Island Beat (Nov/Dec 1995)

Events and people in the news around the islands

  • Island Beat Nov:Dec 1995-IMG_4683
  • Island Beat Nov:Dec 1995-IMG_4682
  • Photograph by Heather Bruce
  • Grand Etang National Park and Forest Reserve. Photograph by Mary Glenn
  • Photograph by Heather Bruce
  • Illustration by Christopher Cozier
  • Illustration by Christopher Cozier
  • Holetown Festival. Photograph by Eleanor Chandler
  • British yacht Maximizer at the starting line.  Photograph by Andrea Falcon
  • Photograph by Ian Yee
  • Photograph by Ranji Ganase

Come On Down

Write this dates in your diary right away: February 19 and 20, 1996. Carnival in Trinidad.
Already the masquerade bands are hard at work, the calypsonians are working on their new albums, the pan arrangers are agonising over which tune to choose for Panorama. It’s time to book your ticket on BWIA.
If you want to explore the world of calypso, you’ll need to be in Trinidad in time to visit at least the main calypso tents and catch the Calypso Fiesta (the semi-finals of the Calypso Monarch competition) in San Fernando on February 10, before one of the most critical crowds known to the entertainment world. The Calypso Monarch is usually chosen at the Dimanche Gras show (February 18)- but this is Carnival, and every year there is talk of restructuring things. Last time, the calypso crown was snatched by Black Stalin, beating the legendary Sparrow into third place.
If the steel band is your interest, the Panorama contest gets under way as early as February 2 with the old-time bands (their pans slung around the neck in the traditional way) parading in Port of Spain. Th various zonal and national rounds take place mainly on the following weekends, with the national Panorama finals on February 17. This is always one of the most keenly fought musical battles: last time, Amoco Renegades, one of the most successful orchestras, edged out Exodus and their great rivals WITCO Desperadoes to take the championship yet again.
As for the masquerade bands, many of them will be out to dethrone Peter Minshall, whose Hallelujah won the 1995 Band of the Year title (after a season of furious debate in which a small army of pastors vociferously objected to the use of the word “Hallelujah” in a Carnival band.) Minshall, one of Carnival’s most innovative and controversial figures, ended the record-breaking dominance of Wayne Berkeley; his Hallelujah was a characteristically theatrical production, a tale of reconciliation and healing.
The two-day Parade of the Bands is on February 19 and 20, after two weeks of mounting excitement, from the parade of traditional Carnival characters in San Fernando and Point Fortin through the children’s parades and the King and Queen of Carnival competitions (the finals are on February 16).
Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival is the root of the festival that has spread through the Caribbean and into a hundred cities and countries around the globe. More than two centuries ago, French Catholic settlers paraded the streets of Port of Spain on their way to Carnival masked balls; Trinidad’s enslaved Africans quickly mimicked their pompous masters, created a whole army of distinctive characters, and-after emancipation in the 1830s-and turned the entire Carnival into a celebration of freedom, out of which grew the music of calypso and (half a century ago) the steelband. The festival is constantly changing and developing; but its roots are still deep in Port of Spain.
If you arrive early, don’t worry-there’s never any shortage of music and partying in the Carnival season. And if you miss your plane and turn up late- well, remember there’s the big allstars night, Champs in Concert, on February 24, when you can catch up on the winners.

