colombia were in fact evolved in concert with the Catholic tradition,

as was the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. However, the historical trajectories of these

festivals have been independent of each other. Grenada has now moved its Carnival to

the summer period in order to facilitate tourism. The Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago

Carnival are intimately connected. The most significant manifestation of this connection

is the fact that the Kaiso King of Trinidad and Tobago (and indeed the world) is The

Mighty Sparrow, who was born in Grenada.

Just as the native peoples of Chiapas view their Carnival as a sui generis festival, a

similar sentiment would be expressed by nationals of Barbados, Guyana, the Virgin

Islands, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Jamaica with regard to their respective Carnivals. We

have argued in our book, Ah Come Back Home: Perspectives on the Trinidad and Tobago

Carnival that the festival is the mother of all festivals and it is fundamentally a Pan-

African festival. This would explain why so many different groups of peoples of the

Americas see Carnival as their own thing.

Speaking of the festival of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a national festival for Mexicans, Paz

declares:

Durante los días que preceden y suceden al 12 de diciembre, el tiempo suspende su

carrera, hace un alto y en lugar de empujarnos hacia un mañana siempre inalcanzable y

mentiroso, nos ofrece un presente redondo y perfecto, de danza y juerga, de comunión y

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comilona con lo más antiguo y secreto de México. El tiempo deja de ser sucesión y

vuelve a ser lo que fue, y es, originariamente; un presente en donde pasado y futuro al fin

se reconcilian. (42)

[In the days that precede and follow December 12, time stands still. It takes a pause and

instead of pushing us towards a tomorrow that is always unreachable and deceptive, it

offers us a perfected present, redolent of dancing and revelry, of communion and of

feasting in the spirit of Mexico’s most ancient and secret traditions. Time ceases to be a

sequence and becomes again what it was in the beginning and ultimately always is: a

present in which the past and future are finally reconciled with each other.]

Festival time is sacred time. It is time outside of time. The renowned African scholar

Cheikh Anta Diop reports in The African Origin of Civilization that his ancestors from

the Nile Valley, who created humankind’s earliest civilization, established in 4236 B.C.

(or 4241 B.C.) “Humanity’s most ancient historical date.” For we know “with

mathematical certainty” that by this year “a calendar was definitely in use in Egypt”

(100). It gave us a year of 360 regular days with a period of five days outside of time.

Precisely during those five days time stood still; it ceased to be succession, a flow, and

returned to being what it always was and still really always is, an eternal nunc [now]

where past, present, and future converge wondrously.

Kimani S. K. Nehusi discusses these five days in his essay, “The Origins of Carnival:

Notes from a Preliminary Investigation,” in Ah Come Back Home. Paz focuses on the

reconciliation aspect of this magical time, the eternal nunc, for he understands the basic

contradiction of the human estate. We are spiritual beings existing on a material plane.

We essentially seek to reconcile this fundamental dilemma, to make sense of our

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existence. This is what the Wosirian mystery play was about, as will be explored later on

in the essay.

Patricia Alleyne-Dettmers, a Trinidad and Tobago born scholar currently based in

Germany, studied a particular masquerade band of the 1996 Notting Hill Carnival, the

best known of the reconstituted Trinidad and Tobago style Carnivals of contemporary

Britain. Allyene-Dettmers’ study is entitled “Beyond Borders, Carnival as Global

Phenomena: ‘Going Bananas, Food for the Devil,’” and is one of the contributions to the

volume, Ah Come Back Home. In her study she explores brilliantly the idea of

reconciliation, seeing it as a fundamental form of homecoming, taking the idea of home,

the book’s major focus, to a new level of meta-discourse. Indeed, Alleyne-Dettmers

introduces the concept of “meta-masking,” a process by which the reconciliation of

which Paz speaks is achieved. The masquerade band on which her presentation is based,

“Going Bananas, Food for the Devil,” was brought out for the 1996 Notting Hill Carnival

by two London-based artists, Julieta Rubio, a mestiza-white woman born in Colombia,

and her husband, Charles Beauchamp, a white man born in London. These two

Europeans proved to be keen students of the Carnival tradition and grasped the centrality

of reconciliation as metaphysical homecoming, as Alleyne-Dettmers argues with

compelling cogency.

Alleyne-Dettmers focuses on the Carnival as global phenomena. In a section of her essay

entitled “Globalization, Meta-Masking, and Cultural Identity” she makes the following

assertions.

