History of Trinidad Part 1: Tales of Heritage and Resistance with Sunity Maharaj

Exploring the Rich History of Trinidad: From Indigenous Roots to Cultural Fusion

This episode is the first of two parts with host Hema and guest Sunity Maharaj. They explore the history of Trinidad, uncovering the island's rich cultural tapestry. From the Indigenous people to the effects of European colonization, the relevance of understanding the island’s history is critical to comprehend present circumstances and promote compassion. 

Sunity shares her expertise as a journalist and director at the Lloyd Best Institute, emphasizing the importance of Caribbean development. The episode covers the island's Indigenous people, the impact of European colonization, the African influence, Indian indentured labourers and the resilience of Trinidad's culture, culminating in a discussion on present-day economic and social dynamics.

Come back in two weeks for the second part of the episode where we dive into food, music and culture.

Resources
The Lloyd Best Institute of the Caribbean
The Banwari Man
Banwari Trace
Celebrating the First Peoples of Trinidad and Tobago
Peggy Mohan
Lise Winer
Maureen Warner-Lewis
Dr. Kelvin Singh
Patois Song Dodo Piti Popo

Transcript

Sunity: We need to understand why things are playing out in the present. And we only understand that by understanding the history. And when we understand history, we gain a lot more compassion for the other 'cause Trinidadians, today Trinidadians are and Tobagonians, sometimes they are at loggerheads because okay, you wanna go, go. No, you have to understand why Tobagonians feel that way. And they feel that way because they were once… they, they owned their own island. 

MUSIC

Hema: Good morning, Sunity. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Moreish Podcast.

Sunity: I am happy to be here Hema.

Hema: Today we're gonna be talking about the history of Trinidad.

Sunity: Mm-hmm.

Hema: This is personal for me because that's where my family is from, but it's also personal for me because my guest today is my Auntie. And before anybody starts to say why Trinidad and not Trinidad and Tobago, because they are one country, we are doing separate episodes for each island because they do have different histories before they came together to become one country.

So today we'll focus on Trinidad. We may talk a little bit about Tobago in today's episode, but an entire episode on Tobago will come later. 

 Before we dive right into it, introduce yourself and tell people a little bit about your work.

Sunity: Okay. I'm a, essentially a Caribbean woman. I, I identify as Caribbean and not just Trinidadian. I am a mother of two. These are my priorities in life and a career journalist. All my, my, the one consistent, professional engagement I've had is as a journalist, which I, which I began at age 18 and I've gone to full gamut in journalism all the way from journalist to editor, editor-in-chief, both in print, in television as well, head of news, director of news, and so on, media executive. And these days I mostly do consulting work and I add to that the responsibility of an Independent Senator in the parliament of Trinidad and Tobago.

Hema: And you also have association with the Lloyd Best Institute?

Sunity: Yes, I'm a Director of the Lloyd Best Institute. I was the Managing Director for many years, but my daughter Carmel has taken on that responsibility, which is so thrilling to have the next generation choose to do that. So I'm just, I'm part of the Board. 

It is such an important institution. It is a gift from my husband, I think, Lloyd Best, and for him to have given us a quintessential independent space that is completely focused on Caribbean development is truly a gift to all of us, not just the family, but to Caribbean society.

Hema: So let's talk about Trinidad, and to give it some context for anybody who doesn't know where Trinidad is geographically, where is it?

Sunity: Yes, it's just down the archipelago. If you, if you take the frame of reference being the North America near Miami, Florida, you come down from the Bahamas, down to South America. And we are just above Venezuela, Guyana. So a little island there. And it was one part of South America. It was earth movements, and the first people who came to Trinidad actually walked across, Earth movements that eventually cut us loose from the from the continent.

Hema: And that's a great place to start, is to talk about who were the original inhabitants of the island.

Sunity: Well, I can introduce your viewers Banwari. Banwari is, we now believe she's a woman, and her remains were found the seventies during a dig, between Trinidad and, a collective of, Trinidadians and archeologists and some archeologists from Yale in an area called Banwari in south Trinidad. And there was quite a number of remains that were found humans. And Banwari is the one that we have under glass in at the University of the West Indies. And we honour her as the first, because she's been dated to some somewhere between 5,000 to 7,000 BC. So we see Banwari as the oldest. I call her the mother of Caribbean civilization. So these were the people who came, and over time they, some migrated up.

Of course, they, they, seafaring people, canoes, you'll find a lot of settlement on coastal areas. But eventually a lot of the people, many different groups came. We have the Warao who, some of whom are still here, they're more, more located in Cedros, which is closest to Venezuela. We have the Nepuyo people. Today they, many of them are organized under, under a group called Santa Rosa First Nations people. 

One that I am particularly keen on interested in is the Carinepagoto people, because they settled, Port of Spain with what we call Mucurapo today. But the reason that I am really interested in them is that they're leader Baucunar was the one who fought off the Spanish in 1930. And that changed the course of Trinidad history, which is very different from Tobago history. Because of that, and it was twice done, repelled the Spanish. 

The Spanish left Trinidad for over 200 years. From 1530, it wasn't until 1780 something, which is 250 years, Trinidad remained largely unsettled because the Spanish thought said that place is blight. That place is evil. You know, because they were beaten by Baucunar people in the first, in the second instance, they really came to burn down the, the community and so on. But they left. 

