Part III

The battle between the forces of the elite Euro­pean-led Mardi Gras and the working class African-led Camboulay is not just a Carnival battle—it is a metaphor for the battle for the nation’s developmental direction and soul. Our crises of crime, institutional collapse, loss of identity and direction are because our leaders have consistently negated the authentic, the working-class, the indigenous, and the “roots”—choosing instead the foreign, plastic and elite. We’ve become a Mardi Gras people—fake, soul-less, status- and trinket-obsessed, surface and empty. We confront nothing and wait until the rot overwhelms. We’ve abandoned our own star. The Carnival, the culture and the country are all collapsing because of these choices…

From the 1930s, with the first experiments to create pan, to 1956, with the world’s first platinum album, Calypso, by Harry Belafonte, this country went through an extraordinary period of transformation. Our folk culture evolved into classical forms…