Trinidad Carnival

Carnival is a festival of colours which is transformed into costumes, calypso, steel band music, dance and different foods and Caribbean art which attracts many people from the different countries. The carnival season is usually during the two weeks before the traditional Christian fasting of Lent. This is celebrated to mark an overturning of daily life.The roots of carnival both lay in Africa and France(Liverpool:57).

Trinidad carnival is a very significant festival in the island of Trinidad and Tobago. This festival has evolved from an elegant, exclusive affair to an all inclusive national festival of the country. Therefore in order to understand the meaning of this festival one must look at the acculturation, …show more content…

After a time of day was changed and for many years past the Carnival days have been inaugurated by the Cannes Brulees”.This brought concerns for the whites. The British entrenching themselves as the new colonial power in the west. The French had lost their dominance in society. All the whites caught up in the problems of labour, low productivity and financial structures.Therfore the opportunity was provided for the Africans to take over Carnival and embrace it as an expression of their new found freedom (Pearse 1956). The newly emancipated Africans celebrated their new condition festival of Canboulay which featured torch light processions, loud music ,drumming ,reinterpretations of traditional African masking as well as representations of their treatment during the period of plantation slavery(Regis 2000:232).Since the whites and coloureds refused to have anything to do with them but were taken up in the end of African enslavement ,the Africans had the streets to themselves ( Liverpool:222).According to Liverpool “ previous studies on