So you'll discover as we talk that Trinidad was settled quite late compared to places like Barbados and Jamaica where even from 1600s they were settled and had House of Assembly and so on. Trinidad was really, left very little Spanish settlers, very few, largely untouched and Indigenous were here for much longer, though as soon as Europeans came after 1783, they began to dwindle the numbers. There's a greater awareness, and today we are getting Indigenous people who are migrating from Venezuela because of conditions and economic conditions in Venezuela. So there's a modern wave of Warao people and others.

Hema: You said early on that Trinidad was geographically connected to South America and people would've walked over and now people from the same region are making their way over

Sunity: Mm-hmm.

Hema: to Trinidad.

Sunity: Yes, there, there has always been that relationship between south Trinidad, especially the southwestern tip the country and Venezuela has always been, remains one of continuous connection. 

And I have this wonderful story of going to Cedros, which is that area that is closest, that's, it's like seven miles from Venezuela, and going to interview somebody there, and I was told, hold on a little, she'll be back soon. She went supermarket. And I waited and the woman arrived on a little pirogue. She had gone to Venezuela, all her goods, her products were in Spanish, her detergent and everything, because that's where she shopped. There's always been a very strong relationship.

Hema: When you were talking about the First Peoples or the Indigenous people, you named off a whole number of the different groups. Predominantly when we're reading or when I've been reading, two groups are named Arawak and Caribs.

Sunity: Yeah. That's the education, misinformation really. Right.

Hema: Let's talk about that for a second. Why would those two be the ones written most about when, as you just explained, there were a number of different groups.

Sunity: Well it's, it is like what people do today. They look at Africans and say, Africans. They don't say Nigerians, Ghanaian, you know Congolese, right? You just see one people and you are just here to take their land. 

And they was, they were categorized as to which one is quote unquote more warlike and the other who is less. And so they divided them into Arawaks and Caribs. They said the Caribs were fierce, and it's, so, this stereotyping has been formalized through the British education system. Because Trinidad became a British colony and the education system that that we have today was set down by the British. So they're not going to take the time to bother, they're not interested. 

In fact, those people have been largely written out of the, the school curriculum. And you are, you are, you are given a very simple story that begins with Columbus. It doesn't begin with the First Nations people. It begins with Columbus, as though there were no, there was nobody here. 

In fact, the, the research suggests that pre-Columbian, population in the Americas was in the range of a hundred million people, right? So it's a well populated area. The fact that you could land there and, and see nobody virtually, you could, you know, you could see nobody. Today we talk in terms of colonizing space, right? And, and you know, people think they can just go plant a flag and say, declare it in the name of whatever country or whatever, um, they business operate, and they just put something and claim it. And so humans have not evolved. That far in terms of, um, inquisitiveness.

Hema: And that's why in this podcast, I like to start as far back as we can and acknowledge all of the people that lived in the different Caribbean islands prior to quote unquote discovery, because that's a big part of our history, and it's important not to forget that.

Sunity: Well, I just call about three, communities, and I don't even like to talk about them in terms of tribes because if I were to ask, a North American today tribe you came from, which is, which is what I have sometimes done, and they get very confused. They don't see themselves as a tribe.

And I start to say, what are you, is as your antecedents Swedish, German? Is it Irish? Is it African? Tell me your tribe. And we call these people members of a tribe, but we don't see that all it is is ancestry. But in Trinidad many, there were many groups and they survived today in the names of different villages and towns. 

So you would know Chauguanas, but, but there was a group called the Chaguanes, and their name has survived in the name of that area in central Trinidad. There are groups called Arawaks, right? Those are the Arawaks, Arwa and its name in Arouca in Trinidad, right. So you go through the places we have many in. I'm from Tunapuna, I'm in Tunapuna, I'm from Balmain, Couva, but I'm in Tunapuna. And Tunapuna is a Indigenous name uh, that means like, I think it's a place of water because we have the Tunapuna River. 

So we have several, uh, Arima, Naparima, all those places are First Nation people. The place was named to a significant extent by the First Nation people. So this is why we need to know those things because those are our hometowns. This is our land that was, christianed by them. And we can feel their presence. Mucurapo, which is a location of, uh, that major battle between the Spanish and the Baucunar's people. That's Indigenous. Chaguaramas, all these places are, you know,

Hema: So, while the population may have dwindled, and we're gonna talk about why that may have happened, their presence and their legacy

Sunity: right.

Hema: still remains and is stamped in the history.

Sunity: I think the world is becoming, we hope more aware of history. How it plays out in the present. And so you can actually feel these people coming to life, and people are open to the idea, the whole, genealogical, interests that people have and who are they when they test their DNA. People never used to say, I have Indigenous or First Nation in me. 'cause they didn't know. They would just say I'm Indian, African, or European. Because for a long time, history was, our history was cast in those terms. But there is an an awakening of everyone who has been around our table who was there first to we join them. So, I mean, that could only be a great thing, you know.

Hema: For a long time, and this is my personal experience growing up in Toronto and Canada is there was a lot of shame around, my, for me personally, my history and my background because of racism and because of misunderstanding of who we were.

And so I grew up living what I consider two lives, my inside life, in my home and my outside life where I didn't talk about my religion, my background, anything as a self-preservation.

Sunity: Yeah. Well, you know, that's true of, true of people living in Trinidad, in that, very many Trinidadians will tell you regardless of race, the Indians are constantly here referring… that shame that you mentioned captured in their memory of hiding their roti in school at lunchtime. Because that was not considered sophisticated. If you were sophisticated, you will come with a sandwich bread, and even if it's just butter in it, because it betrayed who you were in behind the, the doors at home. 