This constant needs to define localness, place, to construct a new identifiable space and

its resultant reformulation of cultural or, indeed, other identities mirror another process,

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what I have described, in “Jump! Jump and Play Mas” and in “Ancestral Voices. Trevini -

A Case Study of Meta-masking in the Notting Hill Carnival,” as meta-masking. Initially

this concept was applied with respect to the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. This is a

process which combines both historical, and sociological analyzes that track Carnival

from its inception as a small folk festival of Africans of various ethnicities—who had

under the demoniacal pressures exerted by the brutal chattel slavery imposed on them by

barbaric Europeans forged a common way of life—to the grand professionalized, media-

directed national event that it is today. With this approach, I have been able to

demonstrate that Carnival, first and foremost, always reflects contemporary Trinbagonian

society in the larger universe of the contemporary world . . .. When applied to the global

Carnival context in Britain, meta-masking is a novel concept, which relates to the power

of Carnival to express, define, and explore national and indeed other identities, if only in

play. At every level the process of meta-masking involves a movement away from the

historical fragmentation and cultural denigration of the colonial legacy, a history of

departure, towards the ongoing quest for cultural wholeness, an arrival, a coming home,

as we termed it in “Ancestral Voices” (203). This encompasses a re-capitulation and re-

appropriation even a re-evaluation—in terms of symbolic representation (through

masquerade)—of many different historical, cultural, social, linguistic, and ethnic

frameworks, which assist in unfettering that unique capacity of the diasporic person to

move beyond cultural dislocation and ethnic marginalization, to a point of acceptance

and triumphant conclusion, a new sense of coming home . . .. Consequently, this political

and mental decolonization produces reconciliation to one’s situation, healing,

transcendence, ethnic empowerment, and finally a sense of cultural wholeness. This

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“sense of cultural wholeness,” as I have pointed out before, facilitated by meta-masking,

accentuates a notion of cohering, forming, metamorphosing, but moving always towards

a dynamic unfolding.

Finally, we should note that this chapter highlights the notion of cultural identity as

becoming rather than being. It focuses on the phenomenon as a dynamic process and

production, underscoring its shifting, mobile nature as diasporic subjects negotiate

between and are mediated by time, culture, experience, and history. (139-40)

Alleyne-Dettmers presentation is heavily theoretical. Meta-masking is defined as a

principle of cohering, reaffirming disparate elements. It is then coterminous with the

principle of unity in diversity. And, according to Alleyne-Dettmers, it is the principle,

which continues to energize the Carnival festival. However, the scholar with principled

fidelity to the academy ends the passage cited with a typical postmodern intellectual’s act

of faith:

Our approach thus contradicts the idea of cultural identity as a form of re-discovery of an

authentic/essentialist self fixed in time and space. We eschew the essentialist approach to

cultural identity. (139)

Contemporary scholarship has tended to develop into a belief system, a veritable lay

religion. Our opening section argued that the belief in the cultural diversity of Africa and

the Caribbean is a veritable dogma of the mainstream academy. Just as firmly held by the

academy is the rejection of “essentialism.” The eschewing of essentialism appears to

apply only to scholarship on non-European cultural phenomena. The idea of a romantic

movement, the idea of the classics is founded on an essentialist approach to cultural

identity.

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The theme of order versus disorder is another one that Paz develops in his essay as an

aspect of that reconciliation of contradictions. Indeed, the fundamental interplay of

opposing elements is highlighted in Paz’s choice of language. He speaks of the

celebration of an eminently religious feast as a transcendental moment redolent of

dancing [danza] and revelry [juerga], of communion [comunión] and feasting [comilo-

na].

Paz reports on a conversation he once had with a local mayor who complained about an

abysmally low annual municipal budget of three thousand pesos (these must have been

the old-time pesos that were almost on par with the United States dollar). The

conversation went in part as follows:

“Somos muy pobres. Por eso el señor Gobernador y la Federación nos ayudan cada año a

completar nuestros gastos”. “¿Y en qué utilizan esos tres mil pesos?” “Pues casi todo en

fiestas, señor. Chico como lo ve, el pueblo tiene dos Santos Patrones.” (43)

[“We are very poor. That’s why the state governor and the federal government help us

every year to meet our expenditures.” “And on what do you spend the three thousand

pesos?” “Well, almost entirely on festivals, sir. As small as you see it our little town has

two Patron Saints.”]

