The Power and the Money

From the Country that Brought You the Katipunan

The city of Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, commissioned a great deal of public art.  The sculptures are more-or-less abstract, quite playful, and rather weird.

When I was last there, after a very luxurious trip across the country, I was thoroughly sick of being wined-and-dined.  Since Jeddah is one of the few places where a vaguely Arab-looking man in Western clothes can walk around unnoticed, that's what I proceeded to do.  That led to an impromptu basketball game with a group of Filipino expats. I automatically blurted out "Kumusta-ka!" when their car pulled up in front of me as I watched other people toss a ball around on some public courts, and an invitation to play naturally followed.

So when they told me that the below sculpture had, in fact, been designed by a Filipino, I was not surprised.  I have also been unable to stop laughing.

And a close up:

Brought to you by the country that named its first independence movement the "KKK."  I am not surprised, and I am still laughing. 

Beyond Belief

Hinduism isn't the only religion India brought to Trinidad, of course.  Twenty-thousand Muslims (20,007, to be precise) arrived in the great migration.   

For reasons that I don't know, the Muslim population grew slowly at first, numbering only 26,000 as late as 1922.  (Conversion to Christianity?  Reverse migration?  Undercounting?)  After that, though, it began to swell.  It's now about 68,000.

Most of the growth came from natural increase, but conversion played a role.  In 1922, Indo-Trinidadians made up the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  Today, they make up only about 85%, according to the Guardian newspaper.  The remaining 10,000 are Afro-Trinidadian converts or their children. 

And that's caused trouble.  Trouble worthy of the phrase "beyond belief," trouble that would be downright hilarious in a comic opera way if it hadn't gotten 40 people killed.  More below the fold.

Among the Believers

Trinidad is a very religious country.  It's also very British.  These two things interact in strange ways that I'm only beginning to understand.

I didn't think this was a particularly British country at first.  In fact, I made the mistake of telling that to a proudly patriotic and most un-British middle-aged Trini individual. 

Oh boy did I get a talking-to.  First, the proper term here is "English."  You can refer to "Britain" and "British" until you're blue in the face, and they'll come back with "England" and "English."  This is especially true of the Hewitt family, who have traced their last name back to a Scotsman who came to Barbados in the 1840s and married a local woman. (His children moved to Trinidad.)  "We were both colonized by wankers," explained a film buff who also shared Scottish ancestry.

Second, it was pointed out to me—at great length and with no small amount of passion—that the "English" heritage lives on.  The school system.  The uniformed kids.  The parliamentary government.  The Privy Council.  The driving on the wrong side of the road.  The architecture.  Cricket.  Soccer.  (Although by that last count, Bolivia has a strong English heritage.)  And the blurry line between the churches and the state. 

Consider the Hindu temple in Waterloo, on a pier extending into the Gulf of Paria.  It's at the end of a road that passes by suburban bungalows on one side and an abandoned sugar fields—probably slated to become future bungalows—on the other.  The entrance to the temple's parking lot is marked by a modest statue of Sewdass Sadhu, the grocery-store owner who in 1947 built the original temple on the site of what's now a parking lot. 

More below the fold.