How Tobago's festival season celebrates its future—and its past

The grave of Jane Lovell, one of the last former enslaved people of Tobago, is marked with a bronze carving of the Sankofa: a mythical bird of West Africa. Its body faces forward, but its head looks back. “The Sankofa symbolises the belief that in order to move forward you must first return to the past,” says my guide, Phill Williams, as we stand before Jane’s final resting place at St Patrick’s Anglican Church. Phill’s voice, like that of many of the locals, has a lilt that sings the Caribbean island’s stories as much as saying them.

Along with other enslaved people, Jane Lovell carried bricks from British ships two miles into the island’s centre to build this church, explains Phill. When they achieved full emancipation in 1838, she would have been just 18 years old. She lived out her days on Tobago and died at the age of 103. As we take a moment to remember her life, the ochre-coloured building casts a shadow that stops just short of her grave.

Since independence, Tobagonians have built an identity that looks in two directions, like the Sankofa; one that reconciles their West African origins and the scars of colonialism with their post-independence history and a future yet unwritten. Exactly how they’ve done this is what I’m here to find out. The visit to St Patrick’s Church is a harrowing reminder of what they’ve had to overcome.

As Phill and I walk back to our car, I inhale the sweet, cashew-like scent of the island: a mix of woodsmoke, spice and frangipani. Above us, yellow-bellied bananaquit birds peep down from the trees.

We drive up to Mount Irvine Bay, from where Jane Lovell carried the church bricks almost two centuries ago, and along Tobago’s north coast. Today, resorts and restaurants line the golden crescent of sand, behind which the ocean turns from cerulean to indigo. People are hanging out — ‘liming’, as the locals say — with Carib beers. But development on Tobago has been gentle over the past few decades. Around half of the island makes up the North-East Tobago Unesco Biosphere Reserve; even further south, where we are now, the landscape is covered in trees, some of which stretch their long limbs out to create a green canopy over the road. These include the mango, the cacao and the taro, but also the kapok — sacred to the West African Yoruba people, from whom many Tobagonians are descended. “It’s believed the spirits of our ancestors, both good and bad, are released from the tree in the evening,” says Phill, adjusting his glasses and flashing me a smile as he drives.

At this time of year, the trees are lush and full. It’s the rainy season, but also when the island’s biggest annual party — the month-long Tobago Heritage Festival — takes place. My plan is to explore the island and check out festival events that delve into the island’s history, folklore and legends. I already feel I can sense the trees whispering the island’s stories.

Lying just off the coast of Venezuela in the southeastern corner of the Caribbean, Tobago has been seized and reseized around 30 times during its turbulent colonial history, mostly by the French, Dutch and British. In 1889, while under British rule, it was merged with the larger neighbouring island of Trinidad to form the nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The 19th-century collapse of its sugar industry — mostly the result of increased competition, labour shortages, investment problems and a devastating hurricane — made the move an economic necessity. Trinidad and Tobago gained full independence in 1962, and this year marks half a century since the twin-island nation became a republic.

We arrive at the fishing village of Castara: one of Tobago’s tourism centres, complete with holiday rentals, beach bars and a high-end resort. And yet, it’s hardly busy. Its low-rise homes — brightly painted in blues and yellows — soon thin out into forests. Tramping through thickets of bamboo and cacao trees, we reach Castara Waterfall, gushing from a crevasse between two slabs of rock. Continuing an old tradition, people still bathe with lemon and lime in the waterfall pool to cleanse away bad energy, explains Phill.

Returning to the village hungry, we head down to Castara Beach to meet Brian ‘Alibaba’ Taylor, who sets up a barbecue here on Tuesdays and Saturdays. His voice booms in melodious greeting as we hurry into his makeshift restaurant, the rain tapping a calypso beat on the corrugated iron roof. Alibaba stands in a haze of smoke, soaked in sweat, turning slivers of tuna on a blackened barrel grill. Moments later, the fish is presented to me alongside charred breadfruit in an almond leaf. Alibaba also insists I try his take on an oil down — a Caribbean stew of spiced coconut milk and lamb sauce — which he serves in a hollowed-out breadfruit. Inside, I find more chunks of the fruit with the pillowy texture of suet dumplings.

In the everyday poetry of Caribbean English, breadfruit is one of a group of starchy fruits known as ‘ground provisions’. It originated in Asia and was brought to the region as cheap food for enslaved people. Over time, it became a keystone of Tobagonian cuisine — not just sustenance but a showcase for the islanders’ creativity. “Breadfruit can be roasted, fried, boiled, steamed or baked,” says Alibaba. “Our ancestors got creative to survive.”

