* Carnivals are not just about making glamour and glitz
By Anote Ajeluorou
Their reputation is built on solid group achievement,
to paraphrase Chinua Achebe in his iconic novel, Things Fall Apart. Now, People’s World is quietly taking a strategic part in this year’s
Calabar Christmas Carnival. The group has seen carnivals, has brought carnivals
into life and has been part of Europe’s biggest street carnival, the Notting
Hill Carnival, London. With its Peoples World Carnival Band in Tottenham part
of London, the group has been part of stage costume-making and many other
community events in the U.K. and elsewhere.
The
group arrived Nigeria last week and will provide costumes for the lead participants
of Calabar Christmas Carnival. It is in the country in partnership with
Nigeria’s stage lighting and decor giant, the Alhaji Teju Kareem-led Zmirage
Multimedia Company Ltd, to give the carnival and its numerous visitors an
unforgettable time. For Kareem, the Zmirage boss, this collaboration with
Peoples World Carnival Band is also part of his yearly International Cultural
Exchange (ICE) programme in honour of Prof. Wole Soyinka’s humanistic
contributions to the world.
As part
of the partnership, Peoples World had worked with Zmirage months ago at the
Nothing Hill Carnival to expose and sell Calabar Christmas Carnival to the rest
of the world when a big float was mounted to advertise the carnival.
Now,
both parties will be providing Calabar Christmas Carnival with something
everyone can share, the rich experience of giving carnivals a meaning quite
apart from the usual razzmatazz, fun, gaiety and pomp carnivals supposedly
generate. With a membership largely made up of Africans from the Caribbean
Islands, Peoples World sees carnivals as street theatres, which are not only
celebratory, but provide opportunity for some form of self-expression for the
people in articulating their vision of the world.
So for
them, a carnival should go beyond the mere display of beautiful costumes and
colours. It should hold up an aspect of the people’s culture, even their
grievances and joys and tell unique stories about how things really are, where
things are headed, and possibly how to get whatever destinations the people are
headed. Largely coming from carnival backgrounds steeped in street protests
that characterised slave-master relationships in the Caribbean Islands of years
gone by, Peoples World frowns at carnivals that do not have underlying tones
that speak to the people’s daily living conditions and how to better improve
such conditions for their better living.
Indeed,
this is where the group disagrees with the spirit of the Rio De Janeiro
Carnival in Brazil, where the display of naked flesh seems the pervading
intent. With Nigeria’s follow-follow, bandwagon effect that has resulted in carnival explosions in recent
years in some states, with the Abuja Carnival jamboree leading the way in poor
programming conception and cultural/artistic contenxtualisation almost
bordering on meaninglessness, the involvement of Peoples World in this year’s
Calabar Christmas Carnival may just be the turning point carnival organisers
need to redirect their efforts so that carnivals being organised in the country
can have impact in the people’s lives.
For
Peoples World, carnivals should embrace the totality of a people’s existence
and give them a voice to speak to authority and to themselves about their
conditions.
INTERESTINGLY, the recently concluded CARNIRIV, with ‘Reminiscing
the Past, Consolidating the Future’
as theme, and organised by the Rivers State Government, may just have done well
as it accommodated many elements into its agenda, including a symposium or
colloquium that addressed many socio-cultural issues that affect the people and
perhaps how to move along on the path of cultural promotion and value
edification.
Last weekend, The Guardian sought furthwer explanation on members of the Peopls World on their
idea of carnival, and coming to lend their expertese to carnivals in Nigeria.
Excerpts
Angela Duncan-Thomson
FOR me, coming to Nigeria for the first time is quite
an experience and a way to portray an art form that I’m passionate about and to
work for the first time as a new company and we’re hoping to make an impact for
the carnival in Calabar. You know, everybody has a different opinion about
coming to Nigeria. On my first day in Lagos, we got caught up in the traffic on
our way to the museum. But it felt like home, like Jamaica, where I’m from.
