On Thursday, February 13th, from 6:30pm, at The Cloth, Erthig Street, Belmont, Vulgar Fraction Mas will launch of their Carnival 2025 presentation, ‘Kongo Déy’– celebrating the Kongo presence and continued resilience in the Caribbean.
The evening’s event will open with a panel featuring Prof Dianne Marie Stewart, Prof. Dr Yanique Hume and Prof. Dr TJ Desch-Obi and will culminate in procession led by Moko Jumbie King of The Band Adrian ‘Daddy Jumbie’ Young with rhythmic support from the Egbe Omo Oni Isese drumline. The procession will end at it’s beginning where refreshments & entertainment by DJ Prizt of The Burg Vintage, awaits.
“Kongo is here, in your cell phones, in the batteries of your electric cars,” Young said in a recent interview at his atelier at Propaganda Space, Erthig Road, Belmont.
Congo, or Kongo as it is often styled, is also here because of our history in the plantation economy and African chattel slavery. In another kind of “extraction”, enslaved people from the Central African region were brought to Trinidad and Tobago; they and the cultural retentions that linger in their wake are remembered in TT culture as “Kongo.”
“And this is our way to recognize that ‘Kongo dey’ but it exists in Trinidad; it seems invisible, but it’s here, in ‘Kongo pepper’, in the way we say, ‘One day, one day, Kongo tey.’” The long-time phrase harks to the Kongo spiritual philosophy that there is a natural order to things, a cycle of death and rebirth, a pendulum that will swing back over time to restore balance and order.
‘Kongo Dey’, suggests that to point to the conflict in contemporary Congo, we must also point to the Kongo within, hiding in plain sight. ‘Dey’ and “dey”. It’s a performance that cuts through the erasures of the media. The pun continues. In ‘Kongo Dey,’ One can also hear Kongo’s Day. This mas will be a day to acknowledge the living presence of Kongo in Trinbagonian and Caribbean culture. It is veneration, mourning, and protest at once. We shall see Kongo dey and dey and day. In due time.
