Caribana Culture

Nothing showcases Caribbean culture in Canada as does Caribana -call it what you may, with all the recent clarifications of who owns the name ‘Caribana’. To paraphrase the Bard, ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a Caribbean Festival by any other name would smell as sweet.’ But we have to admit that ‘Scotiabank Toronto Caribbean Carnival’ just does not connote the ‘joie de vivre’ of the peoples of the Caribbean.
But the two-week ‘largest street festival in North America’ is slated to outdo itself this year with organisers hoping to touch the 1.5 million mark in the final grand parade this weekend. The Parade of Bands is the emblematic Caribbean Carnival trademark-whether Barbados calls it ‘Crop Over’, the Bahamas, ‘Junkanoo’, Guyana, ‘Mashramani’ etc. We can be sure that this year’s celebration will certainly not disappoint the hundreds of thousands of visitors who will flood into Toronto to inject almost half-a-billion dollars into the economy.
Kicked off in 1967 as the West Indian input to the year-long Canadian Centennial, Caribana was a consequence of the earlier decision, to alter the rules on Canadian immigration which then allowed non-whites equal access into the country. There were now enough West Indians in Canada-and more specifically in Toronto, to create the critical mass to sustain a Carnival atmosphere. More than any other festival, Carnival needs that throbbing, swirling pulsating mass of humanity in the streets.
But there’s one aspect of Caribana which is connected integrally with the Caribbean experience that is often overlooked-perchance because it predates large scale Caribbean migration to Canada. The weekend of the March of Bands occurs on Canada’s ‘Civic Holiday’, known by several different names in the various provinces and municipalities-in Toronto “Simcoe Day”, but which falls on the first Monday of August.
Caribbean peoples will immediately recognise this day as commemorating and celebrating the emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean. The irony of ironies is that slavery was also abolished throughout the British Empire on August 1st 183- including Canada. John Graves Simcoe, the founder of York-which became Toronto -was the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. He was also the promulgator of the Act Against Slavery in Canada. When Caribana was kicked off in 1967, the promoters consciously chose the weekend nearest to August 1 for the festival. The Canadian Centennial actually peaked on July 1st of that year.
For a host of reasons the connection of Simcoe Day with the emancipation of slavery is not played up by either the Toronto or Ontario administration-or, nowadays, the organisers of Caribana. One of those reasons is probably behind the outburst by the Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford that the Federal Government to use the country’s immigration laws to ‘exile’ and eliminate criminal gangs from the city. Immigration Minister Jason Kinney added specificity when he tweeted that ‘foreign gangsters’ were behind the flurry of gun-related violence involving persons of Caribbean origin in Toronto recently. Caribbean spokespersons were not surprisingly outraged by the racist premises of the assertion.
But ordinary persons of Caribbean origin should utilise the explicit connection between Caribana, Simcoe Day and the Abolition of Slavery. Caribana was conceived as a celebration of Caribbean Heritage and participants should showcase to a greater extent that the Caribbean and its people are more than just about ‘jumping up’.
Canadian residents of Caribbean origin should lobby that Caribbean heritage be emphasised in the textbooks used in schools and universities; also that Canada, during the days of Caribbean slavery was an integral cog in the wheels of that perfidious system is nowadays ‘silenced’. During slavery salted cod fish from Canada was an integral part of the diet of slaves and this helped to create the fishing industry of Newfoundland. In an analogous move, Canadian split peas substituted for lentils in the diet of Indian indentured workers following the abolition of slavery.