And and we can explain that because in the case of the Indians in Trinidad, the Presbyterians from Canada, actually the missionaries who came from Canada, we had, of course, the Catholics. We had the Catholics came with the, the French and the Spanish. The British came with Anglicans. But the Presbyterians came here on missions to, to modernize the Indians in particular. And they started the schools. They started schools to encourage Indians to, to become educated. And one of the conditions virtually was you change your name, you embrace their religion and their way of life. 

And so this issue of cultural disconnection became a, it's a policy position. It wasn't just an attitude, it was a policy position. And today you will have, you will, you'll recognize the names because people will say, my name is Errol, or my name is Suzanne. But then they will tell you they have a Hindi, they would not have said that to you as part of a name. They have a Hindi name and it might be what they call their rashi name or the secret name or the middle name. But officially in the school system you would have that. And of course, parents would, many parents, and may even be, most parents would go along with that because it was the only option to give their child a chance for an education, and an education to escape the life that they had, life that the parents had of poverty, of injustice, and of being, scorned. They did not want that for their children. So they will, will, shut down their children's instincts towards belonging and being in that culture. They would not not a lot of the, a lot of, um, young people, a lot of people talk about with regret that they did not learn their parents' language because their parents would speak it for secrets.

But that's not really the reason. Yes, of course people were, were, were, if they don't want the child to understand what they're saying, they will go into another language. But they saw the child learning that language as a hindrance to moving up in the world because if they went to school, the school would beat that out of them and teach them to speak English.

You have, in fact, English was a condition for voting. The very first election that we had in Trinidad, if you could not speak English, you could not vote. That was, and but that was a very limited election, which only, about 6% of the population qualified to vote. Uh, we are marking that hundredth anniversary this year, actually. 

So there all the incentives were for you to abandon your culture and embrace the culture of the other in exchange for the possibility of a better life. 

What we've had since then is a critical period in the 1970s in the post, in that sixties, seventies, Black Power movement where a resurrection of culture, an an embrace of all that you were, became the, the cry of the time, that cultural resurgence. And it has changed. But every now and again, you still have, this need to prove that you are some modern person. Thankfully, being modern me should means, it means being, I, I would think more, aware more in touch, um, more knowledgeable, not part of who you are.

Hema: I think all of what you're talking about is we can sort of lump into and, and I don't like to lump it into one thing, but the generational trauma is real and it's been passed down. And, and unless you, unless you dig into it, for a lot of people, they don't understand what that trauma is, but it is passed down in the family and it shows up in different ways,

Sunity: Yep.

Hema: Um, and maybe in shame or in not understanding or wanting to appear to be something different than you are.

 And I think that now, as you were talking about, people are becoming more aware and embracing the history, but not everybody is. And hopefully some of what we're sharing today will encourage people to embrace it and look into what their family lineage is.

Sunity: Well, many people are afraid, you know, because trauma is something that blinds you, to only to self obsession. You become obsessed with your feelings. You are traumatized. But the idea, and you are a victim, but the idea that whoever caused that trauma that you recognize that person did it, it blinds you to their trauma and it blinds you to how they too victims. And they, you, all of you, are victims going back in time to what I call the original sin, right? And so that it, to break the cycle of trauma is to understand, it requires understanding. It requires forgiving oneself. It, it requires forgiving the other going before the other to understand what happened to you, and the other, to say what happened to you. And understand that there are forces at work here that the society doesn't create the space to help you to understand you. And so what we have is a replication of trauma. When is that cycle broken? It is broken the moment you understand that this trauma is bigger than me.

Hema: There's a lot of history in Trinidad from people who, I'm putting this in quotes, discovered the island, came to the island and a lot of that really changed the culture and shaped what Trinidad is today. 

You mentioned earlier that a lot of the history books talk about Trinidad from the time Columbus discovered it and, and a lot of people talk about Trinidad as that being the beginning of history.

Sunity: Yeah, because that’s what they were taught in school. Remember, the books that we had in school were written by Europeans. They're writing our history, sending it to us in a package called a book. Okay? And what you knew about your history, you left it outside the school. You, you, you get to the school door and you leave all of that.

What your parents are telling you about who they are and what you do. And you are required to leave it there. And you join a school where the objective is to put you into a cultural mainstream that denies three quarters of who you are in order to prepare you for your role as a good colonial, right?

A good clerk in a government system. Where the power resides abroad, not here. You are just a cog in a wheel that is, that is moving along at the, the, the hidden hand of some power abroad, the King's hand or the Queen's hand. 

The issue is that history, our history has come back to us, by, in books via self-serving colonial powers. And it starts with when they think they discovered, right? The, the place, a place that was totally populated, as you know, in Canada, America and the US, central America, south America and the Caribbean. Fully populated, very interesting people, very evolved people. If you look at the Incas and the Mayas and so on, how their architecture, their political systems and all of this. 

That whole, it has taken many, many historians who have an interest in these communities to do the work. But that work doesn't necessarily find its way into the school system because the schools, you have to be, you have to, it's the work of academics and researchers and you have to have an interest. And right now the Caribbean is in the throes of trying to make sense of a, an education system and how do we transform the education system because we are seeing what half education does to the development of the Caribbean.

We can't solve our problems because we are not being educated in our real lives. So I, that's for another story, okay. 

Columbus arrived in Trinidad and on his third visit in 1498, his first arrival was in 1492 in Hispaniola, which is the island that is today known as divided into Haiti and Dominican Republic. And, and that was a horror story in itself, the arrival in, in, in Haiti, in Hispaniola. 

