Daly Bread: A social force for good—the gov’t can still do more for pan

The Junior Panorama took place last Sunday. It is the Carnival event I most enjoy.  This year, my annual attendance was seasoned by an insightful statement from a member of the current government, whose communication is regularly that of deny, deflect and denigrate.

The phrase that headlines this column is a quotation from an interview Senator Randall Mitchell, Minister of Tourism, Culture and the Arts (the Minister) gave to Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT) while the Junior Panorama was in progress.

The day after, I saw and absorbed that interview on the YouTube post by Wack Radio 90.1 FM, renowned supporters of Trinidad and Tobago’s cultural events.

The first item of encouragement was the apparent and also reported sincerity with which the Minister has embraced the steelband movement—a welcome departure from merely using the steelband movement to keep pan persons on board for electoral support.

Secondly, the Minister expressly recognised pan as “a force for social good”, and “an answer to many of our social ills”.  He did so by reference to what “we are experiencing right now”.

My regular readers will observe how this ministerial recognition echoes what I have been advocating—as well as acting upon whenever I can—for two decades. Going forward, how will the Minister act upon his awakening to what we have?

About that I was less encouraged when, in the course of his assertion that the future of steelpan is in great hands, he then said: “there is not much more for us to do but to continue doing as we do.”

I beg to differ on that assessment. There is much more to do. A social development plan that supports panyards in the two vital functions that they already perform is urgently required.

One of those functions is the nurturing of youth who may have difficult circumstances at home. I have already written about that, stating for example:

“Joy was also tempered in my case when I looked at the youth who, in significant numbers, comprised the members of the small bands.

“I wondered what many of them might be going home to and what future they might have beyond being stuffed into schools that frustrate the life out of them or, in the worst of cases, drive them into psychological fracture.”

In addition to supporting the panyard as nurturing places, panyards must be supported as they become wider places of learning, capable of filling major deficiencies in the colonial grammar school education, with which we have cruelly persisted.

The education system significantly fails to embrace a young person’s interest and to stimulate potential competence in skills and technology which are related to parts of the economy, particularly industry.

Ironically, maintenance of a steel orchestra depends on just those skills, namely the physical metallurgy of processing steel drums to extract sound from the surface. This aspect of metallurgy involves the overall examination of the physical and chemical behaviour of the metallic elements in use in a panyard to make and present pan music.

It teaches the use of tools and electronic strobes. Ancillary to that pan-making and tuning, skills to weld, work with wrought iron, fibre glass and galvanise are also required for racks and canopies and shed building.

Returning to the affirmation that the future of pan music is in good hands, the Trinidad Express newspaper featured the performance of Adrianna Achaiba at the State funeral for former prime minister, Basdeo Panday, and set out the lineage of the distinguished Achaiba family.

Adrianna is a typical product of the high-achieving end of the steelband movement.

Adrianna began playing pan at the age of five and professionally at the age of nine. Her father, the late Steve Achaiba, was a great from the south of Trinidad.

Highlighting Adrianna also served to remind us that there was inventive genius in the south, commensurate with the genius in the north, but which does not receive media coverage to the same extent.

South bands received great respect in the time of Bobby Mohammed and Steve Achaiba. The 1990 heartbreak concerning “Professor” Ken Philmore’s composition and arrangement and Fonclaire’s performance of Pan By Storm came 15 years after Achaiba’s Hatters won Panorama.

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Martin Daly

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.