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part in many countries. Originally it was held by Roman Catholics during Lent in Roman Catholic countries, but the concept has spread the world over to include other countries outside religious circles.

In Zimbabwe, the street party (carnival) and parade occurred on Africa Day, Saturday May 25.The route of the parade was from Africa Unity Square, proceeding along Jason Moyo Avenue, turning left at Rotten Row, then right at Robert Mugabe, then straight into Glamis Arena at the Harare Exhibition Park (Showgrounds).

It was a sight well worth seeing with different bands wearing different costumes, armed with drums, vuvuzelas and a variety of other musical instruments.

The carnival, which kicked off with the crowning of Miss Carnival, Dananai Chipunza, a week ago, moved into full throttle on Saturday May 25. It ends today.

Zimbabweans might be wondering where the idea of holding carnival as a tourist attraction came from. Many people who know a bit about carnivals will tell you that the idea came from the Caribbean Islands, West Indies, in particular Trinidad & Tobago, which has Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, St. Vincent, St Dominic, St Lucia, Montserrat, Grenada, St Martin, Antigua, St Kitts, Grand Cayman Islands, Barbados and Guyana as its neighbours.

Carnival was created when West African slaves mimicked their French owners who were known for their lavish costume balls. The French would go to dance in a variety of colourful costumes. Forbidden to partake in these festivities and confined to their quarters, slaves combined elements from their own cultures to their masters’ fete. Hence the creation of characters such as Jab Jab or Jab Molassie (Devils), Midnight Robbers, Imps, Lagahroo, Soucouyant, La Diablesse and Demons.

With the abolition of slavery in 1838, freed Africans took their version of carnival to the streets through expression of steel drums, rid-dim sections like tamboo bamboo and as each new immigrant population entered Trinidad, carnival evolved into what we know today. Every year after harvesting , a crop over carnival is held on the streets in Trinidad & Tobago. Originally, carnival was held to celebrate the good harvest but today it has become an annual event on Trinidad’s tourism calendar. It has become big business as many American tourists like to go on holiday to the Caribbean during carnival time.

The Trinidad & Tobago Carnival is an annual event held on the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, and is well known for participants’ colourful costumes and exuberant celebrations.

Carnival in Trinidad & Tobago is the most significant event on the islands’ cultural and tourism calendar, with numerous cultural events running in the lead-up to the street parade on Carnival Monday and Tuesday. It is said that if the islanders are not celebrating it, then they are preparing for it, while reminiscing about the past year’s festival. The heart of the musical celebration has been calypso. Recently soca music has replaced calypso as the most celebrated type of music. Costumes, stick-fighting and limbo dance competitions are also important components of the festival. Tourists are allowed to enter the limbo dance competitions and some end up winning the available prizes.
Carnival as it is celebrated in Trinidad & Tobago is also celebrated in cities worldwide. These include Toronto’s Caribana in Canada, Miami Carnival, Houston Carifest, in the US. and London’s Notting Hill Carnival in the UK, to name a few.

During my time as a student in London, each year, for four consecutive years, during the August Bank Holiday, I would attend the Notting Hill Carnival which featured music stars like Arrow, Calypso Rose, The Mighty Sparrow, The Mighty Spoiler, Lord Kitchener, Eddy Grant, Aswad, King Sounds, Dennis Brown and Steel Pulse. The Notting Hill Gate Carnival which began on a very rough note as it met a lot of resistance at first from the English people who failed to understand why their streets should be closed to allow a bunch of black people to jump up and down in the streets, still takes place in London today. It has now become part of British society’s cultural events.

The Notting Hill Carnival started in 1966. It is so called because it has taken place on the streets of Notting Hill in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, UK, each August, over three days (the August bank holiday Monday and the two days beforehand). It is led by members of the West Indian community. The carnival has attracted around one million people in the past years, making it one of the largest street festivals in the world.

