Trinidad - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 105

Trinidadian slavery before 1783 is too insignificant to be considered. The country was then flung open.
New settlers arrived and new slaves were brought from Africa, and in fourteen years the population shot
up to 18,000. In 1807, ten years after the island became British, the Slave Trade was abolished; which
means that, apart from the illegal activities of the slave-runners, [5] and the remnant (perhaps 1 per cent.?)
of the old Spanish slaves, the ancestors of the present black population of Trinidad must all have come
to the island from Africa between 1783 and 1807: twenty-four years. So assuming that eighteen was the
likeliest age for a Negro to be enslaved and shipped to Trinidad, and that his normal span of life was the
biblical seventy years, the oldest slaves would have survived the Emancipation Act of 1834 with exactly
one year's grace, and the youngest of the slaves imported from Africa would only have known slavery
for twenty-seven; only a little more than a third of his life. And most of the Negroes born into slavery in
Trinidad came of parents who had known freedom.
If there is no basic error in this theory, the period of slavery in the ancestry of the coloured population
of Trinidad today can virtually be limited to fifty-one years, and fifty-one years when the memory or the
tradition of Africa and freedom was fresh in all their minds, and filled, for the latter half of its length (as
the anti-slavery campaign gained momentum in England), with the growing hope of deliverance. [6] And
brutal and oppressive as all slavery by its nature must be, it was certainly milder then in its application
than during the preceding centuries.
The Trinidadian Negroes, then, have escaped the deadening effects of centuries of slavery in the same
place, of generation after generation of it, with no hope of change till the world's end. It would be surpris-
ing if this terrible continuity had not in some measure quenched the natural ebullience of the African race
in the other islands. (It is astonishing how much has survived.) A certain self-consciousness, the wariness
of a man in a false position, has taken its place. Caribbean slavery was a double-edged weapon, for while
it was steadily damping the spirits of the Negroes, it was also taking terrible toll of the intelligence and
of the civilized virtues among the slave-owners; a loss which their descendants have not yet been able to
make good. The art of combining the ownership of slaves with intellectual maturity and a high state of
civilization must have vanished with Greece and Rome.
The Trinidadian population of African origin has now risen to well over 200,000—a growth that has
taken place in the middle of a multitude of cosmopolitan influences, great changes in the economic and
strategic importance of the island, and the rapid growth of the capital. A thoroughly stimulating atmo-
sphere, in fact, and I suggest that these factors, and the short duration of slavery and a quick psychologic-
al convalescence, are the causes of Trinidadian eupepsia.
To return to clothes. At last we saw coloured people (who are physically, I suppose, the best built race
in the world) dressed with befitting splendour, especially the slightly raffish, urban class known as the
Saga Boys. [7] The term has definite implications of low life, and Saga Boys, as far as I can discover, live
idle and happy lives on music and air and immoral earnings. They are, in fact, a mixture of wide boys,
dead-end kids, fly coves and garçons du milieu ; though, and this is important—in case some absolutely
virtuous Saga Boy should ever read these pages with indignation—it can also be a purely sartorial term,
implying nothing more than adherence to a certain canon of adornment. Not having been to America, I
cannot say how much Harlem has contributed to Port of Spain fashions; obviously quite a lot.
The basis of the whole outfit is the trousers, the saga-pants. They are usually held up by transparent
plastic belts, and pleats like scimitars run down to an unusual fullness at the knee, where they begin to
taper, reaching almost ankle tightness where the turn-up rests on the two-coloured shoe; peg-top trousers,
in fact, but so neat and clean and beautifully ironed that they are nothing like the floppy inexpressibles