Laventille then is now

This is the height of poverty

for the desperate and black…

Derek Walcott, “Laventville”.

Laventille was once known as “Yoruba Town” or “Freetown”. The first name is revealing, the second now sadly ironic.

The first label suggests that the second favourite apologetic of local Afrocentrists is wrong: Lovelace and Kambon up to last Sunday argue that the reason young black males are failing by every important measure is because they are disconnected from their Africanness. But it is Laventille, the main production centre of murderous young males, which was once called Yoruba Town. This implies that, 170 years ago, Africanness was already embraced by that community. Indeed, in The Book of Trinidad, historian Gerry Besson noted of 19th century Laventille that “The inhabitants of this area retained to a considerable degree many African customs and usages.”

The word Laventille is itself of French origin. In Behind the Bridge, a 1997 collection of essays analysing the community, UWI sociologist Roy McCree argues that the name is rooted in the French word “venter”, meaning to blow or be windy. Interestingly, McCree records that Laventille was never a centre of the plantation economy – there were only a few estates in the area, and those were small and medium in size. And the main planter family in Laventille, the Philips, was not white but coloured. In fact, in the 19th century, the coloured group made up over one-third of the Laventille population, while three percent were whites, and 60 percent enslaved Africans.

The hill, however, was more significant as a strategic location for island defences, and for construction materials. Even so, there seems to have been a stigma attached to the area from its inception: in the 19th century, a leper colony was established there. But the Laventille we know today really began after Emancipation from August 1, 1838. Historian C.R. Ottley writes in a 1975 booklet: “Laventille and East Dry River for the first time became thickly populated, creating over a century ago sub-standard housing which has continued from then till now, to provide accommodation for successive bands of displaced persons…So great was the exodus that five months later, by the end of December 1838, of the 22,359 former slaves, only a mere 8,000 were to be found on the estates.” In 1871, the Laventille population was 1775; ten years later, it was 4,472. Most of the individuals who migrated to Port-of-Spain came because of the high wages for agricultural labour, and many of them went up to Laventille because they could either find cheaper accommodations there or just squat.

As early as the 1860s, the area was described as “an unsanitary and crowded slum”, and had already gained a reputation for crime. One crime-fighting measure taken in the 1880s was the instalment of street lamps, a strategy which was to be again used – with as little effect – by the PNM 125 years later. Indeed, the coming of the PNM in 1956 seems only to have exacerbated the problems which already existed in Laventille.

One year after taking office, the Williams regime began its Depressed Areas Programme. This was not only intended to provide employment in poor areas but, interestingly, also to curb gang warfare among the steel bands. Nearly all the funds in these “crash programmes”, as they were popularly called, were allocated to Laventille and Belmont – so the beginning of the dependency syndrome can be very precisely tracked. The programmes had little positive effect on Laventille. A 1972 survey of the area found that 37 percent of young people dropped out of the education system after primary school, and more than half of the 13-18 age group did not attend secondary school at all. Twenty years after that, others surveys found that 72 percent of the 15-24 age cohort had never passed an exam, and only 17 percent of the adults were married, as compared to a national rate of 40 percent.

Which brings me to the first favourite apologetic of the Afrocentrists: that all the shortcomings of the Afro-Trinidadian community – poor education, unstable families, high crime rates – can be traced back to slavery. Even Walcott, who has described Afrocentrists as “witch doctors of the new left with imported totems”, accepts this argument. But the explanation does not explain why Africa itself has many of the same problems. Indeed, it seems more reasonable to assume that the similar situations between Afro-Trinidadians and sub-Saharan Africans is precisely because cultural predilections were NOT destroyed by slavery. And, next week, I shall argue that it is culture, not history, which explains Laventille’s problems.

Email:kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com