Beneath Notes of Trinidad Harmony Play Undertones of Racial Discord

It’s a brisk autumn night, but The Pelican is red hot.

Salsa, soca, calypso and reggae fill the air, energizing a diverse crowd of locals and visitors.

“They say we are the rainbow country,” says a smiling Opal Douglass, who has come to “lime”--the ubiquitous “Trini” verb meaning “to hang out.”

She’s with her friends Ron, who is of African descent, Terence, whose roots are in India, and others. “I myself am so mixed I can only say I’m Trinidadian!” the 33-year-old insurance company worker shouts above the music before she downs the rest of her Carib beer.

Hers is a happy, booming society where things are looking up.

Trinidad ‘Rainbow Has Teeth’

Leroy Clarke’s dark, lined face breaks into a rueful grin at such talk.

“People existed here for a long time on this lie--that we were some kind of ‘rainbow society,’ ” the respected African-Trinidadian poet and painter says. “But I tell you: This rainbow has teeth. Trinidad as a unified society is what we can only dream of.”

With eloquent anger, Clarke recounts how successive Spanish, French and British masters imported shiploads of African slaves to harvest sugar cane. How, after the abolition of slavery in 1834, the British brought indentured servants from India.

After their terms, many Indians were given land, and that, says Clarke, is the source of their widely perceived, but difficult to quantify, economic domination of Trinidad.

Today, 40% of the 1.3 million Trinidadians are of Indian descent, and an equal share are of African heritage. The rest are either mixed or trace their ancestry to Portugal, Syria or other places.

Clarke, 60, sits on a wooden bench surrounded by dozens of his mural-sized paintings in a display that occupies half the national museum.

His words are harsh but measured, and, coming from a national institution, they carry some weight.

“The Afro-Trinidadian’s disenfranchisement has never been redressed,” he says. “We are on the brink of something tragic, a tidal wave of psychic disorder. Any little thing could spark such a convulsion, such a catastrophe. So we cannot afford to go out in public and be ridiculous, as some people have been.”

Controversy Surprises New Prime Minister

He’s talking about Prime Minister Basdeo Panday, the longtime political firebrand who was finally elected to head the government, by a whisker, in 1995.

After 32 years of nearly all-black government in Trinidad, Panday’s victory was a cathartic coming of age for the Indian-Trinidadians, and they intend to keep what they have gained.

For many blacks, the loss of political power on top of their economic woes was an almost unbearable humiliation.

Panday can’t understand what the noise is all about.

In a recent speech, he noted unemployment is down from 19% in 1995 to about 13% now, and an economy that was shrinking then will grow by about 5% this year.

The economy “has never been more prosperous; it has never been more stable,” he said.

And the potential is tremendous. With natural gas reserves of 20 trillion cubic feet and probably more, Trinidad has attracted $4 billion of investment by dozens of U.S. companies in the last five years. Every week seems to bring a new factory opening.

Yet in its zeal to bring him down, Panday charged, the black-dominated People’s National Movement and the black-dominated news media have tried “to whip up racist sentiments when any Afro-Trinidadian was fired or removed from office, even though it was for corruption or other wrongdoing.”

At a rally marking three years in power, Panday enraged his critics by openly declaring war on the news media: “They are out to destroy us. We must do them first . . . they must not be allowed to attack this government unfairly and escape unscathed.”

What Panday recommended was an advertising boycott, but many of his supporters weren’t splitting hairs. They began shoving, verbally abusing and throwing drinks at the reporters, photographers and camera operators there.

Editor Fears Attacks on Press

The next day, Therese Mills was a very worried woman. The editor of the highly successful daily Newsday had just ordered security beefed up in the newspaper’s downtown building.

“There are lots of crackpots out there who could be influenced,” she said. “I’m afraid the result will be severe attacks on journalists and maybe even on press houses.”

“The country has become radically polarized,” she added. “This never would have happened before Panday. The prime minister seems out of control.”

New Ways and Old Notions

Beri Singh is a man who speaks so quietly, with such meticulous enunciation, that almost anything he says sounds reasonable and correct.

“Racism in this country has always existed, but we didn’t let it out. It’s too dangerous. After all, you always have in every office black people and Indian people working together. But now people are talking and talking all the time.”

Then Singh, 60, offers this: “For years, a black government ruled this country, and that is why we were in decline. Now, with the Indian government, we have had a few achievements.”

Voicing a stereotype that is widely accepted among African-Trinidadians as well, Singh adds: “The Negro people, when they get a bit of money, they just spend it! The Indian people, they try to put together every coin, so that they will be able to buy a little business or something.”

That doesn’t make Singh an Indian nationalist, though. He too feels Trinidadian, and a recent trip to India drove that fact home. “My wife was pleased to be investigating her roots. But as for me, to be perfectly truthful, I did not like it. Too many people. Too many poor people. I was very pleased indeed to be returning back home.”

It’s more than Africans and Indians only. About 15 miles east of Port-of-Spain lives the Akaloo clan, a group of embittered farmers.

Rice Farmers See Religious Conflict

About 15 years ago, they say, they were encouraged by government officials to cultivate rice on 2,000 acres of remote swampland near the island’s eastern coast. They invested in roads and drainage, but, because of environmentalists’ objections, they were never given a formal lease.

The 16 farmers, all Indian-Trinidadians, voted for Panday in 1995 in hopes that his victory would pave the way for their legalization.

Instead, they were expelled by police.

“We were employers and now we are unemployed,” says Hashem Hussein, 29, who relies on welfare to feed his family of four.

The issue was taken up by the media and became a national scandal, with allegations of corruption and unfairness raising a vocal lobby for the farmers.

The Akaloos have little faith they’ll get their land back, though. They’re convinced the problem is ethnic: They say fellow Indians want to ruin them because they are Muslims, members of a minority within the Indian-Trinidadian group.

“There’s a conflict between the Muslim and Hindu,” says Phiw Akaloo, his colleagues nodding in consensus.

A Calypso Beat and Commerce

On a hilltop about 1,000 feet above Port-of-Spain, a calypso band quickly forms around an American who stops to admire the panorama.

Strumming on a rickety steel guitar, the bandleader improvises:

“Welcome, friend, to my beautiful land,

“I bet that you are a businessman!

“And when I conclude my song and my dance,

“We hope you’ll please this calypso man!”

No tension here on this green hillside. Just $5 changing hands in a flurry of smiles.