And Paz comments:

Esa respuesta no es asombrosa. Nuestra pobreza puede medirse por el número y

suntuosidad de las fiestas populares. Los países ricos tienen pocas: no hay tiempo, ni

humor. . . . Las masas modernas son aglomeraciones de solitarios. En las grandes

ocasiones, en París o Nueva York, cuando el público se congrega en plazas o estadios, es

notable la ausencia de pueblo: se ven parejas y grupos, nunca una comunidad viva en

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donde la persona humana se disuelve y rescata simultáneamente. Pero un pobre mexicano

¿cómo podría vivir sin esas dos o tres fiestas anuales que lo compensan de su estrechez y

de su miseria? Las fiestas son nuestro único lujo; ellas sustituyen, acaso con ventaja, al

teatro y a las vacaciones, al “week-end” y al “cocktail party” de los sajones, a las

recepciones de la burguesía y al café de los mediterráneos. (43)

[That reply was not at all startling. The number and level of lavishness of our popular

festivals can measure our poverty. There are few of them in the rich countries: there is no

time, no inclination . . .. Mass gatherings in the modern world are really assemblies of

loners. On the great occasions, in Paris or New York, when crowds gather in squares or

stadiums, what one notices is that there is no sense of being a people; one sees couples

and small groups, never a vibrant community which simultaneously absorbs and makes

whole the individual person. But how would a poor Mexican make it without those two

or three festivals in the year that make up for his hard times and his misery? Festivals are

our only luxury; they substitute, and perhaps to our advantage, for the theater and

vacations, the “week end” and the “cocktail party” of the Anglo-Saxons, the receptions of

the bourgeoisie and the coffees of the Mediterranean people.]

Neuse’s research uncovers the importance of festivals in Kempt. Be that as it may, many

people, even natives of Trinidad and Tobago, have expressed concern about the waste of

human and material resources that the celebration of Carnival involves. Paz in the quote

above presents the problem, which he will go on to discuss in depth. The mayor of an

impoverished municipality spends all of his scarce monetary resources on festivals. In the

spirit of Judas’s perverted logic, many would complain that these resources could have

been put to better use, feeding the poor, redressing the balance of payments problem,

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investing in infrastructure, etc. etc.

Ransford W. Palmer, a Jamaican-born scholar who chairs the Department of Economics

of Howard University in Washington, D.C. presents in Pilgrims from the Sun the cruel

irony of the emigration of peoples from CARICOM (and associated members) from their

sun-drenched paradise to the urban centers of the North. Paz had presented an insightful

critique of the culture of this North. Millions, if not billions, of our precious foreign

exchange are consumed by the sun people of those islands on the pseudofestivals of the

North.

Cleverly manipulated by the mass media propaganda mill, baneful victims of what Fidel

would term “teleagresión” [teleaggression], CARICOM people flock to Orlando, to Los

Angeles, to the theme parks of the North, forsaking their indigenous festivals. Many who

have completed the absurd “pilgrimage” have excitedly joined in such organized

pseudofestivals as the Macy’s Christmas Parade, the New Year’s Eve assembly at Times

Square, the Orange Bowl Parade in Pasadena, or even the Disney World and Disneyland

experience, only to come away sorely disappointed, utterly depressed by the artificiality,

the devastating emptiness, the total lack of “spirit.” It is clear that the economic situation

of CARICOM nations would greatly improve if the leadership, intellectual and

otherwise, would do more than muse on these matters.

Paz masterfully uncovers the core problem, those assemblies of celebrating humanity

never coalesce into a community; they are just agglomerations of individuals. And Paz

does not find the mayor’s position to be surprising. If the leadership in Trinidad and

Tobago had the insight of that minor Mexican mayor there would be a clearer national

understanding of the Carnival and a corresponding clearer national policy towards it. One

19

that would generate a sense of ownership over this significant element of the tiny nation’s

cultural patrimony. According to the perverse logic of white supremacy, poor people,

Mexicans as well as other Original World natives, waste money on festivals. Poor

Africans throughout the Americas-from Rio de Janeiro, to Panama, to Barranquilla,

Colombia, to Port-au-Prince, to New Orleans-have traditionally centered their cultural,

social, and economic life on the Carnival.

The potential for economic development through Carnivals in CARICOM is, then,

tremendous. It is clear that the various national governmental apparatuses have begun to

be aware of this potential. They know that Carnival is a genuine festival. With a fuller

understanding of the history of the festival this knowledge will lead to empowerment.

