Dr Rita Pemberton

IT HAS BEEN said that Carnival is controversy and this is certainly true of Carnival 2024. As preparations for the annual Carnival celebrations got underway with great expectation for a successful event after the wounds of the covid19 pandemic, the position of Tobago regarding the national festival remained unclear. The question was should Tobago’s Carnival be different from that of Trinidad?

The issue at hand relates to the fact that the different historical experiences of the two islands resulted in the development of different cultural expressions. However, while Tobago’s popular culture was expressed in different ways from that of Trinidad, there were some developments which permitted the adopted Carnival culture to grow on the island.

At the centre of the differences were religion, size and composition of the population and post-Emancipation resistance strategy.

While in 1838 the freed population of Trinidad asserted itself by wresting the then exclusive Carnival celebration from the upper classes, taking it to the streets and making it a movement of resistance, there was no Carnival culture in Tobago.

Since 1838, Tobago’s major annual celebration was Emancipation Day, which was considered a sacred day. To this event, the people of Tobago demonstrated a commitment to keep the memory of enslavement alive by using the day to remind the population of the experiences of their ancestors and, despite the challenges they faced, to indicate what they had achieved.

This was a strategy to stimulate further achievement of the members of the population despite the difficulties the freed population continued to face on the island.

Emancipation Day 1838 was marked by a worker-imposed one-week holiday, when workers downed tools, refused to go to work and used their musical traditions to give expression, in song, to sentiments that they could not voice in public. The traditional music patterns of call-and-response songs were used to reflect the conflicts of society and stimulate onward and upward movement of the people.

The first week in August was maintained as a complete holiday in Tobago. The workers were in resistance mode, refusing to accept low wages and the attempts of employers to control them. During that period people cleaned their homes, killed pigs for the celebrations, considered the fete of the year. Shops were closed for part of the day when masqueraders donned traditional costumes and paraded through Scarborough accompanied by bands of musicians.

On August 9, 1888, a public holiday was granted on the island to mark the jubilee of Emancipation. This led to islandwide celebrations, which included sporting activities, marches, music with local songs written by local musicians. The labouring classes in Roxborough, Goodwood, Charlotteville, Speyside and Betsy’s Hope maintained the tradition of celebrating Emancipation Day. These celebrations were continuously maintained until the 1930s and the component of no work on that day was strictly maintained.

To mark the Emancipation