And it, there's a lot of, um, but the general, the history is that Columbus didn't necessarily come off and land in Trinidad. You know, it's his vessels. And he looked at, what he saw were the three hills and called it Trinidad, in the name of the Holy Trinity. Every version of history is challenged, but that seems to be the most plausible one, because look how many islands he had to name, right? The Caribbean has hundreds of islands. 

And that's 1498 over time, well, there was a papal bull, that Portugal and Spain had, and all they did was draw straight line. In what they think, you know, this is what the world looks like and that half is yours and this half is mine. And we fell in the Spanish half. And so in over the next couple of few years, they, they had, they sent out somebody who would be responsible for Venezuela, Guyana, Trinidad, that area. So they will just move across very easily. 

There was some, trading, trading always goes on right? Between if you, if you land and your Spanish in, and your, your headquartered in a place like Caracas or somewhere or on the coast, you are going to use the Indigenous people for helping you. You get them on your side, you give them some little knives and so on.

And they they had these ability to dive deep for pearls. They can go down and they can stay underwater for a long time. You know, their, their lung capacity was tremendous. And so you were getting pearls in exchange for a little piece of iron, metal knife or something. 

They, so they, they, they, Spanish wanted to come up to the north of the island by Chaguaramas, there in that little bay area, and they were hearing scary things about the the ferocity of that particular group. That's the Karina, Karina Pagota, group led by Baucanar. So the, the Spanish, the person in charge of the area was, Antonio Sedeño. And he led a mission, what they call an expedition, with the support of some of the, the First Nations groups in south Trinidad who they were close to. And they led them up to Mucurapo in the north where they were really beaten by Baucanar and they fled back. 

And then they came, I think the next year, and they brought the horses they came in the night and they burned down the, the, the people that lived in the north in the, what they call thatched hut, they used the carat leaves and so on as their roof, burned down the place. But it was a ferocious enough battle, it destroyed the, the, the, the community, but it was bad enough that they went, the Spanish went back and said, that place is problems. That place is a blight, its, its evil spirits, and so on and so forth.

And they left Trinidad alone. Trinidad was a small island, and they were in Guyana and, and Venezuela, they're not going back there. And essentially they, they did at, and the 1600s, I think, came up the Caroni River and settled, put a little settlement in what we know today as St. Joseph and declared that that's the capital. And so some, there was some presence of the Spanish, but it was not a big presence. 

It wasn't until 1783 when the, the Governor at the time was Don José María Chacón, the last, it turned out to be the last Spanish governor. And, there was a survey being done around the island by, by the Spanish officials. And in that period, there was the uprisings the in Haiti. France at that time in the throes of the French Revolution. And Haiti being a French, uh, a French colony, was responding to that as well. And the Africans in, in Haiti organized themselves and eventually was able to mount the first successful, act of freedom in the enslaved world. 

And, a lot of the people who had land, the French, the French planters fled Haiti and the, they settled in other islands, and this particular individual, Phillipe Saint Roume, I always forget his name is a long name. He came to Grenada and he came across to Trinidad while they were doing the surveying, and discovered going through the island how fertile, untouched the island was, how much space and land it had that was available and thought, wow, but this is a, this is a gift, because other islands were getting exhausted, planting, I mean, for 200 years, planting sugar and, and planting sugar cane. And the thing about the, European planters is that they did not even need to innovate improve their ease. They just moved on to fresh land. The lack of innovation was quite extreme. 

And so anyway, he wrote to the King of Spain, Philippe, and asked, he made a proposal to allow French planters to come to Trinidad on the, on the grounds that they are going, they would develop the island, because there's so much possibility and so on and so forth. So I call that like the first investment plan. You know, you have foreign investment you go to you, you, you connect with a country and say you have an un an undeveloped area. We will come and put our money and labour and ideas and develop it and then you would get taxes from that and we would get, and so I think that's our first foreign direct investment. And the King approved it.

That’s the Cedula de Poblacion of 1783. It, that Cedula laid down the conditions under which the French could come and settle Trinidad. And that changed the trajectory of Trinidad's progress.

Hema: I wanna ask a couple of questions about that period from the discovery in 1498 all the way up to, you said that, that there were some battles. How did Spain and the people of Spain interact with the Indigenous population?

Sunity: They were, they were throughout the Caribbean, they were considered heathens and depending on what, what their response to you was, their treat, how they dealt with you, you were either docile and you were co-opted, or you were to be killed off because you were a warrior. And throughout the Caribbean there were individuals who stood up and fought the British.

I could, I call them our first freedom fighters, because in Haiti we, and we had an interesting story of a woman who became the Chief because her husband and his brother were both killed off in that first encounter. When Columbus came, he was there for a while, then he left to go back to Spain to announce this discovery. And the people gave, had gold and so on and left his brother Diego. And Diego was a brute, you know. And, there was this, this incident where he invited all the Chiefs to come to, this was in Haiti, right? To come to a feast. And everybody came and then they set the thing afire. You know, they killed off the, the chief.

And so Anacaona the wife, became the leader. And then there was Hatuey who fled to, to Cuba and actually so resisted when he was captured. He abs… he could have saved his life by Catholicism and he said he preferred to die and they burnt him. 

You have in, um, St. Vincent, Joseph Chatoyer, leader of what, what we call the, some people call the Black Caribs, but they're the Garifuna people. They’re the Indigenous who mixed with the Africans, and he led his people in a rebellion against the British and won. Right. And in Trinidad, later on, in the years after we have, Baucaunar as I have mentioned before, we have Hyarima was a tremendously, high quality strategist, military strategist.