The unity in diversity paradigm will clear the way for such a fuller understanding. For

sociologists studying have provided the data on this African-ancestored population

throughout the Americas is instructive. Joyce Jackson, for example, reports on the

African Americans who play Indian mass annually in New Orleans. Nina de Freidmann

reports on the African Colombians who play mass in the Barranquilla area. And John M.

Likspi describes a similar practice across the border in Panama. The Carnival of Rio is of

such a lavish scale as to astound all observers and must clearly consume much if not all

of the resources of the participants, who in many instances are jobless Africans

The Paz-like understanding of Carnival leads to the economic empowerment of the

people over their cultural patrimony. The concept of “sustainable development” has been

fully endorsed by the transnational money elite, thereby canonizing and considerably

sanitizing the notion of economic empowerment of Original World peoples over their

natural resources, including their cultural patrimony. The route to be taken towards

20

“sustainable development” is clearly one that would make the Carnival the center of a

cultural tourism. Such a tourism would be analogous to the ecotourism that has recently

become the rage. Just as home economics was at one time renamed human ecology, so

too a cultural phenomenon like the Carnival can be considered to fit under the rubric of

human ecology. And on this basis an authentic “humanoecotourism” could be developed.

This would be a tourism that, for a change, would be fully controlled by the native

peoples of the Original World.

The Caribbean cruise is a particularly significant example of the exploitation of Carnival

by the corporate interests of the North. Through the mechanisms of the mass media, a

need has been created for the Caribbean cruise. This need has spread like a cancer, first to

the African American population and now even to the “pilgrims from the sun.” The

Carnival motif has been used as a lure. So, irony of ironies, “pilgrims from the sun,” has

now decided that a Caribbean cruise is an absolute necessity. CARICOM born residents

of the North now go back home, their return to the native land mediated by the corporate

interests of the North. Their experience is organized within the matrix of a pseudofestival

in such a way that these corporate interests keep ninety-nine cents of every dollar spent.

And these very dupes, these hapless “pilgrims from the sun” who would consider

themselves blessed to spend upwards of six thousand dollars on a ten-day, cruise-ship,

transnational-orchestrated “return to the native land” for their family would begrudge the

spending of one thousand dollars annually for a spouse to enjoy the authentic experience

of “coming back home for the Carnival.”

21

Carnival as an African Festival

E. A. Wallis Budge, the British Egyptologist whose work is about a century old, has

given the scholarly world much information on and insight into the cult of Osiris (Wosir)

in his two volume book, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection. Budge reports that the

centerpiece of Kemetic devotion to Wosir was the annual mystery play that was

performed principally in the holy cities of Abydos and Dendera up in the south of Egypt.

Budge gets his information, he tells us, from “The second portion of the inscription on

the stele of I-kher-nefert . . . [which] describes briefly the principal scenes in the Osiris

play which was performed at Abydos annually” (II 5). Budge continues:

I-kher-nefert himself played a prominent part in this “Mystery play,” and he describes his

own acts as follows:—

“I performed the coming forth of Ap-uat when he set out to defend his father.”

From this it is clear that in the XIIth dynasty Ap-uat was regarded as the son of Osiris,

and that he acted the part of leader of Osiris’s expedition, which was represented by a

procession formed of priests and the ordinary people. (II 5)

Budge’s interpretation of the document on which he is reporting is convincing; it is a

document of stage directions. The play is an annual religious ritual of singular

importance in the life of the community. The king, Pharaoh, participated along with the

priests and other officials as well as the common people; and it involved the movement

of all the participants in procession through a public space.

Ap-uat walked in front, next came the boat containing the figure of the god and a

company of priests or “followers” of the god, and a crowd of people brought up the rear.

22

“I drove back the enemy from the Neshmet Boat, I overthrew the foes of Osiris.”

The boat of the god was then attacked by a crowd of men who represented the foes of

Osiris, and, as the god was defenseless, Ap-uat engaged them in combat, and beat them

off, and the procession then continued on its way in the temple. (II 5-6)

The ritual is clearly a dramatic reenactment, a commemoration, of certain transcendent

events in the life of the founding “god” or hero. There is a warrior theme. In fact, the

presentation reminds us of those presentations of war scenes that Carnival bands like

Tokyo and Casablanca used to put on in the Savannah and even in the streets of Port-of-

Spain during the Carnival in the 1950s.

