Kungo Nights

By John O Stewart

Kungo Nights is a collection of short stories about Trinidad, its colonial history and people. The stories are posited as memories or memoirs of different figures in the intersecting histories of the people who lived in and around the fictional village of Kungo Pass. The author interweaves recurring characters, points in history, fictional and r

• Language: English
• Publisher: JOSM Media
• Release date: May 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780982806432

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KUNGO NIGHTS

JOHN O STEWART

JOSM MEDIA INC.

Published by

JOSM MEDIA, Davis, California

Copyright © 2022 by JOSM Media, Inc.

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-9828064-1-8 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-0-9828064-2-5 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-9828064-3-2 (eBook)

CONTENTS

The Homeground Restoration Committee

Market Day (1935)

The Gallery At Flo’s House (1936)

Ma Gertie’s Cry (1937)

Mothers (1947)

Lutchmin (1947)

X At The Shop (1975)

Beryl: Rebel/Teacher (1987)

King Petit: Old Stickfighter (1987)

Daniel’s Evening Lesson (1991)

Glossary

THE HOMEGROUND RESTORATION COMMITTEE

I am Claud Atwell.

Along with the other characters in the storytelling that follows, I am present as an ethnographic fiction composed of elements garnered among multiple individuals, who are unified just the same in culture and history, from birth through old age. I belong to a fictional African-Creole community located in the Moruga hills of southeast Trinidad, next door to the Merikin villages known for being settled by ex-soldiers of the British army who fought in the American revolutionary wars.

A decent two-hour walk from Princes Town, the main commercial and administrative center of the region, Kungo Pass was founded as a temporary settlement in the mid-nineteenth century by a handful of families who identified themselves as Candelas. No one knows with any certainty in what land or in which era Candelas as a surviving demos originated, but some old heads claim that early Candelas first made their presence felt in the days of Spartacus, fighting as one of the elite units in his rebellious army. Others contend that Candelas go back hundreds of years before Spartacus, having emerged in ancient Kush during the reign of King Kashta who fathered Egypt’s Twenty-Fifth Dynasty. Recent investigators insist that Candelas had their origins along the River Niger in Ancient Ghana, not along the Nile, and some distance in time and place from ancient Rome.

What isn’t disputed, however, is the recognition that Candelas originated among an African agrarian people historically forced to escape one homeland after another as a result of wars over religion, territory, and the formation of dynasties. Over time, they cultivated an adeptness at being variable in their language and customs so they could blend in wherever they found themselves. While they insisted on no tribal name of their own, they remained united in their dedication to freedom and liberation from all forms of overlordship.

Based on such reasoning, it can be further assumed that Candelas’ skill at blending in resulted in their being swept up in the slave trading between sub-Saharan Africa and both the Islamic and Christian worlds and that they survived over the ages as an informal and international confraternity committed to the principles of liberty.

According to an early West Indian plantation owner who warned his cohort via pamphlet, Candelas distinguished themselves even as they were being shipped across the Atlantic and were a nemesis to the plantation system in the West Indies. He wrote:

Among the cargoes out of Africa Candelas were the ones who voiced no complaint in the dark belly of our slave ships. They did not wail and vomit upon themselves for being trapped in bondage. They held their stomachs across the water. It is not clear how they pass on their beliefs from generation to generation, but those among us today continue to consider themselves ensnared in some celestial adventure that holds them ready for a coming stage in our history that they believe they are destined to bring about. Long before the Atlantic slave was invented, Candelas served this belief in waves through Kanem-Bornu, Timbuktu, Segu, and other African empires. They have managed to keep it alive. When the time comes, they will rise up again. Their eyes, hands, and hearts are ever locked into a battle for freedom. They fight not for any ruler or deity: they bestow their blood on absolute liberty.