The roots of the Notting Hill Carnival come from two separate but connected strands. The carnival began in January 1959 in St Pancras Town Hall as a response to the depressing state of race relations in the UK at the time. The UK’s first widespread racial attacks (the Notting Hill race riots) had occurred the previous year.

This carnival organised by Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian who had taken the concept from her Caribbean country of Trinidad and who is widely recognised as “the Mother of the Notting Hill Carnival”, was a huge success, despite being held indoors.

The other important strand which inspired the Notting Hill Carnival as a street party was the “hippie” inspired festival that became the first organised outside event in August 1966. The prime mover was Rhaune Laslett, who was not aware of the indoor events when she first raised the idea.

This was a more diverse Notting Hill event to promote cultural unity. A street party for neighbourhood children turned into a carnival procession when Russell Henderson’s steel band (who had played at the earlier Claudia Jones events) went on a walkabout.

The carnival’s traditional starting point has been Ladbroke Grove near Notting Hill.
As the carnival had no permanent staff and head office, the Mangrove Restaurant in Notting Hill, run by another Trinidadian, Frank Crichlow, came to function as an informal communication hub and office address for the carnival’s organisers. Initially, the restaurant was the centre for black people eating out and playing dominoes but it eventually became an office for organising carnival. By 1976, the event had become definitely Caribbean in flavour, with around 150 000 people attending.

However, in that year and several subsequent years, the carnival was marred by riots, in which predominantly Caribbean youths fought with police — a target due to the continuous harassment the population felt they were under. During this period, there was considerable coverage of the disorder in the Press, which some felt took an unfairly negative and one-sided view of the carnival. For a while it looked as if the event would be banned. Prince Charles was one of the few establishment figures who supported the event.

In recent years, the event has been much freer from serious trouble and is generally viewed very positively by the authorities as a dynamic celebration of London’s multi-cultural diversity, though dominated by the Caribbean culture in the best traditions of Rio. Lately several West Africans have taken part in the Notting Hill Carnival. Big business in selling of diverse African and Caribbean foodstuffs and curios has also been established. However, there has been controversy over the public safety aspects of holding such a well-attended event in narrow streets in a small area of London.

Concerns about the size of the event resulted in London’s former Mayor, Ken Livingstone, setting up a Carnival Review Group to look into “formulating guidelines to safeguard the future of the carnival”. An interim report by the review resulted in a change to the route in 2002. When the full report was published in 2004, it recommended that Hyde Park in London’s West End be used as a “savannah”; though this move has attracted some concern that the Hyde Park event may overshadow the original street carnival.

By 2003, the Notting Hill Carnival was now run as a business by a limited company, the Notting Hill Carnival Trust Ltd. A report by the London Development Agency on the 2002 Carnival estimated that the event contributes around £93 million to the UK’s economy.

For the 2011 Notting Hill Carnival an iPhone app was released, and in 2012 both iPhone (in App Store) and Android (in Google Play) apps. They show the carnival route, sound systems, toilets, food, and transport links on international sites as many European and Caribbean visitors now make Notting Hill Carnival their yearly tourism favourite.

In Zimbabwe, though small, the Caribbean community has taken part in the Zimbabwe International Carnival. The group, called “Out of Many, We are One” put together a float which carried members from the different Caribbean islands such as the organisers, Nosa Boadi (Barbados) and Trevor Hall (Jamaica).

The float also featured DJ McGyver of Jugglers Paradise and Ice Rain Music Studio who is from the Caribbean island of Montserrat. Ras Jabulani (Trevor Hall) of Jamaica put together a fusion band for the float which blended very well with steel drums of Trinidad & Tobago and with marimbas, mbira and ngoma of Zimbabwe. Some socalypso music came out of it all.

Carnival in Zimbabwe! Some of us have seen it before, but, wow, the born-frees have been let in on a secret, one that delightfully complicates music with imagery, and by making an instrument’s timbre positively mouth-watering.

As the Jamaicans would say, “it was pure niceness”.

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