Budge further reports that

I-kher-nefert played the part of leader of the search party, and their wanderings probably

occupied three days, during which the sham fight between the followers of Osiris and the

followers of Set was repeated at intervals, and great lamentations were made. All these

events were represented by the words “great coming-forth,” which to every Egyptian

bore the most solemn significance. (II 6-7)

Budge has unearthed what could be seen as a template followed closely by the Africans

who created “we thing,” the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. At Carnival time stickfighters

would roam the island in bands spurred on by shantwells, lead singers of the call-

response kalinda (warrior) songs, to the rhythm of tambour bamboo. The shantwell was

the captain, playing a role analogous to I-kher-nefert’s. Indeed, the band is still the

fundamental organizational unit in the Carnival. However, as Pearl Eintou Springer, a

Trinidad and Tobago based scholar and poet, has poignantly lamented in the piece she

contributed to Ah Come Back Home, the Carnival band is not what it used to be: “HE

23

[the I-kher-nefert type] is also disappearing from the bands themselves, pushed out by a

mass of vibrant, energetic, orgiastic female flesh” (32). The wanderings of the small

bands of the “long-time” Carnival would begin weeks before the official Carnival days.

Kaiso singers even after they were no longer exclusively shantwells singing laways

maintained the urge to wander, to take to the road like I-kher-nefert.

Skipping forward three or more millennia, Budge reports on a street processional dance

to music in which people played roles wearing disguises. This was the spring festival for

Auset (whom the Greeks called Isis)-Wosir’s faithful companion-in Rome.

At the head of the great procession came men who were dressed to represent a soldier, a

huntsman, a woman, and a gladiator. Men dressed as magistrates, philosophers, fowlers,

and fishermen . . . followed these. Then came women wearing white raiment and

garlands of spring flowers, scattering blossoms as they went . . .. After these came a

mixed multitude . . .. The musicians and a choir of youths followed these. (II, 296-97)

He had reported on another festival for Auset, which opened on November 10, and which

“commemorated the murder of Osiris and finding of his body by Isis” (II, 296).

The element of theater that was central to the ancient Kemetic festival continues on after

many millennia in the Roman one. Conventional wisdom affirms that the modern-day

Carnival was derived from a Roman pre-Lenten festival, a bacchic saturnalia that the new

Way reinterpreted into the Christian world order. The once pagan festival was stripped of

its bacchanalian excesses, being converted into a decent Christian celebration of one final

indulgence (hopefully not too, too licentious) in carnem [meat or “the flesh”], a fond

farewell to “the flesh” in its literal and symbolic sense prior to the carnem levare,

literally the taking away (removal) of flesh, that would be the forty days of fasting,

24

abstinence, and general penance for sins that Lent represents.

The evidence would suggest that this original Roman pagan festival was really an African

religious one, and one that has its roots in the mother of all festivals, the Wosirian

mystery play. Nehusi’s essay corroborates this interpretation, presenting, indeed, even

more compelling data and commentary. We argued in a second essay contributed to Ah

Come Back Home that is was not the European French who exerted the greatest influence

on the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival but rather the speakers of French Creole, an African

language.

It is clear, too, that all of the contemporary New World Carnivals are closely related.

Nina S. Friedemann, for example, reports on the aggressive self-assertion that

characterizes the traditional Carnival celebrations in the region of Barranquilla,

Colombia, especially in the central tradition of the groups of Congo dancers and mas

players (to use the Trinidadian equivalent) who come out on the streets for the Carnival.

In fact, as John M. Lipski reports, the Congo groups are found in neighboring Panama as

well and the high point of their cultural life is precisely the Carnival season.

The fact is that, like Carnival, most popular culture throughout the world has an African

base, and that this base is necessarily what the post-modern theorists would label a

“meta-form.” So-called “pop” music is nothing but watered down African-American oral

literature.

The fact is that the most vibrant cultural energies in the Americas are those provided by

Africans, from go-go, to salsa, to reggae and Kaiso, to blues and jazz. Even the very,

very “American” form, the Broadway musical is of African-American origin. The

quintessential Argentine cultural expression, the tango, less than one hundred years ago

25

was simply another Negro (“nigger”) dance.