I, in today's terms you will call them military strategist because they plotted, the survival of their people. So you had, this is not a simple story of acquiescence or invisible people. These were people who put up a tremendous fight across the region to save them, their people, to protect their lands. And these people ought to be elevated. We should, we should know all their stories and honour them. Certainly in Trinidad, what Baucanar did is held off Spain for 250 years, and that changed the people. We are very different, Trinidad is very different from many other islands who had a much longer period of European colonization because of Baucanar.

Hema: You just gave rough dates, right? From 1498 all the way through to 1793…

Sunity: 1783 yes. 83. Mm-hmm.

Hema: 1783, sorry, when, when not much was happening

Sunity: Well, this,

Hema: in Trinidad. I.

Sunity: also the period of the, when the Spanish introduced the encomienda system, right, where they would corral the Indigenous to put them through, to put them to labour on these, wherever they are in the fields. And this, these are people who, that was not their way of life. They weren't organized labour. They were people who lived free, who engaged each other, whether they, they fighting each other or they are friendly with each other. But they had a, a, a view of life that was very different from the European system that was essentially capitalist the exploitation of, of labour, of many for the profits of a few, for the enrichment of their societies. And the encomienda system was brutal. A lot of them died. They could not handle that system of forced labour and gang work. And also in the process, the Europeans. just comforted and rationalized their behavior that these were savages and we are, we are civilizing them. Right. Of course. It's all self-serving nonsense.

Hema: Did the Spanish bring any enslaved Africans over or indentured servants over during that time period?

Sunity: No, there was some, but I don't know if they came with it. Um, some people, some people escaped to Trinidad. 'cause Trinidad was, it's a place you could hide, and the enslaved were always trying to escape. I mean that is such a horror story to have been kidnapped and, you’re live you're living your life in Africa for thousands of years. You know, this is your land. And to just be grabbed up and taken and put into a labour camp under forced labour and be considered a commodity, put you on the slave block. I, it was just a horror and that went on for generations. So people are born into that, they have no memory of Africa, of living in Africa.

They're born into that. What their parents tell them. It's a, it's in, it's incredible that cultural practices survived to this day. We can trace the language. We can trace rituals, religions, cultural behaviour, language all kinds of things. We can trace it back. It's amazing that that survived because all of it was beaten out of people. Whatever survived it survived because it went underground, you know?

Hema: I think that speaks to the resilience of the people to maintain whatever part of their culture that they could in secret.

Sunity: Whatever part of their humanity, 'cause culture, culture is not just ritual, it's not just, something for show. It is essential to who you are, and whether you practice it or not, it's inside you. Whether you show other people it or not, it's in you it's the glory of the human being. All of the, what you are is what you bring to a table, not a piece. And people want you to only bring the piece, you know, it’s a suppression of who you are.

Hema: You said that, 1783 and the Cedula really changed the trajectory of Trinidad, and you mentioned a little bit about what that is. Let's talk about the Cedula and how that really changed who lived on the island and how that affected the history of…

Sunity: Up until that point, the majority of the population was Indigenous up until 1783. There were some Spaniards, but they were in a minority. And the French came, and the conditions under which they came is that they had to be, Catholic, the Spanish King said, these are the conditions. You can go to Trinidad, and I don't know if there was any statement of why, because your assumption is that they were all white. 

And for every adult who went, they would get 32 acres of land each. And for every enslaved person you brought, you would get, you would get 16 acres of land. So if you brought 10 enslaved persons, you get 160 acres. Every, child I think as well got land. So people came and just got huge tracts of land. The more enslaved people you brought, the more land you you got and you didn't pay a cent for it, right? And so it was like this new land and there was this rush to come here, and it attracted the French, with the enslaved people.

But by virtue of the fact they, each family would bring more Africans than white people, the population very quickly moved from the Indigenous being the largest population to the Africans being the largest population, but they were without power. Right. And the elite in Trinidad moved from whatever few Spanish there were, because of course the governor was Spanish, to the French planters. And so, and the, the topography and the the cultivation of the land from being virgin forest very quickly changed to clearing the land for sugar cane plantation. Later on you would have cocoa plantations and so on, but at that point it was sugar. So the land changed, and this happened overnight, this wasn't a gradual evolution.

This was a dramatic alteration of what had existed, since 1498 and what certainly what existed before 1498. The French were totally different type of person to the Spanish. So obviously at that point they brought the French and African, culture into Trinidad.

One of the things that happened in that period was emergence of Calypso, the storytelling to song. Right. 

But very quickly, no, no sooner had their French settled in from, in that period, from 1783 right through the eighties. Then the British arrived in 1797. In the short space of 14 years, the British arrived, virtually walked from St. James, that area in St. James up to Laventille Hill, and there was a peaceful transfer power because Chacon just handed it over to the British Commander Abercromby, and you know, we have Abercromby Street in Port of Spain and in St. Joseph and so on. He was the, the leader of that battalion that came to Trinidad. 

So think how, how, much happened in Trinidad in an intense period of 14 years. It moved from being Spanish, populated largely by Indigenous, underpopulated in the context of how much land there was to the number of people. And then it became the French, the French arrived with all their pomp and pageantry and their style.

And they could once again feel comfortable because they were the Lords in Haiti until they were beaten out and had to escape with their, with their or the servants and the, the enslaved people. 

Now you have this hothouse Trinidad in my mind that period, it, it's like a lab. It's an, and interestingly, the British did not change the laws to Britain's laws for a long time. And you have now a place where the law is Spanish, the country is claimed and owned by the British, the elite and moneyed class is French, the majority of the people are Africans. And you have the Indigenous who are the original owners and namers of the place. 