Racing the Atlantic

It’s called The Rum Race: not just because its sponsor is the Barbados rum manufacturer Mount Gay, but because any record-breaking crew gets an entire barrel of the Caribbean’s best-known refreshment (that’s 200 litres). The 1995 race was won in a record-breaking nine days by the Swiss yacht Merit Cup, who were suitably rewarded.
The 1996 Mount Gay Atlantic Barbados Challenge sets out from Gran Canaria on January 5 (cruising yachts three days earlier), arriving in Barbados 2,630 nautical miles later just in time for the partying that precedes the annual Mount Gay Regatta at the end of the month, the first big event of the Caribbean season.
One of the class winners in the 1995 race was veteran British yachtsman George Tinley in Castaway, on his last race. “In January, the tradewinds blow properly,” he reported. “We never did less than 150-mile daily runs and never more than 180. Our crossing was just over 16 days, without pushing too hard and with a boat laden down with cruising equipment…
“So we left in a shambles! Do we care? well, not a lot. The sun shines; it is hot; it is windy. We start at midday and the wind, once we hit the acceleration zone, is firmly out of the east at force seven or so…The first three days saw 540 miles under the keel and straight down the line. Our main boom went out to port that first day, the mizzen to starboard, and they both stayed there for the entire passage, only being added to with our staysail and reachers when conditions permitted. That is trade wind sailing!
“The days came and went. Happy Hour followed Happy Hour. We developed a special system for crossing time zones. We would all three meet in the cockpit at noon for Happy Hour.
This would continue until 1300 hours when the clock would be put back to noon allowing Happy Hour to begin all over again.
“Then what a lovely welcome. Despite arriving at 9 p.m., the earlier arrivals, in the true friendly spirit of the whole event, waited for us to finish, waited for us to dock and clear immigration, finally pouring us into a taxi to go and celebrate at the Yacht Club with a BBQ and Mount Gay party.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, can compare to the glorious trade wind sailing on the way out.”

Caribbean Sandblast

Tanned torsos and bulging biceps flexing and stretching in the Caribbean sun; a well-stocked bar nearby, a live band or two and a purpose-built pool to cool rising temperatures…heaven cannot be too far away.
A beach in Bermuda, you ask? No, this is Caribbean Sandblast, blazing the bay of Chaguaramas in Trinidad. Sandblast is hot. It is a fun filled fete, Trinidad and Tobago style. Though the concept is not new (the idea was partially adopted from a similar format on MTV), its place in the Carnival culture of this land of the laid-back is, and Trinidadians and others are taking to it with a passion.
The idea goes like this. Four people group together to form a team an compete against other teams (there are 60 in all) in a series of obstacle courses and events. The aim is to eliminate 44 of these groups so that the best 16 remain. That is when the competition really catches fire in a test of strength and endurance.
Nor are spectators left out: beer drinking, biking baring and jello eating are just some of the contests they can enter if they are willing-or able-after such listless lying in the sun. Caribbean Sandblast’s motto is to give you what you want. There is even an event called Singled Out-Trinidad’s answer to Britain’s Blind Date-which aims to match two lonely souls across a crowded beach.
This year’s launch event was expected to reach a grand climax in September, with a major concert involving one of Europe’s biggest rock groups. Organiser Kerwin Escayge– who left his bank job to get the project moving–intends to make Sandblast an annual event, and to introduce it to Antigua and Barbados next year. He also talks about a direct link-up with MTV, and incorporating a number of sea sports into the event.
Marcia Noel

Barbados’s Holetown Festival

In late February of 1627, 80 people landed on the west coast of Barbados, where the community of Hometown stands today. Every year since 1977, Holetown has staged a festival to mark the arrival of those first settlers; it takes place in the last full week of February, from Sunday to Sunday.
The driving force behind the event has been Barbadian radio and stage personality Alfred Pragnell, who in 1977 “had the bright idea to do a little something to mark the 350th anniversary of the settlement of our country.” Armed with little more than goodwill, government backing and three weeks to work in, Alfred and a group of friends organized Barbados’s first community-based festival; it started with a weekend, and has grown to a nine-day extravaganza of non-stop action.
One of the first events was a pioneering street market. “We just told people to bring whatever they could sell,” Pragnell recalls. “That first street market was so exciting. More and more people started to come, and suddenly we had no room.” Today, the market stretches from one end of Holetown to the other, with stalls offering anything from local food to jewellery.
“Today we see the Hometown Festival as one of the major activities on our cultural calendar,” says Ian Estwick, chairman of Barbados National Cultural Foundation. “It encompasses all areas of Barbadian culture, including music, dance, poetry, craft, fine arts and the culinary arts. All the other festivals which came after Holetown would have been influence would have been influenced by the Hometown example.”
Alfred Pragnell likens the Festival to “a birthday party” for Barbados itself. Secretary/treasurer Eon Philips, who has been involved since he was a boy, adds: “Visitors like it because it’s free and they see Barbadians in a natural setting.”
Most of the Festival is still free. “We begin with an opening ceremony on the first Sunday,” Pragnell says, “and each day there is some form of cultural or art exhibition. Every night we have a concert on the beach, highlighting a different form of music. On Friday night, we come alive with a big floodlit tatoo. The street market starts on Saturday morning and runs until midnight, and during the day we have a parade through the town. Sunday morning is the church service with the Governor General; the street market re-opens, and we have a number of sports events in the afternoon. Sunday night we culminate with the Miss Hometown queen show.”
Roxan Kinas