Carnival is as Alleyne-Dettmers presents it a “meta-masking” phenomenon. It is the

engine of unity in diversity, of reconciliation. Olaogun Adeyinka, a Trinidad and Tobago

born scholar now based in Toronto, focuses in his contribution to Ah Come Back Home

on the reconstruction element of Carnival. He cites Gordon Rohlehr, a Guyanese scholar

now based in Trinidad and Tobago, who has written one of the definitive books on the

Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. In his work, Calypso & Society, Rohlehr telescopes the

confusion, which reigned in nineteenth-century Trinidad:

In the confused post-Emancipation period, the problems of identity and status must have been

acute. How was status to be determined in a society where groups of Yorubas, say, fresh from

Africa as indentured workers, or taken off slave ships, were living alongside creolized Blacks of

French, English or Spanish background, East Indian indentured workers and a dozen or more

fragmented ethnic groups, all experiencing severe problems of language in their relation to the

power structure? Clearly in that mêlée, the man who was recognized as a possessor of the word

and as a spokesman for the group occupied a position of supreme importance. Such a man would

have been the chantwel of the Calinda bands. (52)

Adeyinka sees the festival as a “Carnival of hope … a Carnival of emancipation, com-

memoration, reconstruction, reassembling, and creativity which had its sacred ‘ritual

beginning,’ as Errol Hill, in The Trinidad Carnival, so aptly writes, in the Canboulay

reenactments and remembrances.”

Citing the data presented by Rohlehr, Adeyinka highlights the steady influx of immi-

grants from other Caribbean territories, such as Barbados, Grenada, Dominica, St.

Vincent, Venezuela, Curacao. “Between 1838 and 1931 approximately 100,000 British

West Indian migrants settled in Trinidad, the heaviest influx (665,000) occurring between

26

1871 and 1911”(8). Between 1841 and 1867 this Carnival of emancipation,

commemoration, reconstruction, reassembling and creativity was also freshly nourished

by the arrival from Africa of “3,383 ‘recaptives’ from Sierra Leone, 3,510 from the Kru

coast near Liberia, and 3,396 from St. Helena” (7). Add to this social, political, linguistic,

religious, and cultural maelstrom, Yoruba-speaking Africans with their “Orisha

worship . . . [and] their songs, chants, liturgy and dirges,” forming new relationships, as

Rohlehr points out, with “the Kongos, Hausas, Igboes, Rada and Gurunsi” (16-17).

Adeyinka concludes:

Post emancipation nineteenth century Carnival in Trinidad developed inside a cauldron of

massive social, economic, political, linguistic, religious, and cultural unrest. We, indeed,

have already paid some attention to the linguistic situation. There were major problems

of adjustment, intragroup conflict and violence among the various African ethnic groups

fighting for space and ascendancy. Rampant poverty, malnutrition, diseases, and

atrocious living conditions prevailed. And the European puppet masters pulled the strings

of discord and coercively implemented their policies of divide and rule, white

supremacist indoctrination that included religious conversions, and an oppressive,

Orwellian regimen of “control, censorship and containment.” But Africans fought back

with the powerful spiritual, political, cultural, creative, and artistic tools at their disposal.

The many insurrections that occurred during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth

centuries, including the Canboulay riots of 1881, bear graphic testimonies to their

determination not to surrender to the onslaught. (120)

The Carnival phenomenon proclaims the principle of unity in diversity with respect to

27

the significant question of language. The academy basing itself on the sacrosanct

assumption that language defines the culture has comfortably posited the division of the

Caribbean into disparate cultural groups reflecting the European languages imposed by

the colonizing powers. Thus the academy speaks confidently of a French Caribbean, a

Spanish Caribbean, an English Caribbean (CARICOM for the most part), and a Dutch

Caribbean.

None of those who declare confidently that Carnival as it is known in Trinidad and

Tobago came from the French has ever tried seriously to sustain that the “French” in

question was unambiguously French, that is, European “French.” Such a postulate would

be rejected as patently preposterous. Even though those who declare confidently that

Carnival came from the French have not evinced any real propensity for in-depth,

holistic, historical analysis, they should at least be expected to apply a little common

sense. Common sense indicates that in the context of the discussion of Carnival the

“French” referred to is not really “French,” but more precisely what linguists term a

French-based Creole language.

Creole is one of those marvelously ambiguous terms, its protean fluidity transferring

from English to French to Spanish to Portuguese, and to all of the Creoles or creolized

varieties associated with these European languages. So that “Creole” has as many

mutually incompatible referents as créole or criollo or crioulo (Nor must it be forgotten

for a moment that in the Caribbean there exists a well-established Portuguese-based

Creole language, it is the Papiamento of the Dutch controlled islands- Caribbean reality

is, indeed, most marvelous). The term, then, belongs to the magical realm of poetry in

which a word can mean “A” and “non-A” at the same time; it can have two diametrically

28

opposed referents. Trinbagonians, for example, all know that the term “Creole” can refer

to white people or to black people. Take, for example, the sentence: “That French Creole

prefers to lime with Creole women, he can’t stand Indians or other French Creoles.”