Looking back

That creativity has been passed through the generations and helped spur a cultural rebirth that takes many forms across the island: evident not just in food, but in clothing, dances, festivals, art and music. The next day, I get to see all of this inventiveness come together after we drive the 7.5 miles from Castara to Moriah in the island’s centre. The latter is an unassuming village of brightly painted wooden houses that puts on one of Tobago’s most idiosyncratic annual shows. Phill and I pull up to find men and boys in top hats, bow ties and tails, a ‘groom’ similarly dressed and a ‘bride’ in tiers of glossy white ruffles, dripping with pearls.

We’re here for one of the Heritage Festival’s main events: the Ole Time Wedding ­— a recreation of a 19th-century, post-emancipation wedding. It’s one of several festival highlights drawing on traditions created by Tobagonians during the colonial era — performed not for the benefit of tourists but as a way for new generations to learn about their past: both their precolonial West African heritage and the resilience and ingenuity of enslaved people. “We’re searching for what was lost,” says Phill. “People want to know where they came from.”

The outfits I’m surrounded by are loosely based on British Victorian styles, but the colours, music and cuisine are emphatically Caribbean. There are young girls wearing tightly bound ribbons and dresses in shades of pink, green and yellow seen on tropical birds. There are teens wearing false eyelashes that flutter like wings, and older women in lace gloves and wide-brimmed hats that droop under the weight of silk flowers. One saunters by with a breadfruit on her head (representing fertility). The ‘wedding guests’ — all local Tobagonians — follow behind, dancing. Ahead is a lorry stacked with speakers blasting fiddle music. The street shakes with sound.

In the middle of it all, I find Kern Cowan, incongruously dressed in a plain white T-shirt: he’s the CEO of the Tobago Festivals Commission, which organises the Heritage Festival. “We’re holding on to our traditions, being persistent in our legacy and standing firm in who we are as Tobagonians,” he tells me. “What’s significant to me is the number of young people here.” Eventually, we reach a marquee, where a band strikes up on goatskin tambrin drums and fiddle. Kicking and twirling, the guests dance the reel and jig — representing the push and pull of a marriage.

Music is the pulse that drives the cultures and traditions of this island, and nothing has had a bigger influence on Tobagonian music than the steel drum, also known simply as ‘pan’. It originated in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1930s — a natural evolution of the islands’ carnival culture and colonial-era percussion instruments. That evening, we drop by the coastal village of Buccoo to watch local band the NLCB Buccooneers Steel Orchestra in rehearsal. We arrive at their practice space to find them flowing effortlessly through pop hits: from Arrow’s Hot Hot Hot to a Latin medley via Miami Sound Machine’s Conga. There’s just a fraction of the full band here, but the 24 pannists in attendance sound like one giant, living instrument. They’re practising for Buccoo’s weekly Sunday School — so-called “because it takes place religiously every Sunday,” jokes Phill — when the Buccooneers strike up on the shore and travellers and Tobagonians come together to lime, drink beer and dance.

During a break, pannist Anthony Hopkins guides me through the different pan types, from the small, silver tenors to his own booming bass, which resembles an oil drum. He strikes it with seemingly no effort, his limbs loose and limber. “The rhythm section keeps the pulse,” he says. “Once the downbeat is constant, the vibes just keep flowing. We’re a rhythmic people.” I’m invited to try it, so I borrow the beaters and play a few notes, feeling them vibrate up my arms and into my chest.

The precursor to steel pan is widely held to be tamboo bamboo: different lengths of bamboo banged percussively on the ground. When it was temporarily banned in the 1930s due to its association with gang violence, the steel pan — previously a rudimentary accompaniment to tamboo — was refined into the sophisticated instrument it is today.

The tamboo is in use the next day at Charlotteville, a northeastern village of concrete bungalows wrapped around the turquoise Man O War Bay. It’s the location for another Heritage Festival event: Natural Treasures Day, celebrating island crops such as sugarcane, ground provisions, bamboo and, above all, cacao. There’s a parade that’s about to set off from Fort Campbleton, a former 18th-century British stronghold that soars over the sea and now flies the Trinidad and Tobago flag. A group of musicians in the street beneath sets off, pounding tamboos against the ground in unison. With a bone-shaking crack, the rest of the band start to bang homemade percussion instruments producing different frequencies — from plastic barrels to car-part cowbells.

