Welcome to the birthplace of the steel drum

How a working-class suburb in Trinidad is turning itself into a musical mecca

By David Mangurian, Laventille, Trinidad

The Port of Spain suburb of Laventille, a low-income hillside community of small, densely-packed houses, is considered the birthplace of steel band music.

But ever since it was settled by freed African slaves in the 1840s, its residents have had a bad reputation. The loud and rowdy Laventille drum bands that paraded through Port of Spain streets during Carnival and often fought among themselves didn’t help this image.

"Too many people in this country still see any type of crass behavior as almost exclusively resulting from a Laventille upbringing," says Trinidad journalist Terry Joseph. "It is as though the area has successfully claimed some kind of monopoly on lawlessness and vice."

"If a young girl from Laventille and other girls apply for the same job," says Horace Raymond, a Laventille civic leader, "you can rest your head on a block that the one from Laventille won't get it because of the stigma."

But for over a decade now, Laventille’s residents have been working not only to change this image but also to turn Laventille into a tourist attraction. A 1991 IDB environmental loan, which earmarked $940,000 for storm drainage works and parks in Laventille, seems to have had a catalytic role in stimulating this quest for respectability.

Future pan prodigy?

Laventille’s transformation from slum to proud community actually began during the mid-1980s when this petroleum-exporting country prospered from high oil prices and Laventille residents started replacing their "box-board" houses of rough-cut lumber and corrugated metal roofs with concrete block homes.

In 1989, local civic leader Horace Raymond says he helped to persuade the government to make an abandoned building at the foot of Picton Hill available to the neighborhood for a community center to replace one that had burned down years before. The new center was named after Spree Simon, who Laventille residents proudly claim is the "father" of the steel band for being the first person to tune a steel drum, transforming it from a simple percussion instrument to one capable of playing a full range of notes. (See link to related article at right).

In the early 1990s, residents began to form neighborhood committees to seek funding from private businesses to finance cleanup campaigns in return for posting advertising signs. "We told them that we were unemployed and we wanted work," recalls Raymond, "and that we would clean up the area if they paid us for the maintenance. It wasn’t easy."

But erosion and flooding were a constant problem. There were no storm drains to channel rainwater down the steep hillsides. Silt and garbage washed down from the hills, clogging canals that drain the runoff to the sea and flooding homes and businesses.

The IDB loan financed eight large drainage works to eliminate these problems. But the project had several objectives, says Ancile Brewster, the IDB sector specialist who helped to design and supervise the project. One of them was to help create neighborhood firms to do the construction work. "We had 15 groups come in here," recalls Brewster. "When they realized that this was not going to be a handout, people started dropping out. But we got five or six really strong groups formed. The objective was that once they had finished the job they would be able to bid on other government jobs." Brewster says that two of the groups are still in business. One of them, the Success Laventille Networking Committee, runs an after-school homework center where local students can get assistance from tutors.

The project also included funds to turn several vacant lots into landscaped parks, including lots next to the panyards of two of Laventille’s oldest, biggest, and best steel bands, the WITCO Desperadoes and Carib Tokyo. According to Brewster, the sites were selected next to the panyards because the two orchestras were the oldest civil society organizations in Laventille and it was easy to involve them in helping to create these new parks.

"There is a correlation in terms of how you feel about where you live once it is cleaner and brighter," says Jacqueline Huggins, regional coordinator for Trinidad’s Community Development Fund and a Laventille resident. "Once your environment is clean and tidy, you feel better."

"It is one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on," says Brewster. "In terms of impact, this project made a big difference in people’s lives. More important, it raised the level of environmental awareness."

The IDB-financed drainage works and neighborhood parks, which were completed in June 1995, contributed to a nascent feeling of civic pride in Laventille. In 1993, seven neighborhood committees joined together to form the Laventille and Environs Beautification Committee (LAEBCO). In the process, Raymond says he spent so much time away from his family that his wife divorced him. "Community work mashes up family life," he says. "I just tell myself that somebody had to do it. I like seeing things done and I just keep going."

In 1994, Trinidad and Tobago Instruments Ltd., built a new factory in Laventille, where it now employs 50 people and manufactures 12,000 professional and semiprofessional steel pan instruments a year, exporting 90 percent of its production to Europe, Japan and the United States.

In 1997, LAEBCO got funding from the government to paint huge likenesses of Trinidad’s two national birds, the elegant scarlet ibis and the coco loco, on the sides of the tanks atop Picton Hill and the notes of a steel pan on top of the tanks. The tanks now dominate Laventille from land and air.

Today, at least 15 steel pan orchestras are headquartered in Laventille. In an effort to attract tourists, Laventille launched its own steelband festival in 1995 to celebrate its central role in the development of the instrument.

Laventille’s newest steel band, the Harlem Syncopators, was formed in late 1998 by pan pioneer and native Laventille resident Daisy McClean, who spent $3,200 of her own money and donations to purchase 20 pans and $1,280 more to build a small panyard to get neighborhood kids off the streets at night. The group practices five nights a week.

"It gives the kids discipline," she says, "because you have to come to the panyard at a certain time and you have to practice. I like to see the kids playing. There’s a sense of pride in Laventille today to do something for the community. You can’t wait on the government for everything."

Today, LAEBCO is trying to raise funds to restore the old English Fort Picton on Picton Hill and turn it into tourism offices. Residents now talk about the day when tour buses will bring loads of cruise ship tourists to Laventille to see the birthplace of the steel pan and the water tanks atop Picton Hill, hear the Desperadoes practice, buy crafts and eat local foods.

It will be quite a turnaround for this singular neighborhood.

Date posted: June 2001

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