It can be reasonably argued that the term “Creole” is most fully applicable when it is

acknowledged to be exactly coterminous with “African.” It can be reasonably argued that

the French-based Creole referred to in discussion of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival is

a fundamentally African language. Thus the “Creole” referred to in such discussion is

always the African Creole as distinct from the European one. This is true even when

“Creole” is used in conjunction with “French.” Not only is Trinidadian French Creole an

African language, but it follows that so too are Haitian Creole, Papiamento, and the many

forms of English Creole-especially the Creole called pidgin that is the current lingua

franca in West Africa. Our second essay in the collection, Ah Come Back Home examined

certain French Creole kaisos from nineteenth and twentieth century Trinidad and Tobago

Carnival showing them to be samples of popular oral poetry that can be considered a

valid expression of Negritude.

Trinbagonians think of their Carnival simply as “we thing.” The book, Ah Come Back

Home argued that the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival has never ceased to be a

manifestation of the quintessential African festival, the mother of all festivals.

Trinbagonians can then rightly claim their festival as “we thing” only because it is a

“black thing.” It is, in fact, the most representative and the greatest Pan-African festival.

Conclusion

29

The cultural diversity model has been the preferred one in the Western intellectual

establishment’s approach to the Caribbean. The study proposes, however, replacing this

with the unity in diversity model. The study further suggests that the unity in diversity

model is the key to unlocking the rich potential of the Caribbean.

30

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, James P. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of

Hieroglyphs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Allen’s book makes accessible to the contemporary scholar the impressive contributions of the

renowned Egyptologists. The book is composed of twenty-six lessons presenting a

comprehensive treatment of the grammar of Middle Egyptian. Thus it is an indispensable

tool for any scholar interested in learning this the real classical language. In addition

there are extremely insightful essays on the culture of the Kemet.

Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. 2 vols. New

Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987, 1991.

These are lengthy tomes of painstaking scholarship. However, reading them proves to be

a fascinating experience and an indispensable one for every humanist.

Budge, E. A. Wallis. Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection. 2 vols. 1911. Reprint. New York:

Dover, 1973.

Budge tends to be frowned on by contemporary mainstream Egyptologists. However, his

work is very popular among nonconventional Afrocentric scholars.

Davis, Kortright. Emancipation Still Comin’: Explorations in Caribbean Emancipatory

Theology. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1990.

Davis, an Episcopalian priest, is a Caribbean intellectual who is a faculty member in the

School of Divinity of Howard University. He was born in Antigua and is one of those

31

Caribbean intellectuals intent on developing a theoretical presentation representative of

the region.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. Trans. Yaa-Lengi

Meema Ngemi. Eds. Harold J. Salesmson and Marjolijn de Jager. New York: Hill, 1991.

_____ The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Editor and Translator Mercer Cook.

New York: Hill, 1974.

Diop, born in Senegal, is the veritable dean of modern Afrocentric scholarship. His

scholarship is impeccable.

Friedemann, Nina S. de. “Perfiles sociales del carnaval en Barranquilla (Colombia).” Montalbán

[Universidad Católica “Andrés Bello”, Caracas] 15 (1984): 127-52.

Friedemann was one of the first Colombian anthropologists to study the Barranquilla

Carnival.

Hill, Errol. The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre. Austin: University of Texas

Press, 1972.

Hill is a Trinidad and Tobago born scholar and Emeritus Professor at Dartmouth College.

His work on Carnival is now three decades old, but it is still useful reading.

James, George G. M. Stolen Legacy: The Greeks were not the authors of Greek Philosophy, but

the people of North Africa, commonly called the Egyptians. 1954. Reprint. San

Francisco: Richardson, 1985.

James was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) but came to America to develop as a

scholar. He was trained in Latin and Greek. He unfortunately died within a year of the

publication of his book. The book went largely unnoticed by the mainstream academy

until it was reissued in the 1980s as part of the burgeoning interest in Afrocentrism.

32

James’s book is simple, the style somewhat schematic. It is, however, a most powerful

contribution to knowledge.