We don’t know exactly when or how our Candelas got to Trinidad, but those who settled Kungo Pass walked directly from Freetown, an early black suburb on the outskirts of our capital city, Port of Spain, to this part of the island. That suburb eventually grew into modern-day Belmont, but back in those days, Freetown was a multilingual, multicultural enclave that also served as a place of refuge for African victims seized off nineteenth-century slavers on the high seas as the British sought to put an end to trans-Atlantic slave trading.

Like everyone else in Freetown, Candelas experienced the intense social and everyday discriminations faced by all blacks subject to the colonial regimes of that time, but they did so with a worldview and a religious-political will of their own. They had their own leaders who remained versed in indigenous African religious practices and maintained their own form of ancestor worship.

Sometime after the announcement of a general Emancipation by the British (1833), Freetown Candelas, under the leadership of Pa Giorgis, a preacher and ex-soldier who had himself fought in the Haitian war of independence, were inspired to undertake the journey back to an African homeland. They took note that while the announced Emancipation was generally understood to be hollow, the reaction against it was tepid among fellow blacks in Freetown. Candelas grew to believe they needed to separate from what they sensed as a weakening in the passion for liberty.

They had no back-to-Africa sponsors; nevertheless, they believed in the power of their inspiration that the time had come for a restorative journey back to their African homeland. They didn’t have enough money among them to pay their way across the ocean, but they believed that such a journey begun in good faith would have a fruitful ending.

When they learned that several companies of ex-soldiers who had fought in the revolutionary wars of America were being settled as free villagers in the southeastern end of the island, Candelas set out for the region, counting on such a move as the first leg of their journey back home. There, in the virgin territory a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean, they would rest and recover as neighbors to the ’Merikins while preparing themselves for whatever destiny decreed with respect to the transoceanic journey back to Africa itself.

When they arrived in the Moruga foothills and located the ’Merikins, they were met with open arms. However, friendship between the two groups did not last long. The ’Merikins had soldiered on behalf of the British crown in warring against the Americans and seemed content to accept the benign authority of the British queen, whom they expected would see to their future welfare. Aggressive Christian missionaries were also safely active among them.

Candelas did not honor any submission to the British crown. They had no respect for the religious teachings and restrictions commanded by the missionaries. They soon withdrew from the ’Merikin settlement to form one of their own in virgin territory between the ’Merikin villages and Petit Mirage, a sugar and cocoa estate owned by a European-Creole family. Pa Giorgis named the Candelas’ settlement Kungo Pass.

As they acclimatized and adapted themselves to the region, Candelas learned, copied, and borrowed from the ’Merikins and from itinerant bands of native Warao who passed through frequently on their treks to their traditional holy center at Naparima on the western coast of the island. Candelas families were soon comfortably making gardens, as well as hunting and gathering in the nearby Corosan forest. With the Moruga coast roughly eight miles away, Candelas visited there frequently for fishing, recreation, and ritual gazing across the watery expanse separating Trinidad from Africa.

Their settlement was further eased into becoming a stable community as Petit Mirage operations—including a small factory for producing muscovado and rum—provided seasonal employment for the Candelas workers. In addition to working at the estate, several also found work with the county administration in the maintenance of roads and other environmental services throughout the territory between Princes Town and the Moruga coast.

During that era, the sugar industry thrived island-wide. The Petit Mirage estate grew, attracting and actually bringing in workers from near and far. Indian field workers lived in barracks on the estate itself. Other newcomers took up domicile in the new Kungo Pass settlement. In the midst of this surge, Candelas strove to retain an intact sense of caste among themselves. They managed to remain central in communal affairs as the expanding community adapted to regional conditions. Meanwhile, the fervor for a return to an African homeland went into decline among them.

Eventually, it dropped away as a dominant attribute altogether, except among a diehard core who maintained belief in their Candelas heritage with the deepest reverence. Such steadfast Candelas were particularly prominent on feast days, when Candelas warriorhood, liberty, and independence won through hard work could be openly brandished and celebrated.

