Race and kaiso in the classroom: Kitchener’s ditty on little Black boys

Only a complete ignoramus! Or the kind of blindness that will not see!

Tell me, how could even one person in Trinidad and Tobago actually entertain the thought that Aldwyn “Kitchener” Roberts might have been capable of such an abomination?

Oh, what a country!

In the days when Guy Harewood and Jennifer Jones were running for their very lives in the hills of the Northern Range, Kitchener, let us not forget, was already back in the country. Randy Burroughs, into whose large boots Gary “Motor Mouth” Griffith dreamed—Oops! Wrong tense!—of stepping, was daily urging his Flying Squad men not to waste government money by taking any of the NUFF fugitives alive.

And the ideas for Jericho and No Freedom were arguably already in gestation inside Kitch’s head.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me back up.

Brup, brup, brup, brigo,

Brugadeep. Dem schoolchildren run below.

Buh when deh reach, deh hold deh head and bawl

’Cause when deh tink is mango is mih branches fall.

That’s the chorus of a Kitchener calypso that was popular on the radio eons ago. In those days, I was just a little boy in short pants in primary school.

I remember my sisters and I singing along lustily with the Blaupunkt radio. I don’t remember any of us being offended by anything in the kaiso, including the clear insult to our intelligence.

Mistaking the sound of a falling branch for the sound of a falling mango? Look, Kitch, gih we a break, nah!

But then, in 1962, came Independence. And, in early 1969, Duke’s Black is Beautiful followed in early 1970 by Black Power and Geddes “Daaga” Granger and company.

“Power alone,” the poet Syl Lowhar wrote, “will never make us strong.  / The heart must also sing the human song.”

And Black Stalin and Brother Valentino began to sing songs that spoke directly to the man-in-the-street. And perhaps to the little boy in short pants.

And things began to be seen through different lenses.

And little boys in short pants became little Black boys in short pants…

Long before Gypsy immortalised the phrase in song in 1997:

Little Black boy, go to school and learn. / Little Black boy, show some concern. / Little Black boy, education is the key / to get you off the street and off poverty.

That education message, as articulated by Sparrow decades earlier, remained unchanged. But whereas Gypsy targeted one colour, only age defined Birdie’s 1960s audience:

Children, go to school and learn well / otherwise later on in life yuh go ketch real hell. / Without an education in yuh head / yuh whole life go be pure misery, yuh better off dead…

On the block, we all knew all those lyrics. By heart. And sang them. At the top of our voices.

And we sang Christo’s QRC, we want a goal although only two of us on the block had made it up to Maraval Road.

Largely unconsciously, we had committed all the words to memory, undependent on myriad devices and a plethora of websites that make lyrics readily accessible.

And already etched in our consciousness by first-hand experience was the essential truth about school which would be repeated ad infinitum in Sparrow’s 1973 refrain.

Schooldays was happy, happy days.

Big belly Arthur eat chataigne paratha / to be the most musical farter. / He say he could play anything from God save the King / to Beethoven’s moonlight sonata.

And strongly reinforced night after night in 1979 by “Trinidad Bill” Trotman’s energetic, theatrical, full-throated performance of Mammy, Mammy, ah want to go back to school.

And all of us were smart enough to also know what Birdie had said earlier about schooling—as distinct from education! His 1963 Dan is the Man in the Van ends thus:

Deh beat mih like a dog to learn dat in school. / If mih head was bright, ah woulda be a damn fool!

And, more importantly, we knew just what those words meant: it have book sense and it have common sense; if yuh cyar get both and yuh have to choose one, make sure is the second one!

I do want to get back to Kitchener. But first, Cro Cro.

In the Sunday paper, Selwyn Cudjoe salutes the Mighty Midget as “our warrior king”. Coming from that source, that our can mislead; clarity about the calypsonian’s camp, mind you, is complete.

The education issue I would really like to hear Cro Cro pronounce on is corporal punishment in school.

I spent a chunk of time in Keith Smith’s office one day listening to the increasingly angry journalist on the phone with an adamant Chalkdust.

The Express Editor-at-Large was trying hard to persuade the calypsonian that licks had NOT made him into what he had become. In vain.

Go to YouTube and check the nine-time Monarch’s unyielding position on the issue. No more Licks in School is the title of the kaiso in which he sets out his views.

I honestly do not know what reaction those views would have provoked on my block back in the ’60s. However, heated arguments would have been generated by the chorus of Cro Cro’s 1988 Corruption in Common Entrance. Or his 2005 Chop off deh Hand, which contains these lines:

Ah have a plan / fuh all dem black hen chicken who fail deh exam and … Some people go feel dat ah pushin’ hate / but in mih black hen chicken ah losin’ faith.

You see, in Tunapuna at that time, there were probably as many Indians living north of the Eastern Main Road as south of it. On my block, the proportion of Indians to Blacks would have been at worst 1:3.

Unsurprisingly, at primary level, Tunapuna had both a Hindu school and a CM school. And, before long at secondary level, Hillview for boys, SAGHS and Lakshmi for girls.

So, back to Kitchener now. On the block one day, we are talking kaiso and Mango Tree comes up. In jest, I make the point that Kitch is insulting my intelligence. There is a tall mango vert tree in my yard across the street. But even if there wasn’t, I wouldn’t know the difference between a mango falling and a branch falling?

Seizing on Kitch’s opening line:

Ah wish ah was ah mango tree / planted at Laventy…,

an older member of the group offers a surprising response:

“He coulda say ‘Sans Souci.’ Or ‘up in Grande’. Buh he ha to pick on black hen chicken in Laventille. Black people stupidee!”

He’s not joking. He’s serious! He’s angry! He really believes that Kitch is taking potshots at Black people.

Kitch? He was part of the Windrush experience and lived to tell the tale. Kitch? For him, calypso is art, not just populist partiality and parochialism.

“Nah!” this little Black boy from QRC patiently pipes up. “Kitchie is one ah we. We have to give him the benefit of any doubt.”

Years later,  vindication. Out of the mouth of our warrior king:

Ah glad fuh Geddes Granger, / ah glad fuh Weekes also. / Ah glad fuh all dem detainees; / ah sure glad deh let dem go. (…)

Oh, what a country! Oh, what an awful sin! / How come we could be jailin’ people so without a hearin’?