The steelpan, the only new instrument invented in the 20th century in Trinidad, is emblematic not just of T&T but the entire Caribbean.
Kim Johnson, former journalist and documentary filmmaker, is the author of The Illustrated Story of Pan, Second Edition.
Johnson, among the foremost historians of the steelband movement, says the book is “the story of Trinidad All Stars and Renegades and Desperadoes and Phase II and Exodus and all the other big steel bands, but also the small bands, Boys Town, Boom Town and Stepyard, the extinct bands, the Tripoli, Bar 20 and Red Army, the “college boys” bands like Dixieland, Dixie Stars, Stromboli and Rogues Regiment.”
As a journalist, Johnson had written about the steelband movement in collection of essays titled ‘If Yuh Iron Good You Is King’. And as an academic, Johnson conducted scholarly studies on the instrument for two decades.
The Illustrated Story of Pan, Second Edition combined photojournalism and academia so successfully that the doyen of Trinidad’s photojournalists Mark Lyndersay declared it “transcendental”, while Andy Narell pronounced Johnson’s book as “beautiful and important”, leaving the reader in “wonder and deep reflection.”
“The operative principle underlying the music Africans brought to the New World is that it must help people to live. This is a functional approach to music: it is made to give people strength when they are weak; it must lift their spirits when they are down. With music people can celebrate the joys of life, and indeed it is itself one of life’s greatest pleasures, yet it must also connect people with their ancestors in the land of the dead, and with the gods in the heavens above. Most importantly, music must strengthen the bonds between people because only with and through others do we become fully human.
“The archaeologist, having unearthed his artefacts, his arrowheads and figurines, must now identify and interpret them. And so it was too with my photos. A photograph may be irrefutably true, but that is a severely limited truth. Torn out of time’s flow, the isolated moment lacks movement, a before and an after, which give the event its intentionality’
“A good photograph may suggest what has just passed or is about to occur, but photographs are generally ambivalent, always wanting explanation.
“Some photography—for journalistic and scientific purposes—enhances what we can see by making visible what is too distant, too small or too fleeting for the naked eye. But the photos in this book are not extensions of the eye so much as enhancements of memory.
“The photographed moment could be private, and the flow of events from which it was swiped comprises a life story. Or it could be public, and the flow of events is history. I sought to unite the two, so the historical photos could be seen as moments in the lives of private individuals, while the personal photos are given their historical sweep. Interviews with the people in the photographs sparked the fusion.
“Straddling two eras can evoke regret or grief for what has been lost. When you gaze into history it might just gaze back into you. One young man at a viewing of some of my photographs burst into tears, overwhelmed by the image of his dead father as a young man. But the more common response was a sense of patrimony, a feeling of pride.
“The whites feared and loathed black music-making. The noise disturbed them. The drumming and dancing outraged both their musical tastes and their sense of propriety, especially Protestants, for whom the Sabbath was sacred and the African music satanic. Additionally, the whites were terrified of unsupervised slave gatherings. Indeed, a drum dance carded for Christmas in 1805 by the slaves of several planters in Trinidad’s northwest peninsula was brutally suppressed for fear of being a planned rebellion.
“It was love at first sound. The booming, clanging, ringing, banging of the iron band instantly captivated young men throughout the island. It was loud, it was mobile and if it was rudimentary, it was nonetheless theirs; no inherited, seasonal affair in the bamboo but an all-day, all-night love. There was rivalry and jealousy, so the young men fought like lions amongst themselves, for which they were ostracised and punished. But rivalry also begot innovation, which transformed the duckling into a swan. In just over a decade, from 1939 to 1951, the dustbin and paint-can gang became an orchestra whose unique voice could sing all the songs of all the peoples of the land.”
The Illustrated Story of Pan, Second Edition by Kim Johnson, is available on Amazon and in local bookshops.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023.