II

During the World Wars, sugar was an important element in the British explosives industry, and Trinidad ranked among the colonial sources of that element. Petit Mirage, along with other sugar estates, not only thrived but also prospered during the resulting boom. Operations were expanded. Incoming workers and their families rapidly outnumbered the original Kungo Pass settlers and their descendants. The village grew into a relatively robust and socially renegade center with a reputation for aggressive independence that often breached or ignored the laws and Victorian mores of the era. That heyday lasted into the period following World War II, by which time petroleum overtook sugar as the prime industrial product of the island colony.

The Moruga region is rich in oil deposits. Drilling and production take place both in the lush, rolling countryside and offshore. While the colonial government had left oil production and marketing fully in the hands of overseas corporations, with the end of Crown Colony rule (1962), the independent government of Trinidad assumed part ownership of the oil industry and certain developments followed.

One project called for the construction of a pipeline from the Moruga fields to the west coast refinery at Pointe-à-Pierre. The projected route for such a pipeline would take it through the center of Kungo Pass. The village was therefore scheduled for relocation, with the government providing a number of small cottages on nearby land where sugarcane cultivation had been discontinued for housing displaced villagers.

Many Kungo Pass dwellers accepted the relocation, others did not. Among the latter, descendants of the original Candelas settlers remained a core of resistance into the 1980s. They believed giving up their homes in Kungo Pass for government cottages in New Settlement would be a grave and alienating dishonor to their ancestors and should be resisted.

III

I come out of Kungo Pass—born around 1945 when the franchise of Adult Universal Suffrage was extended to Trinidad, and raised by my father’s mother and her husband following the disappearance of my mother somewhere on the mainland coast of Venezuela. There were three of us children of their children under our grandparents’ roof in my young days. The eldest, Sexton, was exceptionally brilliant. He was their daughter’s child. I was next to Sexton in age. Randolph, the youngest of us, and I were children of their two sons. We grew up with Ma Gertie as our mothering grandmother who demanded that we treat one another as brothers. Always fight for one another, she charged us. Never let the night pass without making peace when you fight with one another.

Grandpa Domaine was a force in the house, too, demanding that we grow up smart, ever ready to defend ourselves, and do good with all our neighbors, forever remembering we were the bearers of his legacy even if we didn’t carry his name. It was Ma, however, who most often gave the advice—You have to fight! You have to fight them!—whether she was referring to other boys, grownups whom she did not respect, or managers of the declining sugar industry that dominated village life. You have to fight them. In the end, Ma was pleased that we all three escaped working in the cane fields or the sugar factory.

After secondary school, Sexton’s brilliance earned him a scholarship to a super college in Jamaica, and he was gone for several years. By the time he came back home in 1971, Trinidad was a changed place. Following an armed rebellion in the previous year, the country buzzed with noisy political parties. Those who had led the rebellion were on trial before an international tribunal. Armed police details were hunting down Black Power revolutionaries throughout. Gun battles between the police and armed guerillas were making everyday headline news.

I was not active in the Black Power movement; neither was Randolph. He, having advanced through the ranks to corporal in the national constabulary, was posted to a small village in the central counties. I was a certified teacher in one of the secondary schools in Princes Town, now living in the ancestral home of my mother’s family.

While abroad, Sexton not only completed his course in religious studies; he also joined an international relief service that took him on missions to Belize, Venezuela, and revolutionary Cuba. From that storied island, he came home with a passionate mission of his own. He refused job offers from the government and a major church. Instead, he became a constant voice from Ma’s house telling about Paul Bogle, Marcus Garvey, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, and others, declaring the village a natural habitat ready for the revolution.

With funds from a source that remains unknown, Sexton started a liberation academy in the village. He was joined in this by Daphne LeGendre, who belonged to the estate-owning family at Petit Mirage, and soon he had a small cadre of young villagers gathering around him on Ma Gertie’s gallery for informal seminars on the ancient history of Black Africa and liberation conflicts in the British Empire. Knowledge is power, he taught, masked inner power among black people. Black power.

