Notting Hill's lent connections with the Caribbean

As a child growing up in Trinidad, the Geants, the Mokojumbies, the Dame Lorrianes and Poirots, the Jab-jabs and Red Devils would sweep down the streets during Carnival, terrifying but oh so fascinating. Unlike the Notting Hill summer celebration, the Trinidadian carnival is held to celebrate the start of lent.

These colourful costumed characters with masked faces, on stilts, giant hats, sequins and powdered faces that are an integral part of Notting Hill Carnival are part Africa, part Europe.

In the mid 1700s, French and British cane planters brought African slaves to work on their plantations. The catholics would let rip at Carnival time just before Lent sacrifice. They would allow the slaves time off from hard labour to celebrate.

Those days of freedom and celebration became precious to the people of the Caribbean and remain so to this very day

The New York Times recently wrote about Claudia Jones, who started the carnival in St Pancras in 1959. After last year’s Black Lives Matter protests against racist violence, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff wrote a portrait of Notting Hill Carnival: “It has its roots as a site of anti-racist resistance and rebellion, right back to the founding of the original Caribbean Carnival in 1959 by a Trinidadian activist, writer and editor named Claudia Jones.”