And that, I think, I is the thing that has defined the personality of Trinidadians this day. Because unlike, Barbados and Jamaica where the British had settled since the, early 1600s, they, I think they had a planter assembly, this is like the parliament of that time, but only the, the rich people were in it. And therefore they had a representation, political representation where they'd always be fighting with the king for less taxes and more things and so on since the 1620s. It's a settled society. It is ordered. We are in charge. We are the planters. You are enslaved. You are doing this. 

Trinidad had, was in this living lab of so many different peoples as they call, as they would say, and they were all in a state of negotiation with each other. To this day we still have that. You have people who are the majority and they say we are the majority, but we don't have economic power. The other one has economic power, but we are a minority. We don't have, the numerical power that politics gives you, other one is who is in charge with laws, you know? And so we, we have that contestation, and of course the Indians came, within, less than 50 years.

Indians arrived in 1845 and added to concoction because they were hunting for another source. Once the slave trade was officially ended in about 1807, 1809, that period. Then you had other sources of labour you're looking for. And then emancipation came in 1838, though most people emancipated themselves from 1834 'cause they wanted to keep them in an apprenticeship system, keep them as enslaved as we are giving you a time to adapt to freedom, of course, they're milking you. So it was an intense period where you also got Chinese who came and added to that mix, and it gave birth, to me, the cultural fertility, the creativity, but also a kind of maddening environment of who is in charge here. Nobody's in charge really. 

You have this, but you don't have that. I have this. You don't have that. And that negotiation has continued. 

It's a wonderful thing, but it's also a nightmare to manage. You can't, that society becomes difficult, you know? And it's wonderful. And you know, when we come to, we respect each other. We may negotiate our way to a genuine harmony and a kind of society that could really, it's the kind of, microcosm of the world. 'cause of course, they're all the Europeans who were here, they weren't, they weren't a, a monolithic group. They were always fighting each other. The Spanish didn't like the French. The French didn't like the British. The Dutch would be in that mix. Sometimes the Germans would come in, and you had big, big, big battles. 

When Chacon was there in Port of Spain, where the British would land and they will declare meet me at midday and we're gonna have a big battle in the street. And Chacon had to put his body between the French and the, and the British, because it's all about honour and all those crazy things that would go on, you know? 

So it, it, it is such a unique space in the Caribbean.

People always talk about Trinis, the Trini personality, but that, to me, that's what it, it it comes from, is I can just straight line from that to who we are today.

Hema: I, I wanna take a quick step back because one of the things that I think is important to understand is when you talked about the French, they weren't coming from France. They were already living elsewhere in the Caribbean.

Sunity: Right. Europeans, like to live the myth that they were still in France. Right, but because until Haiti happened, they could pretend that the French Revolution wasn't touching them. They were in paradise. They were, had enslaved people to their hearts content, how many they wanted, and they, I mean, they lived for the arrival of the ship that will bring the jams and the finery for the women to wear what is, what is the fashion in Paris, this, this season. I want that and so on and so, because they were making money. I mean, sugar was king in the world. The world had not had that taste of sugar.

When sugar hit Europe it was I, I, bigger than gold. Everybody had to have it, you know? it became instant millionaires. And of course, there's a lot of history in terms of how the sugar wealth is what fueled the industrial revolution and gave Europe that head start on everybody.

It is based on, on money coming from the Caribbean and other places, but largely from the Caribbean. And so when we talk about reparations today, that is why we are talking about reparations. You exploited us, you took everything for free, enslaved people, you owe them that money.

Hema: It's interesting that we're talking about the French right now, because typically when you think about the colonizing of Trinidad, it's often talked about as the British, but the French were the first.

Sunity: Until fairly recently, the language of Trinidad was French Patois. And in fact, we still, we have a lot of phrases, langniappe which means be gimme an extra. Right. If you look at the, the, dictionaries of Trinidad language, you'll find a lot of it in that. Piti popo about oh pity popo is a child, you know, it's a small baby. Right. 

So Patois, this is the point I'm making that the Spanish owned it when the, when the French came, then the British owned it soon after, but the language of the elite French and the Africans had incorporated their language with French, in the meantime have to understand each other, you know, because you have to communicate with, they might not have understanding, but they have to communicate. And so Patois, French Patois was the language of, it was the language of people, of the ordinary people. 

When the Indians came, they brought their their languages from where they came from and they incorporated English into it and they incorporated Patois into it. And so we have versions of Bhojpuri and other, other languages here. And so people will be talking and slipping in and out and adding a few words here. So what a lot of research has gone into the language in terms of the linguistics. 

We have our researchers like Dr. Peggy Mohan from Trinidad, she lives in India now. She, she has done a lot of work in bhojpuri 'cause she captured, she did a lot of interviews she captured a generation that was probably the last generation speaking the language. And that material is available for anybody who wants to read her work. And you have other people who've done, you know, like Lise Winer, she has a Trinidad dictionary of, these are, these are, it's all languages things that we just say and we didn't know where it came from.

So, yeah, the French culture, in fact, is ascribed to the Carnival that we have today, that it was the Africans who mocked the French would have their masquerade Right. And their masquerade balls. And they know that would be a ritual that they, they would all have their fancy, and then the Africans will be, they're working on doing all the labour for these balls, of course. They see what's going on. And then they would put on their own show and they would be mocking. 'cause these women wore, when you look at some of the Carnival, traditional mas, the French women here were dressing with all this, big skirts and so on. And part of that in the costume.