The parade culminates with a demonstration of a barefoot ‘coco dance’ around a heap of cacao, symbolising Tobago’s affection for a crop that overtook sugar between 1880 and 1980 to become the island’s biggest export. It’s a colonial-era ritual that originated as a way for island labourers to dry and polish the beans, making them more attractive for sale. I watch the dancers, mesmerised by the twisting feet, the pulse of drums, the shine of the beans and the vanilla notes of cacao that swell to fill the shimmering air.

Moving forward

Once, chocolate production made colonial landowners fantastically rich. In today’s Tobago the profits are shared by small local businesses. On the western side of the island, a 30-mile drive from Charlotteville in the palm-ringed northern-coast village of Plymouth, I find local cult favourite, Tonči Chocolates & Coffee, owned and run by Carlina Jules-Taylor and her husband Randy. Carlina greets me on the porch of her home — surrounded by fragrant cinnamon trees and oregano bushes — dressed in a magenta kaftan and a headscarf that runs the gamut of jewel tones. She and Randy offer visitors a chocolate- and coffee-making experience, as well as tastings of their popular ‘coco tea’ blend.

Coco tea — a combination of cacao, spices and milk — is drunk across the Caribbean, but each family has its own version. It’s a central part of Tobagonian culture — but for Carlina there’s a personal connection because of memories she has serving it to her son when he was ill with cancer. After he died in 2017, she tells me she found solace in creating her own coco tea blend using coconut milk and Tobago-grown Trinitario chocolate. It was based on her grandmother’s recipe: nutmeg, cinnamon, bay leaf and fennel. “Then, people tried it and enjoyed it, and the idea of making a chocolate business took hold,” she says; the Tonči brand was named after her son. Carlina hands me a steaming enamel cup. I hold it to my face and inhale; as well as the spices, there are the characteristic banana notes of Trinitario.

The first run of chocolates sold out in two days, but despite this popularity, Carlina and Randy still roast tiny batches in a coal pot. I watch Carlina shell some cacao beans by hand on the 1950s wedding tray gifted to her by Randy’s great aunt — similar to one I saw at the Ole Time Wedding. I join her, the fragile nibs skittering across the wood as they drop. “Cacao beans are like people,” she says. “Some are very easy; some refuse to budge, no matter what you do.”

In Tobago, however, you tend to meet more of the former kind. That afternoon, I head over to Store Bay Beach, a popular hangout, to soak up the vibes. Swimmers are bobbing in the bay, along with a couple of double-decker party boats, which blast soca music as the tipsy crowd — a mix of locals and tourists — dance on board. One reveller vaults himself from the top deck into the blue with a splash. “This is the life,” shouts a young boy from his hammock.

A short walk from the shore, I meet artisan husband-and-wife team Collins and Lerelynne Andrews-Toussaint, who preserve aspects of Tobagonian culture through their art, which they sell from a stall here. Collins shows me his cedar wood carvings: vignettes of wedding scenes, the jig and coco dance. One depicts a soucouyant, a folkloric woman who transforms into a ball of fire at night. “It’s not just art — it’s a story,” he says. “[Our heritage] is like a book; you read it but eventually you can’t remember the passage, so you need to keep rereading.”

Tobago’s story, of course, has dark chapters. Looming over the Tobagonian capital of Scarborough is Fort King George, built from slave-ship bricks like the ones carried by Jane Lovell. A colonial relic bristling with cannons and powder magazines, it was founded by the French in the 1780s and also served as a prison. Here, I meet local history expert and guide Margaret Boyce, whose cheerful demeanour and yellow polo shirt contrast sharply with her stories. She tells me about the enslaved people who were imprisoned here, awaiting sale to plantation owners; about the high mortality rate from starvation, dengue and yellow fever; about how different ethnolinguistic groups were mixed in a bid to prevent rebellion by separating families and allies.

But there are also tales of ingenuity, rooted in the musical culture I’ve seen and heard in every village on the island. “A drum could tell you that there would be a riot tomorrow,” Margaret explains. “When the British took away the drum, we used a conch, or a tamboo, or a bottle and spoon. We’re not so much a people of words, as of rhythm. Understandably, not everybody has moved on from these times, but when I look at this place, I just laugh. I’m proud because we were feared. They had to build all these guns to keep us in.”

As we round a corner, a bus pulls up and drummers and dancers spill out, clad in voluminous dresses and vibrant ribbons. It’s the Ah we Heritage on de Road Caravan: a roving dance troupe that travels around the island promoting the Heritage Festival. The band starts a rolling beat and the dancers sashay forth, twirling below the brick arches their ancestors built, stamping on the grounds of their former oppressors. As they sway, a liquid breeze ruffles the tiers of their skirts, blowing the spectre of the past into the luminous bay and far out to sea.