Juicy

As the vital banana exports of the Eastern Caribbean islands face more and more obstacles in their traditional British and European markets, plenty of debate is under way about alternatives. Dominica, for instance, has charged its Export Import Agency (DEXIA) with the task of developing and promoting other agricultural exports, including processed and manufactured items.
As a result, when you sink your teeth into a juicy fresh grapefruit or an ice-cold grapefruit, there’s a good chance that it comes from Dominica. Grapefruit is the second biggest crop in the Caribbean’s “nature island”; two of its varieties–the Marsh seedless and the Ruby Red–are prized for their taste, juiciness and sweetness.
DEXIA has been successfully convincing buyers near and far of the quality of Dominica’s grapefruit: from Martinique and Barbados to Paris, as well as its biggest market in the UK. Last season, a large part of the crop was locally processed, in preparation for substantial exports of fresh grapefruit juice as well as the fruit itself.

Remembering The War

This year has been the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (you can hardly not have noticed). But before the year ends, it’s worth remembering the role that the Caribbean played in that vast and bloody combat.
The Caribbean? Sun, sand and sea? How was the Caribbean involved in the war?
A visitor to Trinidad in 1943 could have been forgiven for thinking he was close to the front line. There were 226 American bases and defensive positions around an island that’s about 50 miles by 35; there were 17 airfields (one of them, Waller Field, was for a while the largest in the world), about 700 military aircraft, 100,000 men in uniform, up to 180 ships in the harbour. There were US Navy and Army Squadrons, an RAF squadron, aircraft carriers in training.
Up to 30,000 local people– about 15% of the entire labour force–were working at the American bases: it was the era that produced rum and coca-cola (both the drink and calypso). Trinidad was an enormous military base.
The reason was simple: Britain and the allies were desperate for oil and other supplies. Two of their three biggest oil sources were in the Caribbean–Aruba, and Trinidad, which had the largest refinery in the British Empire. Many of the merchant convoys gathered in the sheltered Gulf of Paris, off Trinidad’s west coast, for the perilous voyage across the Atlantic.
And in February 1942 the first German submarines arrived (one of them nosed into Port of Spain harbour and blew up a freighter and an oil tanker). They preyed on the Atlantic convoys, prowled around the Trinidadian coast; channels were mined (a vast eight-mile submarine net was draped around the US naval anchorage.) By May 1942, 30% of Germany’s U-boats were in the Caribbean, roaming freely among the islands; around Trinidad alone, they claimed 400 ships and 7000 lives.
The military build-up was formidable. From 1943, every one of the giant American aircraft carriers and other warships going into action in the Atlantic and the Pacific had to train in the Gulf of Paria; the United States had launched its first Jungle Warfare School in Trinidad, at Manzanilla, as it prepared for action in the Far East. By the time the second wave of U-boat attacks came in mid-1943, the struggle was more equal–27 of the 44 U-boats in the region were destroyed, and the crucial battle to protect the supply routes was won.
Nearly 30,000 men from Trinidad and Tobago alone fought in World War II. One of them was the man who received the formal surrender of the Japanese Army in August 1945– Lt. Gen. Frank Messervey, who had fought in Burma and Africa, had commanded the famous “Desert Rats.” had twice been captured by Rommel’s Afrika Corps and twice escaped, and twice won the coveted Distinguished Service Order. His biographer wrote that he probably saw more front-line action than any other general in World War II. After the war, Messervey was knighted by Britain, and became Commander-in-Chief of the newly created Pakistan.
Few of these memories survive in today’s Caribbean. There is a fascinating story waiting to be told.
Acknowledgements  to the Chaguaramas Military History and Aviation Museum, Trinidad.