And they would put on things, they would put stuff their clothes underneath to mock them. And so we have Carnival, it is not French in origin, in origin to say we are copying the French. It was how the Africans interpreted what they're seeing. And, and they added elements of their own, like Moko Jumbie, the Moko Jumbie is African, right.

And, and many other characters that we have. So that a whole new culture emerged out of all these strands that is uniquely Trinidadian. And in this period you could completely, you could talk with comfortable Trinidad. 'cause Tobago was not part of Trinidad. Um, the country of Trinidad and Tobago and, but Tobago was a target of European settlement long before Trinidad, they had been settled. Tobago changed hands among Europeans. I think it said, I'm not, I'm not sure, but it could be about sixty-something times because everybody, it siezed upon Tobago as a point for going up eastern, Eastern Caribbean, right? 

So they were settled, they were going sugar long before. So when you see today's, today's issues between Tobago and Trinidad, where Tobagonians are calling more and more for autonomy, it's because they have a memory of being on their own. They were only twinned in Trinidad because the planters became bankrupt, and the British government just like, okay, the easiest solution is twin them to Trinidad. 

So there we need to understand why things are playing out in the present. And we only understand that by understanding the history. And when we understand history, we gain a lot more compassion for the other 'cause. Trinidad is, you know, today Trinidadians are and Tobagonians, sometimes they are at loggerheads because okay, you wanna go, go. You don't need to be part of, we, no, you have to understand why Tobagonians feel that way. And they feel that way because they were once, they, they owned their own island. Yeah. They, that’s what they want. And they're different culture.

Hema: They have a different culture and that's why we're doing the history of each island separately for this very reason. They have their own histories, they have their own culture, they have their own memories of what happened in the past. 

And, and I wanna just go back really quickly because you talked about, the enslaved Africans were then mocking the French, in the, to start Carnival, and then at some point Carnival was not allowed or criminalized.

Sunity: Yeah, and we had the Canboulay Riots, right? Now there was a, particularly, I would say, cruel, policeman here in Trinidad, a British policeman called Captain Baker, and he's associated with two really horrible, almost depraved incidents. 

And one was the Canboulay Riots and the other was the Hosay Rebellion, right? Some people say Hosay Riots, Rebellion. We can call 'em what we are. These are resistance, act of cultural and humanitarian resistance by people who, were trying to express their humanity. What does it mean to be human? The capacity for joy, the capacity for self-respect, for being who you are, and expressing all of those things. 

The Canboulay was, it was, in full play. It would've been going on for a while. Came down and then with a very heavy hand. What happened in that period was the outlawing of drumming. The British were terrified of drumming because they suspected that messages were being passed in the drumming. And of course they were, why would you not send messages by drums to communicate across from one hill to the other, from one community to the other? You use all the means at your disposal. 

And, so they banned the drumming and that’s how, um, when the drums were banned and people started to go to the Tambo Bamboo and beat that, and then eventually led to the birth of the steel pan. Right? Which is a whole new adventure in our self-recovery. 

So the Canboulay Riots and, uh, a historian of a really good historian, Maureen Warner Lewis, she was doing a lecture this week and she explained the people think that Canboulay is corruption of cannes brûlées which is the burning of the, um, canes, because that is near the crop time, right? Is a sugar crop where people burn the, you would burn the fields to get rid of whatever is living in it. And then you cut the cane, you send it, you squeeze it, the sugar out of it, the sugar, the cane juice out of it to make sugar. And she said no, that word comes, she says kambule a word like that, that means procession, comes from a part of Africa. And I'm inclined, to accept what she's saying first of all, because she's a real serious researcher it makes sense. The Canboulay Riots occurred in Port of Spain and near Duke Street, and I think you went it when you came to…it a early morning, when you came to Carnival in Trinidad very early. It was in fact, the Canboulay celebration was this morning the Friday before Carnival every year they reenact, there's a reenactment of that Canboulay Riot. 

 It's a tradition to go. It's because it starts before dawn. It's a tradition to go and see the play, the, a theatrical performance of it. 

 So that, it was a pivotal moment in the attempt to suppress Carnival, to suppress a people's expression of human, their humanity. But it did not kill it. Right. It has survived and more, it is more elaborate than ever, and it's world famous and all of those things. So we, we, we are, we are so thankful for those people who were prepared to die, you know? 

Hema: And that was in the late 1800s.

Sunity: Yeah, 18, 1880, I think around that period. 

In that same period, we had the Hosay Riots because the Indians, who were brought to cultivate the land under conditions of indentureship, they would come to Trinidad and they would be assigned to an estate. And the British, as as they have done in many other countries, they practiced an official policy of divide and rule. 

Now remember, by the time the Indians came, they had, Africans had been emancipated, quote unquote emancipated. And, um, to make sure that the Indians were not influenced by the Africans, you weren't allowed to leave the plantation, the estate, without approval of the owner. So everyone was given a a pass and you had to, they would check you that you were there and if you were you running away and getting together with Africans. So if we have a legacy today of ignorance of each other's cultures and hostility that people can't understand even where they got it, you trace it right back to that British policy. As soon as people get to know each other, they discover that, yeah, we, we, we just like each other. Right? 

But the, the Indians had been having the Hosay every year, in parts of Trinidad. And on that case, they passed a proclamation the Britis, authorities, that there still be no procession. And went ahead with it. They defied it. When people defied things, they knew they risked death. So tells you how important and the value and the bravery of these people, they organized themselves and he came with his troops, beat a lot of people. It is said that it has been, the number of deaths has been, is put at around 21 to 24. We have had very, that, that happened in Mon Repos area in south Trinidad. And where these people are buried, we're not sure, but it may be in the Paradise, Cemetery, whether people could bury their own or whether they were lumped and put together. That's a whole history. You can find, people can find, those accounts and work done by, Dr. Harracksingh and Dr. Kelvin Singh, amongst others who have written substantially about it. 

