WAYNE KUBLALSINGH
BLACK STALIN was black. His skin was black. Of such a variety that you don’t see much of anymore. Except perhaps in Tobago. The kind of black skin that the Mighty Duke lionised in the 1970s. Black is beautiful, look at the gloss. In the area where I live, Arima side, most of the people are not black black. They are kind of reddish, brownish, Panyol reddish. Not Duke’s black. Or black like Stalin.
Stalin was black. He named himself Black Stalin. He sang for and about black man, Africa.
I felt a great solace, on opening my Facebook page, to see the celebratory funeral streaming out into the streets of San Fernando. There I saw what I had not seen for a long time. Africa. From deep inside the hills, the valleys, the settlements, the shanties, the urban town houses and sprawling suburban districts, Africa came out to chant, chip, burn the chalice. The moko jumbie, with their furling gowns and flags. The pan. The chants and drums. The dance. The celebratory march of African people streaming through the streets. African culture, celebration, motifs.
From all walks of life it came, this deep persistent Africa, alive and vivacious. When I saw it I felt all is not lost for Trinidad.
[caption id="attachment_995370" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Wayne Kublalsingh -[/caption]
Ever since the early 16th century, when Africans first began arriving in TT, in dribs and drabs, to support the Spanish and the Dutch is their small estates, to the relatively larger influx, which began with the Cédula and French planters in the 1780s and then the British, till the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, till 1837-1845, the emancipation period, to independent village and town formations in the second half of the 19th century, to political and economic assertion in the first half of the 20th, from independence to now, Africans in TT have been holding on, hanging on by the proverbial window-ledge to Africa.
Some Africans have been holding on to Africa like castaways holding on to life on a raftless, boatless, wonky sea. Despite the hurly-burly waves of the estates and plantations, the Western corporate media, our education system, books and newspapers and TV and the detached and alienated political elites, trained to represent the colonial boss and neo-imperialists to corral the African and the indigenous.
On seeing this Africa on the streets of San Fernando I felt good for TT. I felt good to see something real, ital, genuine: Africa and African music, the drum, being hailed and supported by the multi-ethnic schoolteachers and their school students.
Black Stalin represented an affirmation against denial. A celebration. Upbeat and Rastafari. Nothing unclean. He once made the declaration that the Caribbean man in his song by the same name was African man. No other. He shifted, rebalanced the boat by singing a song of camaraderie about Sundar Popo. Shift, rebalance, and move on. Positive energy.
Black Stalin was not my favourite calypson
