When it comes to the Caribbean connection in the Big Fug, Trinis, or for that matter Bajans, Dominicans, Lucians, Grenadians are all overshadowed by the Jamaican presence. It’s a combination of sheer numbers and the aggressive Yardie style.

Thirty years ago most Brits’ awareness of Jamaica was shaped by Bob Marley, the Dub sound systems imported from Kingston and the ubiquitous Jamaica pattie. Red Stripe and the Reggae Boyz barely registered on the national consciousness, whereas now runaway Yardie gun and gang culture often aligned to organised crime in major urban centres has arnished the reputation of the majority of peaceful, hardworking Jamaican immigrants and their Brit-born descendants.

But Brit perceptions of the Caribbean community are due for a timely overhaul and T&T is providing the initiative. Interviewing Mighty Tiger, Secretary of the Association of British Calypsonians, yesterday, I was delighted to hear about the Carnival Village project, which will not only give carnival artistes from T&T a state of the art metropolitan home base but should go a long way towards removing Brit misconceptions about Caribbean culture. Tiger tells me four groups—the Ebony and Mangrove steelbands, the Yaa Asantewaa cultural centre in west London and the Association of British Calypsonians have jointly secured £13 million funding to construct the four storey Carnival Village on a site in Ladbroke Grove, at the very heart of the Notting Hill Carnival matrix.

The village will house a steelpan factory and several recording studios, mas construction workshops, a theatre and cinema, restaurant and function rooms.

Construction begins next year and will take the pioneering efforts of Claudia Jones who started the Notting Hill Carnival in 1964 to an entirely new level.

Tribute to Pearl

Connor-Mogotsi

And while on the topic of Trini cultural activists and pioneers, I’d like to remove my hat in tribute to Pearl Connor-Mogotsi, who along with her first husband Edric Connor did so much for Trini and black theatre in the UK. Pearl died recently in South Africa, homeland of her second husband Joe Mogotsi, leader of South Africa’s most famous vocal group The Manhattan Brothers.

Born in 1924 in Diego Martin, as a young woman, Pearl became involved in the reclaiming of Caribbean indigenous culture, which was both a continuation of the resistance against imposed colonial culture and a development of nascent nationalism and the impulse toward Federation. Beryl McBurnie who was a seminal figure in awakening this Caribbean consciousness, became Pearl’s role model and mentor and provided her with her first stage experience at the Little Carib Theatre, which really begs to be recognised as one of the monuments of Creole culture (and be given the same kind of treatment and funding as the proposed London Carnival Village).

During the 1940s as a member of the T&T Youth Movement, she travelled to other islands recruiting for a federal youth movement, meeting another future icon—the young Derek Walcott in St Lucia. In 1948 she met her future husband—Trini folklorist, singer and actor Edric Connor who had already established himself as a presence in the new medium of TV in England. After studying law in the Big Fug, she and Edric established the Edric Connor Agency which became the UK’s premier agency for newly-arrived black actors, dancers, musicians and writers and whose clients included such figures as Earl Lovelace, Ramjohn Holder, Patti Boulaye, Lloyd Reckford and Joan Armatrading. Pearl continued working with what became the Afro-Caribbean Agency up till 1976, following Edric’s death in 1968.

Among the major Caribbean and black British films the agency co-produced or distributed were Carnival Fantastique, Horace Ove’s Pressure, King Carnival, Smile Orange and The Harder They Come. Other landmarks in her long career include helping establish the Negro Theatre Workshop in 1963 which produced Wole Soyinka’s The Road and in 1965 The Jazz Disciples (a jazz version of the St Luke Passion) which was Britain’s contribution to the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal in 1966 and which may have inspired her daughter Geraldine’s Carnival Messiah.