So when people say that Trinidadians never fought for their freedom, that we were just handed it on a platter by the British, that's a myth perpetrated by the British through the education system. And those are just high profile cases. Resistance was continuous all the time. 

Hema: When you said the Hosay Procession, what was that? What were they celebrating?

Sunity: That came, it's Islamic, but interestingly, communities got together to do it. It's in, it's, it's two Princes from the Middle East who had, who had been killed. And on that, in that period, what people do is they build beautiful floats, they go out on the street with in memory of these two Princes. They call these floats tadjahs. They are beautiful and finely crafted, and people go out in the street and they dance and it is, it's spiritual. It's not like a Carnival fete, but it is the same comes out of that same acknowledgement of humanity and of art, and of symbolism and so on. Tadjahs are made to touch each other. And that's the high point. And at the end of it, they are thrown out, thrown into the sea. 

The biggest, today the biggest processions survive in St. James in Port Spain. And thousands of people go out to look at Hosay, with the tassa, tassa music the procession and, it's also in Cedros, we have, Hosay and, and to smaller degree in other parts of the country. But those are are the two main ones. I've never been to the one in Cedros, but I've been to the ones in St. James. And, because St. James had a lot of indentured and it was a place of, we grew a lot of sugar in St. James, as you would find, when you go to St. James, which is on the outskirts of Port of Spain. You would look at the street names and the Indian presence are in the street names. Benares Street, you know, Bengal Street and so on. 

Hema: You talked about the immigration of other people. So Chinese came over as laborers. We had the indentured servants after slavery and emancipation. The indentured servants from India, laborers from China, but also there were other people.

Sunity: The China labour, um, sugar, an experiment of bringing in Chinese was not very successful. The Chinese went into trading and you would see them all over Trinidad. You have what we call the Chinese shops. So the Indians were the most successful, attempt at replacing African labour for sugarcane. And they came with their own understanding of agriculture, and there was some attempt to bring some order and better conditions to Indians, but that didn't always work. 

Some people were still kidnapped and brought, but a large number of people came, chose because they saw opportunity to leave, conditions, because they were told that you will be paid and you'll be indentured for a period of five years. And if you wanna go back home after that, we will give you a, we'll give you a passage back home. And if you choose to stay, I think the later negotiated land, it didn't happen at the beginning where you'll get some land and you will see that, um, the Indians weren't always given the best lands because one of the reasons that the architecture, it is shown in the architecture, how Indians built a lot of houses on what they call stilts in Port of Spain, in, in north Trinidad, that you see a lot of flat houses. And it used to be, it used to stand out because they were building in a lot of cases in mangrove and swampy areas as a kind of land they were given. So they had to put the building on stilts.

They weren't bigger than bungalows. Right later on the value of having an under the house, when you have plenty family and children and so on, it became something of the architecture. But it was really at the beginning of the kind of land that you were on. ' cause the bungalows that were built by the Europeans here, they were sprawling houses and it tended to be a little way off the ground. Uh, maybe a foundation that had a couple steps, but it tended to be sprawling at, at, at, um, at the beginning after the this step up. So you see all these, these, there are reasons, for everything and very often logical common sense. People had no template for settling this land. They just settled it in terms of what the land suggested to them was possible. 

Hema:  With all of these different people that made their way lived, were brought, were kidnapped, were enslaved on the island. How does that show up in what the culture is today and the food is today?

Sunity: One of the things,to me the biggest, expression of it is the creativity of the people. Trinidadians are not, they're not factory produced. They don't, they don't like, they love to be allowed to do their own thing. And this is why to a great extent, we have to design an economy for creatives, not for public servants. A lot of people, even if they have a, a job in the public service, they're doing something else after hours. Something that is their, their passion, their love. They're making a mas, they're acting, they're singing something else, but the economy is not shaped for them. The economy comes from the plantation economy. And so we do have serious economic problems because of that, the kind of economy that was created by the Europeans here. 

And we moved from sugar, which was a mono culture. Then we went to cocoa when sugar failed. So we had our short period of cocoa barrons. And the, the most prominent expression of that are the Magnificent Seven. The, the houses around the Queen Park Savannah, where people, you're going to see these things like castles. One of them is what used to be called the Stollmeyer Castle. It's now been acquired by the state and it has been changed back to its original name of Killarney, I think.

 So some people made a lot of money from cocoa, and then we got, a blight Witches Broom, which is destroyed at the cocoa and pauperized a lot of people. And then after that oil. So we've only had always one product to earn foreign exchange and wealth. Today, as we engage energy transition or as the American government opens the floodgates on oil to make the price come down, we are going to feel the effects of that. Not only that do we have, we have brought up as much oil as we can.

The oil, production of oil is in decline. The impact of that history is that we have a very limited economic options because the plantation economy has survived, which is you put all the eggs in one basket and you live off of the fat of that one thing. And when that collapses, you have nothing else and you have to scramble.

And you just hope that, people just say, the fact that they survive, somehow, they survive. Some people don't. They say, well God is a Trini to as to explain the fact that they still, they recover. So God is a Trini. We live with that motto. 

Hema: Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast. This conversation was a long one with so much information. Come back in 2 weeks for the second part where we chat about music, food and culture. And don’t forget to leave us a rating or review, or send a message to let us know your thoughts on this episode. See you in 2 weeks! 

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