What I found was that people’s temperaments are pretty similar; and my friends
agreed that it was all familiar – the way people drive, the way they argue – it
just felt as if I was home, which to me was very important.
My
mission here is to bring costumes for the Master Blaster band that is taking
part in the Calabar Christmas Carnival, which we were asked by our link,
Shabaka Thomson (ex-Director of Notting Hill Carnival, London) to make. We’ve
been asked to produce 30 frontline costumes and four individual costumes.
They’ve asked us to make them elaborate and something that can stand out. So,
we’ve produced the costumes and we’re hoping they find them acceptable. We’ve
done as much as we could in London including the finishing. I actually
surprised myself the way we finished them.
Now, we
are a group that learn from other cultures; we’re from the different Caribbean
Islands with different cultures and living in London. For us, doing anything
for Africa is one of the greatest things to happen to us because we have to do
research into the particular African culture we want to work with to integrate
that culture into the carnival costumes.
Carnival is about celebrating your own culture; it can be anything but
it has to mean something and not just celebratory; not just colourful, but it
must mean something. And whoever we work for must take ownership of the
carnival or production.
From the
costumes, we expect you to appreciate what we’ve done; you will see that we put
everything we’ve got into it for your benefit. We tried to use the theme that
was given to us ‘Masks at Dawn’, and to bring it
in a way that is local. And we think that we’ve explored it. So, we will have
30 beautiful ladies to parade the costumes. But it’s the first time we’re doing
the costume; so we’re here to see how they will use our costumes. It’s new for
us. So, it will be a two-way learning process; but we’ve given them something
that will be spectacular.
Carnivals should be uniting people; carnivals mean different things to
different people from within their own cultures. Originally for us, it’s about
making a statement; it is making a stand for what you believe and about
individual customs and beliefs and over the years, with people coming over from
the Caribbean to the U.K. and vice versa, we now want to blend. So, we have a
lot of colours that are mixed up and stirred up together, to produce something
that is knitted together and wonderful. That is what carnival is all about.
What we
do with carnivals is to use what you have to exploit what you have to
understand the positiveness of your culture, your country and what you actually
want other people to see about you. When people come to a Nigerian carnival,
they should see what Nigerians are and not go away wondering if indeed it was
somewhere else they had been. If you’re having it in Calabar, it should have an
element of what Calabar is as well. So, it should have that edge. There should
be something unique about Calabar in it - the culture, the people and what else
besides. If in Lagos, the carnival should have that Lagos touch, something
different. That’s the way to take ownership of carnival for it to be different.
On the
social consciousness of carnivals, from the carnivals I’ve been involved in,
they are used to say what is going on currently, historically and even
politically. But this could be difficult in some countries because of political
culture prevailing at the time. But it’s like when you put something on stage
or theatre, it should make some statement.
Carnival is street theatre, street stage; it’s the same kind of way of
thinking, as long as it’s done tastefully and as long as you have control of
what you put out.
It may
offend some people; but sometimes you offend. You have to be aware of your
political climate and really see how far you can go. I won’t advise somebody to
just do that because of the political situation. But you can achieve it within
certain parametres so people respect you for what you have done. In some
countries, it’s easy; in some others, it’s not. You just have to be very
careful how you thread.
Sally (yet to get the full names; have asked Lilian
to send), an educational counsellor
We have a carnival costume band in Tottenham, London.
I think we evolved with Peoples World carnival Band. We started making costumes
for Notting Hill Carnival and other events locally. And over the years, we
realised that we’re opening a need for young people. The unique thing was that
most of the time we found that most of our young people were sometimes second,
third, fourth generation British black children, who know very little about
their home culture or history. Their cultures are being diluted and their
families are not close together as they should be in their own cultures back
home. And there’s also the problem with absentee fathers. I’m not trying to say
it’s the only reason for the problem, but there’s a dilution of the cultures
and the things that people do together.
So, what
we do is work all year round with young people like bicycle maintenance, help
them write CVs, introduce skills, help them look for jobs; there are all kinds
of work we do with them. We try to teach them to be as good as they can be –
the positive aspect of life – we make them learn something and keep it real.