A Guyanese Master

Castellani House Art Museum in Georgetown paid homage this year to the late E.R Burrowes, widely hailed as “The Father of Art” in Guyana. The small retrospective exhibition, consisting of 18 pieces, marked the first time in over 30 years that Burrowes’s work has been assembled for public display. The pieces came from private collections and the National Collection.
Edward Rupert Burrowes (1930-1966) was one of the great figures of Guyanese art. A portrait by his contemporary, Hubert Moshett, shows a portly gentleman, complete with buttoned-down cuffs, tie and studio coat, pipe in a corner of his mouth, standing erect before his easel, palette in hand, applying a deft backhand stroke to a painting.
The first art group in Guyana, the Arts and Crafts Society, established around the 1930, was really a gathering of expatriate British artists. It wasn’t until the 1940s that a genuinely national movement emerged in the Guiana Art Group. In the late 1940s, Burrowes established the Working Peoples’ Art Class Georgetown: this was such a break from tradition that, according to his pupil Stanley Greaves, the colonial authorities thought it was part of a Marxist plot.
But Burrowes was a deep admirer of European artists, especially the landscape painters, and was deeply in love with the beauty of the English countryside. Many of his paintings were gentle landscapes with sinuous trees, waterways and modest houses; a charming pastoral air pervades many of his pieces.
Yet English influence was only part of Burrowes’s art. His paintings show an appreciation of tropical light, and he did not ignore the unique nature of the Guyanese landscape. He delighted in scenes from the famous Botanical Gardens, luxurious flamboyant trees, creeks, and the joker canals which have become a popular theme among local painters of rural scenes. His feeling for local culture is clear in a painting like Going Lawa, which depicts the Hindu wedding custom in which the female relatives and friends of the bride’s family beat drums and chant songs as they go down to a waterside on the evening before the wedding to pay homage to the Earth Mother.
Burrowes’s greatest legacy is in art education. Guyana’s only art school opened in 1975 and was named after him. He was a crucial influence on many of Guyana’s greatest artists, and was directly responsible for producing a generation of artists in the 1950s who created the best era in Guyanese art thus far–names like Denis Williams, Aubrey Williams, Stanley Greaves and Donald Locke. The diversity of their works is another testimony to Burrowes’s influence, which helped his pupils to develop their own directions.
As an artist, Burrowes was a technical innovator, experimenting in producing his own paints and using different materials. Many of his paintings were done on the reverse side of compressed board. His best-known work is the statue of the “father” of Guyana’s unions, Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow, in the compound of the Parliament Building in Georgetown. This year’s retrospective exhibition was a timely reminder of the distance Guyana’s art has travelled from its roots, and of the great possibilities which lie before it.
Alim Hosein

Monkey Business

“Study monkeys on a Caribbean island! You’re kidding, right?” That’s the stock response when we say what we do for a living.

Mary Glenn, my wife, and I came to Grenada about four years ago. We didn’t know each other then. We met on the island and ended up chasing monkeys through its forests, together. I had come to Grenada to work with the Grenada National Parks and Protected Areas Department; Mary was studying the island’s monkeys as part of her Ph.D. research project. Now we live in the Grand Etang National Park and Forest Reserve in the central mountains of the island. Our study focuses on the Mona monkey, Cercopithecus Mona, which lives throughout the island.

