The earthly paradise

Few people in the West Indian island of Trinidad have not heard of the Earth People. Their community lies between the forested mountains of the Northern Range and the rock-strewn coast, above the rough seas where the Atlantic meets the Caribbean, and a few miles from where Columbus is locally said to have obtained a landing in 1498 and whose native Caribs he identified as living in ‘the Earthly Paradise’. It is situated not far from the headland where in the sixteenth century the last remnants of one Carib group leapt to their deaths rather than face Spanish slavery, and where, some three hundred years later, the American anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits were to describe their African successors in the first ethnography of the Englishspeaking Caribbean.

For a country long familiar with the religious charisma of the Spiritual Baptists – the Shouters – frequently gathered by the roadside in their brightly coloured robes, intoning lugubrious ‘Sankey and Moody’ hymns and enthusiastically ringing their handbells, and also with the newer Rastafari movement introduced from Jamaica in the 1970s, the Earth People remain an enigma. Their appearance in the villages or in the capital Port-of-Spain causes public outrage, for they go about naked. Local opinion favours the view that these taciturn young men, carrying staves and cutlasses, and with the long matted dreadlocks of the Rastas, are probably crazy: if not the whole group then certainly their leader Mother Earth, for it is she whose visions gave birth to the movement and who leads their annual marches to town. Alternatively, argue some, they are just a new and particularly dangerous variant of Rastafari.