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The State funeral of former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday last Tuesday occupied the centre of the first news cycle of 2024. Sadly, it did so jointly with a renewed onslaught of murder and violent crime, which once more made a mockery of the statements of the Prime Minister and the Commissioner of Police on crime.
Nevertheless, there were several talking points arising from Panday’s funeral. One of my talking points from the ceremony is how brightly the rich legacy of the pan movement shone out of the pan solo played by the accomplished Adrianna Achaiba.
Photo: Office of the Parliament 2024
Her sterling heritage is one to which I shall return in another column. It is useful first to set out a reference point for why legacies are important, particularly in light of the insecurities of our post-colonial condition.
Julieanna Richardson is the founder and executive director of The HistoryMakers, a non-profit organization preserving archival collections of African-American video oral histories. She was the subject of a riveting interview on CBS 60 Minutes, which I saw.
Ms Richardson left corporate America in order to launch and maintain her project to document oral Black histories.
Referring to the collection of “her people’s history”, she stated the philosophy underlying her project as follows: “If you do not know it and do not touch it, you therefore cannot be inspired by it. The value of history is its contribution to forming values.”
At a time when our Government and other authorities are surrendering to criminal elements, it is poignant to consider how anti-social values, formed by successive generations of our youth, may have been mitigated if we had set new educational and developmental objectives and used the achievements of previous generations at different levels in the society to add inspiration.
Photo: OPM
Thinking further about the legacy of Earl Rodney of Harmonites, an exponent of playing with four sticks, I remember those J’ Ouvert mornings after I returned from university abroad.
There was a radio advertisement for a fete on Carnival Sunday night in a union hall, backing onto upper Frederick Street, at which Harmonites played and from which Harmonites would come out on J’Ouvert mornings “opposite dem boys jail”.
Harmonites was my old neighbourhood friend’s favorite band and he insisted that we meet Harmonites on the road. And so, on a few J’Ouvert mornings, we went opposite dem boys jail.
From those days I have immersed my soul in pan music. The unwavering progress the steelband movement has made from its first reputation as a “badjohn” thing to having steel orchestras perform in the famous concert halls of the world, on the banks of the river Seine in Paris, in Times Square New York and on trips to Africa is a source of great pride for so many of us Trinis. The increasing use of pan music in the scores of films and TV series is also noteworthy.
In our current state of regression, violent crime has now wrapped its tentacles around the Queen’s Park Savannah, Ariapita Avenue and the Breakfast Shed. Worryingly, one daily newspaper (the Newsday) last week enquired in an editorial: “Will crime crash Carnival?”
Moreover, crime has already interfered with a well-sponsored pan project, which proposed to present free live pan performances in an area in the Savannah, near the Carnival booths. A recent mid-afternoon murder in that vicinity caused one of the high-profile sponsors to withdraw from the project.
Photo: Pan Trinbago
That project would have brought more pan music back into the Carnival in the midst of an era in which the presence of pan on the Carnival scene, outside of Panorama, has diminished and it would also have added an element of balance to our elitist-dominated Carnival.
Will it still be considered safe for guests at the Hyatt hotel to walk a few yards east to taste the cuisine of the Breakfast Shed?
We are paying the price for the Patrick Manning-led PNM Government’s disgusting dismissal of an innocent victim of violent crime as “collateral damage”, for falling for the spin that violent crime would be confined to “hot-spots” and for tolerating the attempts of governments of both political parties, when in office, to make political deals inside the milieu of violent crime.
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Martin G Daly SC is a prominent attorney-at-law. He is a former Independent Senator and past president of the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago.
He is chairman of the Pat Bishop Foundation and a steelpan music enthusiast.