Before this project, the Mona monkey was a relative unknown. We concentrated on learning the basics first, such as where the monkeys come from, what they look like, where they live, what they like to eat, and how they interact with each other. This meant a lot of time in the forest, locating the monkeys and observing everything about them.

Mona monkeys are not from Grenada. Their original range is in West Africa: Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon. There, they live in coastal rain forests. Barbados, St Kitts and Nevis also have African monkeys — the green monkeys commonly known as vervets, close relatives of the Monas of the African savannahs.

These different species were probably brought to the Caribbean somewhere between the late 17th and early 19th century, to be sold as pets. Why Mona monkeys remain only in Grenada is, as yet, unexplained: the other islands may have been too dry for them, but congenial enough for the green monkeys which can still be found in them today.

It seems that most of Grenada’s Mona monkeys live in the central forested section of the island. They spend almost their entire day moving through the canopy of tree-tops only rarely do they come to the ground, and then only for short periods.

On a typical day, Mary and I leave our field station home at dawn and spend six to eight hours hiking. We carry the tools of the trade: binoculars, notebooks, compass, clinometer (to measure tree heights), rain gear, waterproof hiking boots, and lots of food and drinking water. We wear dark camouflage clothing to make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible. Mona monkeys are extremely wary animals; we have to move very quietly.

More often than not we hear a group long before we see it — a twelve-pound adult male makes a lot of noise when he jumps from one tree to another. Monas seem to be primarily fruit eaters, but they will supplement their diet with everything from leaves, flowers and moss to insects, lizards and even the occasional bird’s egg.

By far the most interesting thing is their social interaction. Mona monkeys in Grenada seem to form two types of groups. The first is what we call a “bisexual” group, a large adult male with a number of adult females and their offspring of various ages, totalling anywhere between five and 30 individuals, maintaining contact with each other through different kinds of calls because the thick forest canopy often obstructs their view of one another.

This reliance on verbal communication seems to have become highly developed: Monas produce an incredible variety of noises — barks, hacks, chirps, warbles, screams, and even something we have named the “boom” call, an extremely low pitched two-note call that is only made by the adult lead male of bisexual groups. We suspect that this call is used to warn rival adult males away from the lead male’s group area or to express some sort of a gathering signal that the other group members can home in on during times of stress.

Monas do not only use their voices to communicate. We often see them grooming one another, playing, and even using their brightly coloured fur patterns as a means of visual communication.

The other type of group we commonly see is a male-only affair of between two and fur monkeys. These groups seem to be the result of lead males pushing out sub-adult males from their groups because of the threat they pose to the lead male’s position. We think that these young outcasts then band together until they are old and experienced enough to challenge a lead male for his group.

The longer we observe these monkeys, the more we appreciate why field biologists like Jane Goodall, the famous chimpanzee researcher, take such a long time to gather their data. Unlike a laboratory scientist who can control most aspects of his experiment, we have no control at all. If the monkeys do not want to be seen on a particular day, or if it is raining, or if they happen to be hanging out at the top of a 150 foot tree, there is nothing we can do but try to watch them as best we can.

The walk home is always longer than it was in the morning, and the hills are steeper; our clothes are soaked from the frequent downpours (it rains an average of 160 inches a year in the Grand Etang forest), and our boots are caked with mud.

More often than not, we are more confused by what we have seen during the day than we were when we started out. Then it’s long hours interpreting our field notes, with no running water or neighbours to talk to.

But then we hear a large lead male “booming” from across the Grand Etang lake; as it echoes through the rain forest, we both look at each other knowingly. No, we can’t imagine doing anything but this for a living.

Keith Bensen

Funding provided by the 11th EDF Regional Private Sector Development Programme Direct Support Grants Programme.
The views expressed on this website are those of the the authors and do not reflect those of the Direct Support Grants Programme.

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