In time, I joined Sexton and Daphne and spent my after-work hours assisting with the academy. I didn’t know as much as Sexton about revolutionary history, but I wasn’t too bad at learning myself. Plus, I could keep accounts and keep up a correspondence with government offices as we sought to have the academy licensed.

The word spread, and Sexton’s following grew. He named our academy Nkisi, after a good spirit that roamed the countryside when we were children. Old Candelas men in particular liked it when they heard the name. From before I was born, some of them used to have a friendly society by the same name, with a lodge building of their own on the branch road running through the village. They gave us permission to use the old lodge and encouraged their friends and acquaintances to participate in the academy.

Soon, pursuing what he called a restoration of community centeredness, Sexton got some of the elders involved in planting a community garden on an unclaimed hillside next to the lodge and one or two village grandmothers organizing crafts workshops in the building. Others, he guided in starting up a household hygiene training program and an adult literacy program. He recruited my assistance in developing the literacy program.

Then the day came when a police squad from Princes Town rolled into the village and informed us that what we assumed to be an unclaimed hillside neighboring our village was, in fact, private property owned by a family living in Port of Spain. Our community garden was on their land, and they wanted us off their property. Most of us who worked the garden bristled. Older Candelas men in particular decided on outright resistance and continued working the garden as usual. But the police returned with a stern warning.

They didn’t even bother with certifying what crops we were actually planting. They simply claimed we were among the region’s marijuana growers, linked with others who were at work growing weed in the nearby forest, and ordered an end to our gardening.

There was no harm in having the garden, and no one wanted to give up all the work that had already gone into making it. We continued.

Before long, we got word that our liberation academy was to be cited for being nothing more than another front for promoting radical Black Power thought and insurgency. Sexton immediately warned that it wouldn’t be long before the police came to shut down Nkisi. He had us do drills. He knew what he called protocols, picked up in his training abroad, and he got everyone associated with Nkisi to practice encounter routines.

When the police finally came for Nkisi, we were not completely unprepared, but we never had a chance to take a stand against them. In the heat of that Saturday afternoon, Sexton and I had just undressed to join our village cousins, the Cantwell twins, for a cooldown in the oxbow pool where the river passed through going toward the Petit Mirage estate. Suddenly, a number of police rushed into the clearing under the mora shading the riverbank to arrest us.

The oxbow pool on the river through Kungo Pass is where the ’Merikin Baptists held their annual baptismal ceremonies, and while we were under her roof, Ma Gertie always warned, Don’t you bathe in that river! Trouble to pay if I catch you bathing in that river! At the Baptist ceremonies, candidates for membership in the faith were washed clean of all sinful burdens before emerging from the water with their spirits free, fresh, and newly invigorated.

That place not for children to bathe, Ma Gertie always insisted. You don’t know what waiting there for you to catch when you step in. You want to bathe in live water? Go down to Moruga Bay. Bathe in the sea!

As young boys, we had always honored Ma’s caution, even as we sometimes had fun guessing at which homeless sins and other burdens had refused to wash away downstream and instead lurked under the water lilies or between the grass roots along the riverbanks, waiting to catch some innocent soul.

But on that Saturday, in the spirit of Nkisi oneness, Sexton and I took off our clothes and joined the Cantwell twins, who were intensely dedicated to Nkisi. They practically lived at the old lodge, worked in the garden and makeshift kitchen, kept the grounds and building clean and tidy, ran errands, and kept watch at night.

They had no qualms about bathing in the oxbow. Along with free-spirited boys from other households, they had splashed in the brown water regularly over the years, and look at them! Just as healthy and vigorous as Sexton and myself, just as dedicated to serving the Candelas spirit and keeping Kungo Pass a flagship for other villages to follow.

When police rushed into the clearing yelling, Down! Down! Down, you black niggahs! Sexton and I froze. Courtney and Dalton leaped for the water.

Two shotgun blasts exploded one right after the other, and I heard loud splashes in the river behind me.