Keita, Lancine. “African Philosophical Systems: A Rational Reconstruction.” The Philosophical

Forum 9 (1977-78): 169-189.

Keita was born in Trinidad and Tobago. He attended Queens Royal College and then

“went away to study.” He holds the Ph.D. in philosophy and taught for many years at

Howard University. He is, clearly, one of the first scholars trained in the mainstream

academy to apply the insights of Cheikh Anta Diop to research in philosophy.

Knight, Franklin W. The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1978.

Knight was born in Jamaica. He is very much a mainstream historian, being one of the

first African-ancestored scholars to be granted tenure at The Johns Hopkins University.

Knight works within the established paradigm. However, as a Caribbean man he is

keenly aware of the strong bonds that unite all the peoples of the region.

Liverpool, Hollis “Chalkdust.” Rituals of Power and Rebellion: The Carnival Tradition in

Trinidad and Tobago 1763-1962. Chicago: Research Associates/Frontline Distribution,

2001.

“Chalkdust” is one of the leading kaisonians in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago. This

book is his Ph.D. dissertation in history from the University of Michigan. Since it is

essentially a dissertation, Liverpool’s work is exhaustive and unimaginatively “correct.”

However, it is a rich source of vital information about the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival.

Llerena Villalobos, Rito. Memoria cultural en el vallenato: Un modelo de textualdad en la

canción foclórica colombiana. Medellín: Centro de Investigaciones Facultad de Ciencias

33

Humanas U. de A., 1985.

This work provides invaluable insight into the cultural reality of a Caribbean people from

Colombia.

Puerta, Laurian, ed. Carnaval en La Arenosa. Barranquilla, Colombia: Fondo de Publicaciones

de La Universidad del Atlántico, 1999.

This is an important collection of essays on the Barranquilla Carnival. The work

manifests the commitment of the Universidad del Atlántico, the regional university, to the

cultural and economic empowerment of the people of the nation.

Rohlehr, Gordon. Calypso & Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad. Tunapuna, Trinidad: N.P:

1990.

Rohlehr is a Guyanese intellectual who is Professor of English at the University of the

West Indies, Saint Augustine. His is the most thorough analysis of the development of the

Trinidad and Tobago Carnival.

Smart, Ian Isidore. Amazing Connections: Kemet to Hispanophone Africana Literature.

Washington, D.C: Original World Press, 1996.

This work takes Diop’s watershed thesis into the realm of Hispanic studies. It argues that

Hispanidad (“Hispanicity”) is essentially an African product, having come into being

under the tutelage of Moors, that is, black-skinned people who came from Africa and

Northeast Africa, professed Islam, and had Arabic as their official language.

_____. Central American Writers of West Indian Origin: A New Hispanic Literature.

Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1984.

This work blazed a trail which is yet to be followed by the academy.

_____. Nicolás Guillén, Popular Poet of the Caribbean. Columbia: University of Missouri

34

Press, 1990.

This is the only Afrocentric Pan-Caribbean study of the work of the National Poet of

Castro’s Cuba.

_____ and Kimani S. K. Nehusi, eds. Ah Come Back Home: Perspectives on the Trinidad and

Tobago Carnival. Washington, D.C: Original World Press, 2000.

Smart is from Belmont, Port-of-Spain. He teaches Spanish at Howard University. Nehusi

was born in Queenstown Village, Essequibo Coast, Guyana. He is director of the Afrika

Studies Centre at the University of East London. The contributors to this groundbreaking

collection are all both highly trained and experienced in several relevant fields. Some are

practicing academics; all are long-standing initiates and intellectuals of the beloved

festival. The resulting work is not merely informative, but also authoritative, challenging,

and stimulating. It is the only published book to present Carnival as the ultimate Pan-

African festival.

Van Sertima, Ivan. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America.

New York: Random House, 1976.

Van Sertima is a Guyanese scholar who has distinguished himself in the mainstream

academy. He has taught at Rutgers University for many years. His work is nothing short

of spectacular. It is absolutely required reading for anyone interested in understanding

Latin America.

Warner-Lewis, Maureen. Guinea’s Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. Dover,

Massachusetts: The Majority Press, 1991.

Warner-Lewis was born in Trinidad and Tobago. She holds the Ph.D. in linguistics and

teaches in the Department of English of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Her

35

book “is a social and cultural history of a unique kind: it captures the African experience

in the Caribbean through the Yoruba language - in song, prayers, dirges, humour and

philosophy.”

36