What would calypsonians make of ‘Uncle Jack’, ‘Uncle Sam and Aunty Kam’?

October and Calypso History Month are behind us now. February and Season 2026 beckon.

What lies ahead? What is in store for us in the tents—if tents there are! No official Independence celebration, remember?—in Skinner Park and eventually in the Savannah?

What we know is that, barring the unforeseen, Helon Francis, who first showed himself good enough to earn a crown in 2018, will be around to defend his second title, won in 2025.

He writes his own stuff and does not need a Merchant or a Duke or a Joker to come good. But since April 28, there have been plenty of jokers around.

And you don’t need to be a Sparrow or a David Rudder or a Christophe Grant or a Larry Harewood to mine the last half-a-year for the diamonds one expects Season 2026 to produce.

After all, I’m not even in the business and I have an idea—two!—for a calypso for the season ahead…

It’s Thursday afternoon, and i95.5fm’s Cameron Fletcher is regaling us with kaiso after kaiso. Sparrow is singing Wanted Dead or Alive. Know it? It calls attention to authoritarian rulers the world over.

There’s the Shah of Iran, and there’s Idi Amin, whom Birdie describes in his own eponymous calypso as “the tyrant in Africa […] creating real terror all over Uganda”.

Also meriting dishonourable mention is former premier of Grenada, Eric Gairy. None of those named, it suddenly dawns on me, is a Trini.

In 1970, we had a revolt. Raffique Shah, Rex Lasalle and Michael Barzey were the thwarted regiment triumvirate and Geddes Granger was the civilian heading NJAC.

In 1990, we had an insurrection. Yasin Abu Bakr and his 114-strong band of insurgents took power for a weekend.

We have had a would-be strongman, the Karl (Hudson-Phillips), upon whom Chalkdust bestowed calypso immortality.

Apart from Ah fraid Karl, is there any calypso about that? Are there no Trini animals, political or otherwise, who have worked hard to earn notoriety?

I go searching and, in a 2023 Shah—oh, the irony!—column in the Trinidad Express, I find two. The headline is Power in the barrel of a gun. It’s not about revolution or insurrection but about animals:

“Mano Benjamin, for example, who was nicknamed by the trial judge after all the evidence was presented The Beast of Biche, had held two sisters prisoner in a shack somewhere in East Trinidad and had committed some of the most cruel acts against them, including blinding one of the girls and many more too disturbing to mention here.

When I ran into him, almost literally, at the Royal Jail, (…) he had obviously lost weight and aged considerably [but] he still possessed that menacing look that sent villagers scampering for safety whenever he walked on missions unknown.”

In his Mano Benjamin, as is his wont, Cypher uses humour:

“I say they should take the same acid, put back in he eye / Drag he all about, lash he till he cry / (…) Drag he all about, lash he till he laugh / Take a sharp knife, cut back half.”

Composer, however, opts for sarcasm in bidding to recapture some of the unspeakable horror the two Ramirez sisters, Lucille and Dulcie, suffered at the hands of the monster.

“Lucy, just because ah break yuh hand and ah break yuh waist / Lucy, just because ah buss yuh eye and ah buss yuh face / Lucy, just because ah pull out two ah yuh fingernail  / Yuh gone in the court with a long fairytale / to swear way Mano in jail.”

Shah also writes this:

“Another even more notorious, cold-blooded criminal I met was Abdul Malik, who was the extreme opposite of Mano. He was short, small-built and almost handsome, and if you didn’t know him, who he was or what he had done, you might have befriended him or fallen for his missives that he sent—in my case, offers of being named general of the Black Liberation Army, whatever that was, upon my release from prison.

When Malik was arrested in Guyana, fleeing in the forest to escape Interpol, he had left several bodies buried around his home near Arima.

One was that of socialite Gail Ann Benson, who was apparently stabbed and ­buried alive according to the autopsy.

Another had been one of his close friends from Belmont who ran afoul of the boss. Malik was as cold as ice.”

Kitchener’s Stanley Abbot and One to Hang tell us about the six or “four tesses involve in a murder / just the other day.”

But Malik, the monster in whose mind the murders were conceived, merely makes a cameo appearance in the second verse of the kaiso people generally call ‘Parmasar’:

“Ah see Abbott push down Joe Skerritt till he reach the deck / then Mr Malik up with a cutlass and chop him on he neck.”

Cruel. Heartless. Without the milk of human kindness. For people like that, Mano and Malik, old-time calypso had the mot juste. Sans humanité. Santimanitay!

Nowadays, the names in the news are Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and, through him, Jeffrey Epstein, No surprise there. An all-male cast.

But the person whom Venezuela’s parliament recently declared persona non grata is female. Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s desire to be a Trump clone earns her a place on the list.

In August, the US President doubled the bounty on the head of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and deliberately raised the profile of the notorious Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.

Not content with ramping up the harassment of Maduro’s people on American soil, DJT dispatched troops to the archipelago to wage, he claimed, a war on drugs on Maduro’s doorstep.

But the subsequent military build-up in the Caribbean Sea gave the game away. Narcotics trade, my foot! The target is clearly Maduro’s regime.

The series of videos released by the Pentagon starting in early September, shows boats—not ships!—being blown out of the water. But there’s no evidence of any drugs stashed anywhere on board.

By the end of October, the number of illegal strikes is 16, the number of casualties over 70. Among them are two Trinis.

“Narco-traffickers!” Trump dismisses them all.

I hear Kitchener: “Oh, what a country! Oh, what an awful sin! / How come they could be [killing] people so without a hearing?”

Deaf to the voices of reason, KPB ignores long-standing agreement that the Caribbean is a “zone of peace” and, with the world listening, recklessly urges her hero on,

“Kill them all violently!” she says, before the government she nominally leads offers safe harbour to an American warship, armed, one presumes, to the teeth.

That does it! Uncle Sam and Aunty Kam.

Another politician with ties to the US got proof in early October that everybody wins when UNC wins.

Celebrating a big personal victory, former Fifa vice-president Austin Jack Warner revelled in the news that he would no longer face the threat of extradition to Trump’s country to face trial for a rash of Fifa-related white-collar crimes.

He had already shown his true colours when 2011 Calypso Monarch Karene Asche celebrated him as Uncle Jack.

Remember the details? They are worth repeating.

A massive January 2010 7.0 tremor claims an estimated 300,000 lives in Toussaint’s homeland, long high on the list of the world’s poorest countries.

“My friends have told me that they are hungry and in need of basic human supplies,” Wired868 quotes Fifa vice-president Jack Warner as appealing for assistance two weeks after the disaster. “A tide of hungry humanity surrounds me. How can I not hear their cries for help?”

In response, Korean businessman and former Fifa vice-president Chung Mong-Joon sends US$500,000 to an account in the name of the TTFA. To the same account, Fifa sends half that sum.

The full amount of $4.76 million is intended for disbursement to the suffering Haitians, many of whom, even before the earthquake, literally do not know where their next meal is coming from.

It subsequently emerges that Warner, the self-designated special advisor to the TTFA, has complete control of the relevant account. He and only he determines what money leaves it.

In a Sunday Times interview, Haitian Football Federation president Yves Jean-Bart tells the world that, of the US$750,000 deposited in the Warner-controlled account, US$60,000 is the sum total of monies that reached his impoverished country.

Amid all the October crowing, nary a word about the missing US$690,000…

For Trinis, “three” comes out as “tree”. Make what you will of  Uncle Jack, the third.

Santimanitay!