The one with the smoking shotgun aimed directly at Sexton and me looked like a true hunter in raggedy shirt and pants, a floppy hat, and leggings halfway up to his knees. The sergeant who came tromping out of the bush behind him bulged like a professional wrestler in his black-and-gray uniform, shiny bars across the chest pocket. He stomped up to where he could look us both in the face, Down, I say! he shouted and whacked our thighs with his truncheon.

Once we fell to our knees, Sexton looked hard at me and voiced the salute: Ready for the revolution!

The sergeant kicked through the weeds around Sexton and slapped him on the side of the head with his open palm. The heavy blow drove deep, and Sexton’s head snapped back as he crumpled.

My response popped out—Forever!—as I braced myself, knowing I was next.

When the blow came, I did not hear it at all. My eyes went dark. A numbness rammed through my head. Tinny bells rang and shivered all the way out my nose, and I knew I was bleeding. My face felt caulked and overblown.

I still remember the feeling.

Scum! the sergeant threw at us. Chupid scum with yuh so-called revolution! He prowled, clearly under the urge to slap again, but he didn’t.

Sexton, on his knees, held both palms flat on top of his head. I did the same, prepared for the worst with several more policemen in the clearing, some in uniform, others dressed like the shooter. But in a very calm, authoritative voice, the sergeant told us as our hands were being cuffed behind our backs that we were being arrested for threatening the government.

I felt the thistles and wild cane rake my shoulders and legs all the way as we were dragged from the clearing through the weeds up to the troop carrier parked on the road above the river.

At the Princes Town station, they gave us prison uniforms. We were charged with sedition and treason, being engaged in fomenting revolutionary actions against the government, then quickly remanded. To be held in pretrial detention.

Daphne was not with us for any of that day. Of course, she never bathed in that river either.

I missed the trial that followed. Or, one could say, the trial missed me—because of a timely abduction by friends of my mother’s brother. I had no idea that the four men who grabbed me away from the prison bus taking us from the Princes Town station to the San Fernando courthouse then stuffed me into the back of an ordinary van that sped away were Uncle Berry’s men. In the dark of the van—my hands tied behind my back, my lips taped—not a word was spoken.

Nkisi had been warned that the police operated unofficial execution clubs, and I expected I was about to lose my life. But when the van finally stopped miles away at Claxton Bay, two of the silent men hustled me onto a motorized pirogue that took us out to a waiting freighter with its shipment of bauxite for Miami. Aboard the pirogue, my hands were untied, and I was told whom to see and talk to once aboard the freighter.

I never went to trial, but Sexton did. He got sentenced to a bunch of years in jail. I, on the other hand, once squirrelled into the USA, spent eight of the following nine years there under a different name, working as a migrant farm laborer for a while, then as a regular farmhand. I attended a community college and there learned the rudiments of journalism. Later, I volunteered for the US Army and ended up being trained as a photojournalist before putting in ten months in the DMZ. I was wounded in Korea and returned to the USA for treatment. I had nine months of therapy at a San Jose hospital before being discharged.

In time, and with the intercession of old Uncle Berry, I was finally able to come home to Kungo Pass and leave all that past behind. I write columns for a weekly newspaper out of Port of Spain going on five years now, and as long as I keep my nose clean, I’ll be OK. My columns are about features and developments in the rural south, so while I continue to live in our Atwell house in the village, I do travel and roam around quite a bit throughout Victoria, Moruga, and St. Patrick counties. I do have to get into the city once a week to check in with my editor and deliver my work, but other than that, I am a comfortable villager among family and friends many of whom I’ve known since childhood.

IV

Willie, Lionel, Sabotage, Flo, Reds, Brigo, Gertie, Teacher, and some others who would rather not be named—they are descendant Candelas. In their youth, they were all initiated into the old lodge and, by that, commissioned to sustain the legacy of their ancestors. They believe passing on plays a unique role in the cycling of life through existence, although they leave it to others among the better endowed to distill what that role is. It is enough for them to see and understand Pass On.

On Emancipation Day 1986, when they gathered at Tante Willie’s cellar for the annual celebratory feast and palaver, I was there