And because of the problem we have locally; well, globally now, I guess, in
terms of the gang culture and little value for life – young people getting into
fight and killing each other, we’re determined that we’ll let them blossom.
So,
through the medium of costume-making, you can engage them in other things. One
of the main things that we do is to make them learn the world around them or
about the history of their respective countries through costume-making so they
could have a bit more understanding of their cultures. For instance, in one of
our events, we had ‘United in Rhythm’,
using the music and colours from the different countries as highlights.
So, for
people from St. Lucia, Dominican Republic, we had Zooks; from Jamaica, we had
reggae; highlife for the African young people and jungle music for young, black
people in London, also. They also had the colours of their countries’ flags as
costumes; it was subtly political as well, but not in your face politics.
It was to help young people recognise the cultures
that they come from -- from their flags to their music and more importantly,
they had to learn about somebody else’s culture, too.
At
Peoples World, it’s like a family. We celebrated our 30 years recently, and it
was about freedom, freedom of speech, of the elements, of blue. We don’t want
to harp on the slavery issue; we recognise it; we had it. But we want to move
on and young people learnt about slavery but they also learnt about freedom.
They don’t have to be disenfranchised. The riots that happened in Tottenham
were about a feeling of injustice, a failing of government.
I think,
the fact that our name is Peoples World gives us that international flavour,
feel about it. So, at Calabar Christmas Carnival, you will be expecting
fabulous costumes, and a kind of marriage of understanding – a two-way process
of understanding people and hopefully find a middle ground. We’re working with
Décor, which makes the costumes. We’ve taken our cue from the theme ‘Masks
at Dawn’ and we’ve taken our perception of that to produce
very glamourous costumes. You can be sure of that. I hope we can run with that
in spite of the politics!
Now,
we’re involved in the biggest carnival in Europe as the fifth element in the
Notting Hill Carnival in which people don’t appreciate the amount of work that
goes into it. But we work pretty much against the background of so much
restriction from the government – ‘oh, you can’t do this’; ‘oh, you have to
close early’; ‘oh, you can’t be this loud!’; ‘oh, you can’t use this road’.
So, it’s
kind of hard to always keep it sterile even when we always resist those
restrictions because the carnival is about people taking to the streets and not
used to being restriction to where they can be or how much noise they can make.
Unfortunately, there’s so much government machinery involved in policing people
and cleaning streets. We have the pressure of having the biggest number of
people and the loudest noise during the carnival.
I think
that instead of policing us so much, they should be glad. In 2003, they said 93
million pounds came to London over the period of Notting Hill Carnival alone
for airlines and hotels. It’s the biggest tourism event in the country! People around the world look forward to the carnival and
we’re very much down-played. So, why are we being treated so shabbily when
others make all the money? Sponsors come in guardedly.
But you
know, carnivals are not just about making glamour and glitz; not just to get
drunk and having fun. It should be a celebration of something, a commemoration
of something. Unfortunately, the Rio Carnival is diluted so much and is more
about funfair. Carnival must have content and it must be relevant to you! It’s
your cultural thing and about recycling and regeneration, which can be made as
its rule of engagement. It has to be about something locally produced, recycled
material. I don’t know the politics around this carnival, but it should be
something about sustainability, regeneration. Those judging should be looking
for something locally produced. Is it something that is giving back to the
community?
I don’t
know how you work here, but it could be about inviting church groups or faith
groups to make one band. That will be a challenge because carnivals are about
uniting people! It could be about resisting sectarianism, you know. Or they
want local school children to come together and select them to get a place in
the carnival band. But these are things to factor into a carnival to make more
meaning out of it rather than just fun. I think these possibilities could make
it much bigger and like a household event.
You look
at the Rio Carnival and people are going by half naked in bikinis. What message
is that really saying? You just go mad and enjoy yourself. You should think how
to add to that and what value to derive from it.
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