Trinidad and Tobago | Goodbye Conquerors, Hello Music!

Following the current decolonial trend, the government of Trinidad and Tobago announces that it will change the country’s coat of arms by replacing Christopher Columbus’ three ships with steel pans (steel drums), the national musical instrument.

“You see those boats on our emblem? They’re going to go away,” Prime Minister Keith Rowley told a political rally in mid-August, promising concrete change “within six months.”

This purely symbolic gesture is part of a broader movement of historical rewriting which consists of getting rid of symbols linked to colonization or slavery, whether by renaming streets or removing statues.

In the Caribbean and Africa, many states are seeking reparations from their former colonizers, while Caribbean countries, such as Barbados, are officially freeing themselves from the British crown by becoming republics.

“Colonization was only good for Europeans,” says Salah Wilson, a well-known cultural figure in Montreal’s Trinidadian community. “It wasn’t good for First Nations people, not in North America, not in South America, not in the Caribbean. And it certainly wasn’t good for the people of African descent who were brought here and worked for 250 years without pay.”

In this sense, the Rowley government’s decision seems entirely justified to him. “It was high time,” says this expert on steel panarrived in Quebec in the early 1970s.

The pros and cons

In Trinidad, however, there is no unanimity about the plan. Opposition and some academic circles argue that the move will erase history (Christopher Columbus discovered Trinidad and Tobago in 1498) and that it denies a crucial chapter of the national narrative, however unpleasant it may be.

Gelien Matthews, a professor of history at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, disagrees, seeing it more as a gesture of national affirmation: “You can’t change the past, that’s true. But you can choose the symbols you want to draw inspiration from, in terms of heritage. In the current context, I believe that Caribbean people have a responsibility to replace colonial images with images that truly represent them. Christopher Columbus’s ships are part of our history, but they don’t represent who we are. It’s up to Spain to celebrate them, not us.”

Other voices also fear that the addition of steel pans on the coat of arms causes tensions in Trinidadian society, since this instrument primarily represents the community of African descent and not that of Indian descent (about 50% of the population). To avoid divisions, a local historian has suggested that a cupa percussion instrument prized by Trinidadians of Indian origin.

A false good idea, according to Salah Wilson. “The steel pan is inherently a Trinidadian invention, whereas the cup was imported from India and originally came from the Persian Empire. It has no place as an emblem of Trinity,” he says. Gelien Matthews, for his part, argues that the steel pan is played “by all races in Trinidad and Tobago, even Indians and white people!”

Other changes

This will be the first time that the small Caribbean country has changed its emblem since independence (from the United Kingdom) in 1962. In addition to the Girlthere Pinta and the Santa Maria (the three caravels used by Christopher Columbus in his “discovery” of America), the coat of arms is represented by hummingbirds, a palm tree and two national birds, the scarlet ibis and the red-bellied chachalaca.

Prime Minister Rowley also promised public consultations on the possible removal of statues, monuments and street names related to colonialism in the country. He also advocated for the Privy Council, located in London, to no longer be the highest court of appeal for Trinidad and Tobago and several former British colonies in the Caribbean. It remains to be seen what he plans for the name of the capital Port of Spain, a name that speaks volumes…