The Laventille/Fairways connection

By Bukka Rennie
May 21, 2003

"Pas de six ans!" No six years! That was the cry of ex-slaves who after Emancipation came to Port-of-Spain to protest the proposal of an enforcement of six years labour on the plantations as a form of apprenticeship. Many refused to return to the estates and so John-John as a community came into being.

Unplanned development orchestrated by the necessity of people to be near to the city-centre where commercial activity is concentrated so that they may eke out a means of existence, brought the bludgeoning of the Hills of Laventille, John-John and the swampy, flat areas of what was then called "Shanty Town" and is now known as the Beetham Estate.

How many of us can recall what the original Shanty Town looked like? Probably not many of us, for we tend to hear often the jackass talk that nothing was ever done in these areas for 30 odd years. It is a social phenomenon that is not unlike what every single country in Latin America has experienced.

I recall seeing at the IDC a module of an Urban Renewal Development Plan that proposed to level the Hill and extend Port-of-Spain back to Lady Young Road. Phase one began with the development of new accommodation along Old St Joseph Road, the St Paul Street Complex and so on but the real question was the negotiation with all the people who stood to be affected and to be inconvenienced by such a massive project. Only piecemeal arrangements could suffice.

The waterfront was the main attraction for those seeking employment even after the deepening of the harbour in 1936, which allowed even the big ships to come alongside the quay and removed the necessity for small vessels to go out to sea to fetch cargo.

Even up to the late '50s and early '60s, it was a customary sight to see on afternoons, when the waterfront shifts changed, the hundreds and hundreds of workmen riding bicycles along what is now called Independence Square heading for Laventille and East Dry River.

Those were the days of the pink-slip, white-slip system of casual labour recruitment on the waterfront. People daily crowded the wharf in the wee hours of the morning hoping to be selected to work for the day and from that to go on to becoming "a regular".

It is about the development of a geographical area of teeming humanity constantly on the move seeking better and better steady employment, "hustling", as the concept came to be popularly described, that would set the sociology and psychology of the communities therein.

In any such makeshift situation devoid of proper and ordered infrastructure, one can very well expect tremendous social fallout and negatives despite the powerful creative energy of people therein to fashion for themselves wholesome lives. These are communities out of which came an entire urban milieu of professionals: doctors, lawyers, teachers, magistrates, judges, even priests and creative artistes of all genres.

It has to be stated that every opportunity available to the national community is also available to the people of Laventille and East Dry River and this is why today places like Mount Hope, Diamond Vale, La Horquetta, Bon Air, Paradise, Maloney, etc can to one extent or another be considered "diasporas" of Laventille/East Dry River more than any other area of T&T.

But given the continued nature of T&T's development over the past decades, the further concentration and centralisation around a shrinking Port-of-Spain, and the intensification of the polarisation of society into "haves" and "have-nots", the Laventille/EDR area is literally bursting at the seams.

Housing development has not been kept abreast of the demand. Different governments set different priorities. Even the decanting centres, established by the State to accommodate temporarily the people displaced from Old St Joseph Road and St Paul Street, have taken on a never intended permanence.

When you consider the influx of potent drugs such as cocaine, with the accompanying modern guns and ammunition, into such a scenario and the ensuing battle for turf that this brings, then you can comprehend why the area is today a war zone.

What is sad is that this minority of poor folk who become involved in drugs are not the financiers of the trade, they are merely runners and pushers and muscle, the dispensable fodder, who are never even able, when faced with court action, to get a one-time Attorney General or a supposedly reputable priest to provide them with certificates of good character.

In the mid '70s I can recall pleading and warning youths on the blocks of the East/West Corridor to do everything in their power to resist the drug invasion or soon they would be murdering each other for the control of turf to facilitate the welfare of wealthy individuals of Bayshore, Fairways and Westmoorings.

Even the recent spate of kidnappings began as a new form of appropriating finance initiated by small fry as they fight-up to play in the big leagues. Now anybody can become a victim. It's open season!

There were those, to use the "lingo" of the '70s, who proclaimed to be beholden to nothing other than the "natural product of Mother Earth" and swore to stay away from the abhorrence "made in the white-man's lab". Today many of those very ones are wallowing in an abyss of no return.

What is of concern is that today there is no fall-back position. No last defence. All the popular institutions of the corridor are no more, or now pale when compared with their pristine glory. There is no Colts, no Dynamos, no Luton Town, no Tesca, no Civic Centre nor Black City, no Arima United, no great cricket clubs like Paragon, no athletic clubs like Burnley and Achilles, Hampton is a shadow of itself, no Pa Aleong under the cannonball tree, and so on, to guide youth as a matter of natural course.

Like everything else in society today, community leadership has degenerated into crude relationships of power, power derived not from character and integrity but guns and dollars, the Laventille/Fairways connection.

Last week in Tunapuna we buried a community leader of yesteryear. Big Hugh Clarke. How different he was to what now obtains. Musician, sportsman, printer, thinker and an advocate of the social graces.

He taught younger folk appreciation of all musical genres; he provided them with information on all the world renowned artistes; he discussed movies and theatre from the standpoint of story-line, sub-plot, imagery, use of dialogue, dance technique and musical score.

He encouraged young sportsmen, particularly footballers, to pursue their dreams. But most of all he taught younger folk how to present themselves appropriately in any milieu, and, by example, how to engage life totally free of idle conversation.

What is most interesting is that he had no resources outside of himself, his insights and his powers of persuasion. He lived according to the codes by which he felt all artistes should live.

Communities are in deep trouble when such a resource is missing, when there are no longer such individuals readily forthcoming and education for life remains at a premium. One wonders, though, if Lincoln Myers' proposal for a National Service had been carefully and intelligently instituted decades ago whether we would have had to face these nowadays nightmares.